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• Upgrading from 12.10 to 13.04 -> dpkg: error processing sudo (--configure)

  - by Korrigan Nagirrok

  Here's the deal and reason I'm asking for your help. Last night I went on upgrading my Xubuntu 12.10 installation to 13.04, so at tty1 I run the command sudo do-release-upgrade and everything seemed to went well except that after rebooting and when I run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade I get this error: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring Release.gpg Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates Release.gpg Hit http://dl.google.com stable Release.gpg Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports Release.gpg Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring Release Hit http://archive.canonical.com raring Release.gpg Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring Release.gpg Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates Release Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com raring Release.gpg Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports Release Hit http://dl.google.com stable Release Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/main Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/restricted Sources Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com raring Release Hit http://archive.canonical.com raring Release Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring Release.gpg Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/universe Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/multiverse Sources Hit http://dl.google.com stable/main i386 Packages Get:1 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security Release.gpg [933 B] Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/main i386 Packages Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com raring/main Sources Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring Release Hit http://archive.canonical.com raring/partner i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/universe i386 Packages Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com raring/main i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/multiverse i386 Packages Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring Release Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/main Translation-en Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main Sources Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/multiverse Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/restricted Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/universe Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/main Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/restricted Sources Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/universe Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/multiverse Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/main i386 Packages Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/universe i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/multiverse i386 Packages Ign http://dl.google.com stable/main Translation-en_US Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/main Translation-en Ign http://archive.canonical.com raring/partner Translation-en_US Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com raring/main Translation-en_US Ign http://dl.google.com stable/main Translation-en Ign http://archive.canonical.com raring/partner Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/multiverse Translation-en Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com raring/main Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/restricted Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/universe Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/main Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/restricted Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/universe Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/multiverse Sources Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/main i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/universe i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/multiverse i386 Packages Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/main Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/multiverse Translation-en Get:2 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security Release [40.8 kB] Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/restricted Translation-en Hit http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/universe Translation-en Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main Translation-en_US Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main Translation-en Get:3 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/main Sources [2,109 B] Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main Translation-en_US Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net raring/main Translation-en Get:4 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/restricted Sources [14 B] Get:5 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/universe Sources [14 B] Get:6 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/multiverse Sources [14 B] Get:7 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/main i386 Packages [3,670 B] Get:8 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/restricted i386 Packages [14 B] Get:9 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/universe i386 Packages [2,824 B] Get:10 http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/multiverse i386 Packages [14 B] Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/main Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/multiverse Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/restricted Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring/universe Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/main Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/multiverse Translation-en_US Hit http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/main Translation-en Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/restricted Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-updates/universe Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/main Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/multiverse Translation-en_US Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/restricted Translation-en_US Hit http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/multiverse Translation-en Ign http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com raring-backports/universe Translation-en_US Hit http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/restricted Translation-en Hit http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/universe Translation-en Ign http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/main Translation-en_US Ign http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/multiverse Translation-en_US Ign http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/restricted Translation-en_US Ign http://security.ubuntu.com raring-security/universe Translation-en_US Fetched 50.4 kB in 6s (7,454 B/s) Reading package lists... Done Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/373 kB of archives. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y dpkg: error processing sudo (--configure): Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall it before attempting configuration. No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ubuntu-minimal: ubuntu-minimal depends on sudo; however: Package sudo is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing ubuntu-minimal (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: sudo ubuntu-minimal E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I've tried everything I thought logical, like sudo dpkg --configure -a dpkg: error processing sudo (--configure): Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall it before attempting configuration. dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ubuntu-minimal: ubuntu-minimal depends on sudo; however: Package sudo is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing ubuntu-minimal (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: sudo ubuntu-minimal sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/373 kB of archives. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. dpkg: error processing sudo (--configure): Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you should reinstall it before attempting configuration. dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of ubuntu-minimal: ubuntu-minimal depends on sudo; however: Package sudo is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing ubuntu-minimal (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: sudo ubuntu-minimal E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Can someone help me, please. Edit: Here's some more info that could be of help for anyone. The output of apt-cache policy linux-image-generic-pae linux-generic-pae is linux-image-generic-pae: Installed: (none) Candidate: 3.8.0.19.35 Version table: 3.8.0.19.35 0 500 http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring/main i386 Packages linux-generic-pae: Installed: (none) Candidate: 3.8.0.19.35 Version table: 3.8.0.19.35 0 500 http://pt.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring/main i386 Packages

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• Beginner’s Guide to Flock, the Social Media Browser

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you wanting a browser that can work as a social hub from the first moment that you start it up? If you love the idea of a browser that is ready to go out of the box then join us as we look at Flock. During the Install Process When you are installing Flock there are two install windows that you should watch for. The first one lets you choose between the “Express Setup & Custom Setup”. We recommend the “Custom Setup”. Once you have selected the “Custom Setup” you can choose which of the following options will enabled. Notice the “anonymous usage statistics” option at the bottom…you can choose to leave this enabled or disable it based on your comfort level. The First Look When you start Flock up for the first time it will open with three tabs. All three are of interest…especially if this is your first time using Flock. With the first tab you can jump right into “logging in/activating” favorite social services within Flock. This page is set to display each time that you open Flock unless you deselect the option in the lower left corner. The second tab provides a very nice overview of Flock and its’ built-in social management power. The third and final page can be considered a “Personal Page”. You can make some changes to the content displayed for quick and easy access and/or monitoring “Twitter Search, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, Friend Activity, & Favorite Sites”. Use the “Widget Menu” in the upper left corner to select the “Personal Page Components” that you would like to use. In the upper right corner there is a built-in “Search Bar” and buttons for “Posting to Your Blog & Uploading Media”. To help personalize the “My World Page” just a bit more you can even change the text to your name or whatever best suits your needs. The Flock Toolbar The “Flock Toolbar” is full of social account management goodness. In order from left to right the buttons are: My World (Homepage), Open People Sidebar, Open Media Bar, Open Feeds Sidebar, Webmail, Open Favorites Sidebar, Open Accounts and Services Sidebar, Open Web Clipboard Sidebar, Open Blog Editor, & Open Photo Uploader. The buttons will be “highlighted” with a blue background to help indicate which area you are in. The first area will display a listing of people that you are watching/following at the services shown here. Clicking on the “Media Bar Button” will display the following “Media Slider Bar” above your “Tab Bar”. Notice that there is a built-in “Search Bar” on the right side. Any photos, etc. clicked on will be opened in the currently focused tab below the “Media Bar”. Here is a listing of the “Media Streams” available for viewing. By default Flock will come with a small selection of pre-subscribed RSS Feeds. You can easily unsubscribe, rearrange, add custom folders, or non-categorized feeds as desired. RSS Feeds subscribed to here can be viewed combined together as a single feed (clickable links) in the “My World Page”. or can be viewed individually in a new tab. Very nice! Next on the “Flock Toolbar is the “Webmail Button”. You can set up access to your favorite “Yahoo!, Gmail, & AOL Mail” accounts from here. The “Favorites Sidebar” combines your “Browser History & Bookmarks” into one convenient location. The “Accounts and Services Sidebar” gives you quick and easy access to get logged into your favorite social accounts. Clicking on any of the links will open that particular service’s login page in a new tab. Want to store items such as photos, links, and text to add into a blog post or tweet later on? Just drag and drop them into the “Web Clipboard Sidebar” for later access. Clicking on the “Blog Editor Button” will open up a separate blogging window to compose your posts in. If you have not logged into or set up an account yet in Flock you will see the following message window. The “Blogging Window”…nice, simple, and straightforward. If you are not already logged into your photo account(s) then you will see the following message window when you click on the “Photo Uploader Button”. Clicking “OK” will open the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” with compatible photo services highlighted in a light yellow color. Log in to your favorite service to start uploading all those great images. After Setting Up Here is what our browser looked like after setting up some of our favorite services. The Twitter feed is certainly looking nice and easy to read through… Some tweaking in the “RSS Feeds Sidebar” makes for a perfect reading experience. Keeping up with our e-mail is certainly easy to do too. A look back at the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” shows that all of our accounts are actively logged in (green dot on the right side). Going back to our “My World Page” you can see how nice everything looks for monitoring our “Friend Activity & Favorite Feeds”. Moving on to regular browsing everything is looking very good… Flock is a perfect choice for anyone wanting a browser and social hub all built into a single app. Conclusion Anyone who loves keeping up with their favorite social services while browsing will find using Flock to be a wonderful experience. You literally get the best of both worlds with this browser. Links Download Flock The Official Flock Extensions Homepage The Official Flock Toolbar Homepage Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow to use an ISO image on Ubuntu LinuxAdvertise on How-To GeekFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

  - by RobertChipperfield

  One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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• FTP Publishing with the new Windows Azure Release

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  There is a good chance you might have stumbled upon the new Windows Azure Release that we made on June 6th.  Scott Guthrie’s Post quite summarizes the overall new features. One of my favorite features is the Windows Azure Websites and the ability to do publish files to Azure using your FTP Client. Windows Azure Websites offers low cost (free upto 10 websites) web hosting where you can deploy any website that can run on IIS 7.0, quickly. The earlier releases of Azure SDKs and the Azure platform support .NET 3.5 & above for running your applications.  This was a constraint for many since there are/were a lot of ASP.NET 2.0 applications built over time and simply to put it on Azure, many of you were skeptical to migrate it to .NET 4. Windows Azure Websites offer the flexibility of running IIS 7.0 supported .NET Versions which means you can run .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 and .NET 4.  Not just that! You can also run classic ASP Applications. Windows Azure Websites don’t need you to go through the complexity of adding the Cloud Project Template and then publishing the Configuration Files.  Lets take a step by step understanding of Websites and publishing using FTP. I downloaded the Club Website Starter Kit from http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/club It also requires a database and I downloaded the SQL Scripts and created a SQL Server Database called Club. This installs a Web Site Project Template.  Note that I am running Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 2012 RC.  After installing the template, select File – New – Website and don’t forget to choose the Framework version as .NET 2.0 You can see the “Club Website Starter Kit” .  Once you select the Website gets created.  You would encounter a warning indicating that the Club Website Starter Kit uses SQL Express and the recommended database is LocalDB Express.  Click ok to continue.  Once the Website is created open up the Web.config and locate the “ClubSiteDB” connection string.  By default, it points to a SQL Express Database.  Instead configure it to use your local SQL Server. Also, open up Global.asax and comment out the following line if (!Roles.RoleExists("Administrators")) Roles.CreateRole("Administrators"); There seems to be an issue in the code that doesn’t create the role.  Post that, hit CTRL+F5 and you should be able to see the Website Running, as below So, now we have the Club Starter Kit site up running locally.  Moving to Azure Visit http://manage.windowsazure.com/ and sign up for a trial account.  This allows you to host up to 10 websites for free and a host of other benefits.  The free Websites can be extended to an year without any charge.  Once you have signed up, sign in to the portal using the Live ID used for sign up. After signing in, you would be presented with the “All Items” listing page which lists, Websites, Cloud Services, Databases etc.,  If this is the first time, you wouldn’t find anything. Click on the “Websites” link from the left menu.  Click on “New” in the bottom and it should show up a dialog.  In the same, select Website and click on “Quick Create” and in the URL Textbox, specify “MyFirstDemo” and click the “Create Web Site” link below. It should take a few seconds to create the Website.  Once the Website is created, click on the listing and it should open up the Dashboard.  Since we haven’t done anything yet, there shouldn’t be any statistics Click on the “Download publish profile” link in the right bottom.  This file has the FTP publishing settings. Also, if you scroll down you can see the FTP URL for this site.  It should typically start ftp://waws-xxxx-xxx-xxxx In the downloaded publish profile file, you can also find the ftp URL.  Pick the following from this file publishUrl (the 2nd one, the one that features after publishMethod =”FTP”) and the userName and userPWD that follows. Note that we have everything required to publish the files.  But since the Club Starter Kit uses Databases, we need to have the Database running on SQL Azure.  Go back to the Main Menu and click on “New” in the bottom but this time select “SQL Database” and provide “Club” as Database name for “Quick Create” If this is the first time a Server would be created.  Otherwise, it would pickup the existing server name. Once the database is created, you can use the SQL Azure Migration Wizard http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/ and provide the credentials to connect to local database and then the SQL Azure database for migrating the “Club” database.  The migration wizard UI hasn’t changed much and is the same as explained by me in one my posts earlier http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2009/09/29/taking-your-northwind-database-to-sql-azure-and-binding-it.aspx Once the database is migrated, come back to the main screen and click on the Database base in the Azure Management Portal.  It opens up the dashboard of the database.  Click on “Show connection Strings” and it would popup a list of connection string formats.  Choose the ADO.NET connection string and after editing the password with the password that you provided when creating the database server in the Azure Portal, paste it into the config file of the Club Starter Kit Website.  Just to reiterate, the connection string key is ClubSiteDB. Try running the Website once to ensure that the application though running locally could connect to the SQL Database running on Azure. Once you are able to run the website successfully, we are all set to do the FTP Publishing. Download your favorite FTP tool.  I use http://filezilla-project.org/ In the Host Textbox, paste the FTP URL that you picked up from the publish profile file and also paste the username and password.  Click on “QuickConnect”.  If everything is fine, you should be able to connect to the remote server.  If it is successfully connected, you can see the wwwroot folder of the Website, running in Azure Make sure on the “Local Site” in the left, you choose the path to the folder of your Website.  Open up the Website folder on the left such that it lists all the files and folders inside.  Select all of them and click select “Upload” or simply drag and drop all the files to the root folder that is listed above.  Once the publishing is done, you should be able to hit the SiteURL that you can find the dashboard page of the website.  In our case, it would be http://MyFirstDemo.azurewebsites.net That’s it, we have now done FTP publishing in Azure and that too we are running a .NET 2.0 Website on Azure. Cheers !!!

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• Slick2d/Nifty-gui input

  - by eerongal

  I'm trying to get input from slick2d into nifty gui. Ive searched online, and I've seen a few examples, but I can't seem to get it working right. i've tried the example on here but I can't seem to get everything working. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong. I've also looked at examples using the JMonkeyEngine to help point me in the right direction, but still having issues with input. I can get everything else working like i need. Here's the code for my element controller: package gui; import java.util.Properties; import de.lessvoid.nifty.Nifty; import de.lessvoid.nifty.controls.Controller; import de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element; import de.lessvoid.nifty.input.NiftyInputEvent; import de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen; import de.lessvoid.xml.xpp3.Attributes; public class BaseElementController implements Controller { private Element element; public void bind(Nifty arg0, Screen arg1, Element arg2, Properties arg3, Attributes arg4) { this.element = element; } public void init(Properties arg0, Attributes arg1) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public boolean inputEvent(NiftyInputEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } public void onFocus(boolean arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void onStartScreen() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void test() { System.out.println("test"); } public void bam() { System.out.println("bam"); } } Here's my XML file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <nifty> <useStyles filename="nifty-default-styles.xml"/> <useControls filename="nifty-default-controls.xml"/> <screen id="screen2" controller="gui.BaseScreenController"> <layer backgroundColor="#fff0" childLayout="absolute" id="layer4" controller="gui.BaseElementController"> <panel childLayout="center" height="30%" id="panel1" style="nifty-panel-simple" width="50%" x="282" y="334" controller="gui.BaseElementController"> <control id="checkbox1" name="checkbox"/> <control childLayout="center" id="button2" label="button2" name="button" x="381" y="224" visibleToMouse="true" controller="gui.BaseElementController"> <interact onClick="bam()"/> </control> </panel> <text text="${CALL.getPlayerName()}" style="nifty-label" width="100%" height="100%" x="0" y="10" /> </layer> </screen> </nifty> Here's how I'm trying to bind the controller: public void init(GameContainer gc) throws SlickException { Input input = gc.getInput(); inputSystem = new PlainSlickInputSystem(); inputSystem.setInput(input); gui = new Gui(); gui.init(gc, inputSystem, "gui/tset.xml", "screen2"); input.removeListener(this); input.removeListener(inputSystem); input.addListener(inputSystem); } Essentially, all that happens right now is the screen loads up and displays, and it grabs the variable correctly in the label, but none of the input seems to be getting forwarded to Nifty from slick. I assume there's something I'm missing, but I can't seem to figure out what that is. In so far as what I have tried, I attempted to define a custom input listener to pick up events and assign that to my game in order to pick up input, which did not work, so i dropped that implementation, at current i'm trying to take the default inputs and bind then with a PlainSlickInputSystem and assigning that to the input (as shown in the first example link). On code execution, all the code is hit, and i've put several system.out.println's to get ouput of what is happening (the code above has been cleaned for presentation), and i even see the elements getting bound to the controller, yet it doesn't pick up controller events. As far as EXACTLY what's wrong, that I don't know, because I've followed all implementations i can find of this, and none of them seem to do anything it's like the input is just getting thrown out. None of the objects from niftyGui appear to be recognizing any input. Here is the binding from my objects at run time: ******INITIALIZED SCREEN: de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen@4a1ab1c1 ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: button2 (de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element@1e8c1be9) ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: focusable => true, width => 100px {nifty-button#panel}, backgroundImage => button/button.png {nifty-button#panel}, label => button2, paddingLeft => 7px {nifty-button#panel}, imageMode => sprite-resize:100,23,0,2,96,2,2,2,96,2,19,2,96,2,2 {nifty-button#panel}, paddingRight => 7px {nifty-button#panel}, id => button2, visibleToMouse => true, height => 23px {nifty-button#panel}, style => nifty-button, name => button, inputMapping => de.lessvoid.nifty.input.mapping.MenuInputMapping, childLayout => center, controller => gui.BaseElementController, y => 224, x => 381 ******INITIALIZED SCREEN: de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen@4a1ab1c1 ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: panel1 (de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element@373ec894) ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: id => panel1, height => 30%, style => nifty-panel-simple, width => 50%, backgroundImage => panel/nifty-panel-simple.png {nifty-panel-simple}, controller => gui.BaseElementController, childLayout => center, padding => 5px {nifty-panel-simple}, imageMode => resize:9,2,9,9,9,2,9,2,9,2,9,9 {nifty-panel-simple}, y => 334, x => 282 ******INITIALIZED SCREEN: de.lessvoid.nifty.screen.Screen@4a1ab1c1 ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: layer4 (de.lessvoid.nifty.elements.Element@6427d489) ******INITIALIZED ELEMENT: id => layer4, backgroundColor => #fff0, controller => gui.BaseElementController, childLayout => absolute the button2 object is getting bound to my BaseElementController, but i can't seem to get it into the defined "onClick" call.

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• Emit Knowledge - social network for knowledge sharing

  - by hajan

  Emit Knowledge, as the words refer - it's a social network for emitting / sharing knowledge from users by users. Those who can benefit the most out of this network is perhaps all of YOU who have something to share with others and contribute to the knowledge world. I've been closely communicating with the core team of this very, very interesting, brand new social network (with specific purpose!) about the concept, idea and the vision they have for their product and I can say with a lot of confidence that this network has real potential to become something from which we will all benefit. I won't speak much about that and would prefer to give you link and try it yourself - http://www.emitknowledge.com Mainly, through the past few months I've been testing this network and it is getting improved all the time. The user experience is great, you can easily find out what you need and it follows some known patterns that are common for all social networks. They have some real good ideas and plans that are already under development for the next updates of their product. You can do micro blogging or you can do regular normal blogging… it’s up to you, and the way it works, it is seamless. Here is a short Question and Answers (QA) interview I made with the lead of the team, Marijan Nikolovski: 1. Can you please explain us briefly, what is Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge is a brand new knowledge based social network, delivering quality content from users to users. We believe that people’s knowledge, experience and professional thoughts compose quality content, worth sharing among millions around the world. Therefore, we created the platform that matches people’s need to share and gain knowledge in the most suitable and comfortable way. Easy to work with, Emit Knowledge lets you to smoothly craft and emit knowledge around the globe. 2. How 'old' is Emit Knowledge? In hamster’s years we are almost five years old start-up :). Just kidding. We’ve released our public beta about three months ago. Our official release date is 27 of June 2012. 3. How did you come up with this idea? Everything started from a simple idea to solve a complex problem. We’ve seen that the social web has become polluted with data and is on the right track to lose its base principles – socialization and common cause. That was our start point. We’ve gathered the team, drew some sketches and started to mind map the idea. After several idea refactoring’s Emit Knowledge was born. 4. Is there any competition out there in the market? Currently we don't have any competitors that share the same cause. What makes our platform different is the ideology that our product promotes and the functionalities that our platform offers for easy socialization based on interests and knowledge sharing. 5. What are the main technologies used to build Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge was built on a heterogeneous pallet of technologies. Currently, we have four of separation: UI – Built on ASP.NET MVC3 and Knockout.js; Messaging infrastructure – Build on top of RabbitMQ; Background services – Our in-house solution for job distribution, orchestration and processing; Data storage – Build on top of MongoDB; What are the main reasons you've chosen ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 6. What are the main reasons for choosing ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 7. Did you use some of the latest Microsoft technologies? If yes, which ones? Yes, we like to rock the cutting edge tech house. Currently we are using Microsoft’s latest technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Web API (work in progress) and the best for the last; we are utilizing Windows Azure IaaS to the bone. 8. Can you please tell us shortly, what would be the benefit of regular bloggers in other blogging platforms to join Emit Knowledge? Well, unless you are some of the smoking ace gurus whose blogs are followed by a large number of users, our platform offers knowledge based segregated community equipped with tools that will enable both current and future users to expand their relations and to self-promote in the community based on their activity and knowledge sharing. 10. I see you are working very intensively and there is already integration with some third-party services to make the process of sharing and emitting knowledge easier, which services did you integrate until now and what do you plan do to next? We have “reemit” functionality for internal sharing and we also support external services like: Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook; For the regular bloggers we have an extra cream, Windows Live Writer support for easy blog posts emitting. 11. What should we expect next? Currently, we are working on a new fancy community feature. This means that we are going to support user groups to be formed. So for all existing communities and user groups out there, wait us a little bit, we are coming for rescue :). One of the top next features they are developing is the Community Feature. It means, if you have your own User Group, Community Group or any other Group on which you and your users are mostly blogging or sharing (emitting) knowledge in various ways, Emit Knowledge as a platform will help you have everything you need to promote your group, make new followers and host all the necessary stuff that you have had need of. I would invite you to try the network and start sharing knowledge in a way that will help you gather new followers and spread your knowledge faster, easier and in a more efficient way! Let’s Emit Knowledge!

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• SortedDictionary and SortedList

  - by Simon Cooper

  Apart from Dictionary<TKey, TValue>, there's two other dictionaries in the BCL - SortedDictionary<TKey, TValue> and SortedList<TKey, TValue>. On the face of it, these two classes do the same thing - provide an IDictionary<TKey, TValue> interface where the iterator returns the items sorted by the key. So what's the difference between them, and when should you use one rather than the other? (as in my previous post, I'll assume you have some basic algorithm & datastructure knowledge) SortedDictionary We'll first cover SortedDictionary. This is implemented as a special sort of binary tree called a red-black tree. Essentially, it's a binary tree that uses various constraints on how the nodes of the tree can be arranged to ensure the tree is always roughly balanced (for more gory algorithmical details, see the wikipedia link above). What I'm concerned about in this post is how the .NET SortedDictionary is actually implemented. In .NET 4, behind the scenes, the actual implementation of the tree is delegated to a SortedSet<KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>>. One example tree might look like this: Each node in the above tree is stored as a separate SortedSet<T>.Node object (remember, in a SortedDictionary, T is instantiated to KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>): class Node { public bool IsRed; public T Item; public SortedSet<T>.Node Left; public SortedSet<T>.Node Right; } The SortedSet only stores a reference to the root node; all the data in the tree is accessed by traversing the Left and Right node references until you reach the node you're looking for. Each individual node can be physically stored anywhere in memory; what's important is the relationship between the nodes. This is also why there is no constructor to SortedDictionary or SortedSet that takes an integer representing the capacity; there are no internal arrays that need to be created and resized. This may seen trivial, but it's an important distinction between SortedDictionary and SortedList that I'll cover later on. And that's pretty much it; it's a standard red-black tree. Plenty of webpages and datastructure books cover the algorithms behind the tree itself far better than I could. What's interesting is the comparions between SortedDictionary and SortedList, which I'll cover at the end. As a side point, SortedDictionary has existed in the BCL ever since .NET 2. That means that, all through .NET 2, 3, and 3.5, there has been a bona-fide sorted set class in the BCL (called TreeSet). However, it was internal, so it couldn't be used outside System.dll. Only in .NET 4 was this class exposed as SortedSet. SortedList Whereas SortedDictionary didn't use any backing arrays, SortedList does. It is implemented just as the name suggests; two arrays, one containing the keys, and one the values (I've just used random letters for the values): The items in the keys array are always guarenteed to be stored in sorted order, and the value corresponding to each key is stored in the same index as the key in the values array. In this example, the value for key item 5 is 'z', and for key item 8 is 'm'. Whenever an item is inserted or removed from the SortedList, a binary search is run on the keys array to find the correct index, then all the items in the arrays are shifted to accomodate the new or removed item. For example, if the key 3 was removed, a binary search would be run to find the array index the item was at, then everything above that index would be moved down by one: and then if the key/value pair {7, 'f'} was added, a binary search would be run on the keys to find the index to insert the new item, and everything above that index would be moved up to accomodate the new item: If another item was then added, both arrays would be resized (to a length of 10) before the new item was added to the arrays. As you can see, any insertions or removals in the middle of the list require a proportion of the array contents to be moved; an O(n) operation. However, if the insertion or removal is at the end of the array (ie the largest key), then it's only O(log n); the cost of the binary search to determine it does actually need to be added to the end (excluding the occasional O(n) cost of resizing the arrays to fit more items). As a side effect of using backing arrays, SortedList offers IList Keys and Values views that simply use the backing keys or values arrays, as well as various methods utilising the array index of stored items, which SortedDictionary does not (and cannot) offer. The Comparison So, when should you use one and not the other? Well, here's the important differences: Memory usage SortedDictionary and SortedList have got very different memory profiles. SortedDictionary... has a memory overhead of one object instance, a bool, and two references per item. On 64-bit systems, this adds up to ~40 bytes, not including the stored item and the reference to it from the Node object. stores the items in separate objects that can be spread all over the heap. This helps to keep memory fragmentation low, as the individual node objects can be allocated wherever there's a spare 60 bytes. In contrast, SortedList... has no additional overhead per item (only the reference to it in the array entries), however the backing arrays can be significantly larger than you need; every time the arrays are resized they double in size. That means that if you add 513 items to a SortedList, the backing arrays will each have a length of 1024. To conteract this, the TrimExcess method resizes the arrays back down to the actual size needed, or you can simply assign list.Capacity = list.Count. stores its items in a continuous block in memory. If the list stores thousands of items, this can cause significant problems with Large Object Heap memory fragmentation as the array resizes, which SortedDictionary doesn't have. Performance Operations on a SortedDictionary always have O(log n) performance, regardless of where in the collection you're adding or removing items. In contrast, SortedList has O(n) performance when you're altering the middle of the collection. If you're adding or removing from the end (ie the largest item), then performance is O(log n), same as SortedDictionary (in practice, it will likely be slightly faster, due to the array items all being in the same area in memory, also called locality of reference). So, when should you use one and not the other? As always with these sort of things, there are no hard-and-fast rules. But generally, if you: need to access items using their index within the collection are populating the dictionary all at once from sorted data aren't adding or removing keys once it's populated then use a SortedList. But if you: don't know how many items are going to be in the dictionary are populating the dictionary from random, unsorted data are adding & removing items randomly then use a SortedDictionary. The default (again, there's no definite rules on these sort of things!) should be to use SortedDictionary, unless there's a good reason to use SortedList, due to the bad performance of SortedList when altering the middle of the collection.

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• Get Information to Your Blog with Microsoft Broadcaster

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you often have people ask you for advice about technology, or do you write tech-focused blog or newsletter?  Here’s how you can get information to share with your readers about Microsoft technology with Microsoft Broadcaster. Microsoft Broadcaster is a new service from Microsoft to help publishers, bloggers, developers, and other IT professionals find relevant information and resources from Microsoft.  You can use it to help discover things to write about, or simply discover new information about the technology you use.  Broadcaster will also notify you when new resources are available about the topics that interest you.  Let’s look at how you could use this to expand your blog and help your users. Getting Started Head over to the Microsoft Broadcaster site (link below), and click Join to get started. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new account if you don’t already have one. Near the bottom of the page, add information about your blog, newsletter, or group that you want to share Broadcaster information with.  Click Add when you’re done entering information.  You can enter as many sites or groups as you wish. When you’ve entered all of your information, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.  Broadcaster will then let you know your information has been submitted, but you’ll need to wait several days to see if you are approved or not. Our application was approved about 2 days after applying, though this may vary.  When you’re approved, you’ll receive an email letting you know.  Return to the Broadcaster website (link below), but this time, click Sign in. Accept the terms of use by clicking I Accept at the bottom of the page. Confirm that your information entered previously is correct, and then click Configure my keywords at the bottom of the page. Now you can pick the topics you want to stay informed about.  Type keywords in the textbox, and it will bring up relevant topics with IntelliSense. Here we’ve added several topics to keep up with. Next select the Microsoft Products you want to keep track of.  If the product you want to keep track of is not listed, make sure to list it in the keywords section as above. Finally, select the types of content you wish to see, including articles, eBooks, webcasts, and more. Finally, when everything’s entered, click Configure My Alerts at the bottom of the page. Broadcaster can automatically email you when new content is found.  If you would like this, click Subscribe.  Otherwise, simply click Access Dashboard to go ahead and find your personalized content. If you choose to receive emails of new content, you’ll have to configure it with Windows Live Alerts.  Click Continue to set this up. Select if you want to receive Messenger alerts, emails, and/or text messages when new content is available.  Click Save when you’re finished. Finally, select how often you want to be notified, and then click Access Dashboard to view the content currently available. Finding Content For Your Blog, Site, or Group Now you can find content specified for your interests from the dashboard.  To access the dashboard in the future, simply go to the Broadcaster site and click Sign In. Here you can see available content, and can search for different topics or customize the topics shown. You’ll see snippets of information from various Microsoft videos, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, and more, depending on your settings.  Click the link at the top of the snippet to view the content, or right-click and copy the link to use in emails or on social networks like Twitter. If you’d like to add this snippet to your website or blog, click the Download content link at the bottom.   Now you can preview what the snippet will look like on your site, and change the width or height to fit your site.  You can view and edit the source code of the snippet from the box at the bottom, and then copy it to use on your site. Copy the code, and paste it in the HTML of a blog post, email, webpage, or anywhere else you wish to share it.  Here we’re pasting it into the HTML editor in Windows Live Writer so we can post it to a blog. After adding a title and opening paragraph, we have a nice blog post that only took a few minutes to put together but should still be useful for our readers.  You can check out the blog post we created at the link below. Readers can click on the links, which will direct them to the content on Microsoft’s websites. Conclusion If you frequently need to find educational and informative content about Microsoft products and services, Broadcaster can be a great service to keep you up to date.  The service worked quite good in our tests, and generally found relevant content to our keywords.  We had difficulty embedding links to eBooks that were listed by Broadcaster, but everything else worked for us.  Now you can always have high quality content to help your customers, coworkers, friends, and more, and you just might find something that will help you, too! Link Microsoft Broadcaster (registration required) Example Post at Techinch.com with Content from Microsoft Broadcaster Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPAnnouncing the How-To Geek BlogsNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineHow To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Fix Common Inkjet Printer Errors Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com

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• Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

  - by Kyle Burns

  I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) {     var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters;     myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext.  I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController.  This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) {     ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage;     return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view.  If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider;     public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var parameters = new NameValueCollection();         parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!");         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);     }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action.  This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory {     public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext);     } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null;     public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var collection = new NameValueCollection();         var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull;         if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null)         {             foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters)             {                 collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value);             }         }         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);         }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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• Big Visible Charts

  - by Robert May

  An important part of Agile is the concept of transparency and visibility. In proper functioning teams, stakeholders can look at any team at any time in the iteration or release and see how that team is doing by simply looking at what we call Big Visible Charts. If you’ve done Scrum, you’ve seen these charts. However, interpreting these charts can often be an art form. There are several different charts that can be useful. In this newsletter, I’ll focus on the Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow charts. I’ve included a copy of the spreadsheet that I used to create the charts, and if you don’t have a tool that creates them for you, you can use this spreadsheet to do so. Our preferred tool for managing Scrum projects is Rally. Rally creates all of these charts for you, saving you quite a bit of time. The Iteration Burndown and Cumulative Flow Charts This is the main chart that teams use. Although less useful to stakeholders, this chart is critical to the team and provides quite a bit of information to the team about how their iteration is going. Most charts are a combination of the charts below, so you may need to combine aspects of each section to understand what is happening in your iterations. Ideal Ah, isn’t that a pretty picture? Unfortunately, it’s also very unrealistic. I’ve seen iterations that come close to ideal, but never that match perfectly. If your iteration matches perfectly, chances are, someone is playing with the numbers. Reality is just too difficult to have a burndown chart that matches this exactly. Late Planning Iteration started, but the team didn’t. You can tell this by the fact that the real number of estimated hours didn’t appear until day two. In the cumulative flow, you can also see that nothing was defined in Day one and two. You want to avoid situations like this. You’ll note that the team had to burn faster than is ideal to meet the iteration because of the late planning. This often results in long weeks and days. Testing Starved Determining whether or not testing is starved is difficult without the cumulative flow. The pattern in the burndown could be nothing more that developers not completing stories early enough or could be caused by stories being too big. With the cumulative flow, however, you see that only small bites are in progress and stories were completed early, but testing didn’t start testing until the end of the iteration, and didn’t complete testing all stories in the iteration. When this happens, question whether or not your testing resources are sufficient for your team and whether or not acceptance is adequately defined. No Testing With this one, both graphs show the same thing; the team needs testers and testing! Without testing, what was completed cannot be verified to make sure that it is acceptable to the business. If you find yourself in this situation, review your testing practices and acceptance testing process and make changes today. Late Development With this situation, both graphs tell a story. In the top graph, you can see that the hours failed to burn down as quickly as the team expected. This could be caused by the team not correctly estimating their hours or the team could have had illness or some other issue that affected them. Often, when teams are tackling something that is more unknown, they’ll run into technical barriers that cause the burn down to happen slower than expected. In the cumulative flow graph, you can see that not much was completed in the first few days. This could be because of illness or technical barriers or simply poor estimation. Testing was able to keep up with everything that was completed, however. No Tool Updating When you see graphs that look like this, you can be assured that it’s because the team is not updating the tool that generates the graphs. Review your policy for when they are to update. On the teams that I run, I require that each team member updates the tool at least once daily. You should also check to see how well the team is breaking down stories into tasks. If they’re creating few large tasks, graphs can look similar to this. As a general rule, I never allow tasks, other than Unit Testing and Uncertainty, to be greater than eight hours in duration. Scope Increase I always encourage team members to enter in however much time they think they have left on a task, even if that means increasing the total amount of time left to do. You get a much better and more realistic picture this way. Increasing time remaining could explain the burndown graph, but by looking at the cumulative flow graph, we can see that stories were added to the iteration and scope was increased. Since planning should consume all of the hours in the iteration, this is almost always a bad thing. If the scope change happened late in the iteration and the hours remaining were well below the ideal burn, then increasing scope is probably o.k., but estimation needs to get better. However, with the charts above, that’s clearly not what happened and the team was required to do extra work to make the iteration. If you find this happening, your product owner and ScrumMasters need training. The team also needs to learn to say no. Scope Decrease Scope decreases are just as bad as scope increases. Usually, graphs above show that the team did a poor job of estimating their stories and part way through had to reduce scope to change the iteration. This will happen once in a while, but if you find it’s a pattern on your team, you need to re-evaluate planning. Some teams are hopelessly optimistic. In those cases, I’ll introduce a task I call “Uncertainty.” With Uncertainty, the team estimates how many hours they might need if things don’t go well with the tasks they’ve defined. They try to estimate things that could go poorly and increase the time appropriately. Having an Uncertainty task allows them to have a low and high estimate. Uncertainty should not just be an arbitrary buffer. It must correlate to real uncertainty in the tasks that have been defined. Stories are too Big Often, we see graphs like the ones above. Note that the burndown looks fairly good, other than the chunky acceptance of stories. However, when you look at cumulative flow, you can see that at one point, everything is in progress. This is a bad thing. When you see graphs like this, you’re in one of two states. You may just have a very small team and can only handle one or two stories in your iteration. If you have more than one or two people, then the most likely problem is that your stories are far too big. To combat this, break large high hour stories into smaller pieces that can be completed independently and accepted independently. If you don’t, you’ll likely be requiring your testers to do heroic things to complete testing on the last day of the iteration and you’re much more likely to have the entire iteration fail, because of the limited amount of things that can be completed. Summary There are other charts that can be useful when doing scrum. If you don’t have any big visible charts, you really need to evaluate your process and change. These charts can provide the team a wealth of information and help you write better software. If you have any questions about charts that you’re seeing on your team, contact me with a screen capture of the charts and I’ll tell you what I’m seeing in those charts. I always want this information to be useful, so please let me know if you have other questions. Technorati Tags: Agile

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• HTG Explains: Should You Build Your Own PC?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  There was a time when every geek seemed to build their own PC. While the masses bought eMachines and Compaqs, geeks built their own more powerful and reliable desktop machines for cheaper. But does this still make sense? Building your own PC still offers as much flexibility in component choice as it ever did, but prebuilt computers are available at extremely competitive prices. Building your own PC will no longer save you money in most cases. The Rise of Laptops It’s impossible to look at the decline of geeks building their own PCs without considering the rise of laptops. There was a time when everyone seemed to use desktops — laptops were more expensive and significantly slower in day-to-day tasks. With the diminishing importance of computing power — nearly every modern computer has more than enough power to surf the web and use typical programs like Microsoft Office without any trouble — and the rise of laptop availability at nearly every price point, most people are buying laptops instead of desktops. And, if you’re buying a laptop, you can’t really build your own. You can’t just buy a laptop case and start plugging components into it — even if you could, you would end up with an extremely bulky device. Ultimately, to consider building your own desktop PC, you have to actually want a desktop PC. Most people are better served by laptops. Benefits to PC Building The two main reasons to build your own PC have been component choice and saving money. Building your own PC allows you to choose all the specific components you want rather than have them chosen for you. You get to choose everything, including the PC’s case and cooling system. Want a huge case with room for a fancy water-cooling system? You probably want to build your own PC. In the past, this often allowed you to save money — you could get better deals by buying the components yourself and combining them, avoiding the PC manufacturer markup. You’d often even end up with better components — you could pick up a more powerful CPU that was easier to overclock and choose more reliable components so you wouldn’t have to put up with an unstable eMachine that crashed every day. PCs you build yourself are also likely more upgradable — a prebuilt PC may have a sealed case and be constructed in such a way to discourage you from tampering with the insides, while swapping components in and out is generally easier with a computer you’ve built on your own. If you want to upgrade your CPU or replace your graphics card, it’s a definite benefit. Downsides to Building Your Own PC It’s important to remember there are downsides to building your own PC, too. For one thing, it’s just more work — sure, if you know what you’re doing, building your own PC isn’t that hard. Even for a geek, researching the best components, price-matching, waiting for them all to arrive, and building the PC just takes longer. Warranty is a more pernicious problem. If you buy a prebuilt PC and it starts malfunctioning, you can contact the computer’s manufacturer and have them deal with it. You don’t need to worry about what’s wrong. If you build your own PC and it starts malfunctioning, you have to diagnose the problem yourself. What’s malfunctioning, the motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, or power supply? Each component has a separate warranty through its manufacturer, so you’ll have to determine which component is malfunctioning before you can send it off for replacement. Should You Still Build Your Own PC? Let’s say you do want a desktop and are willing to consider building your own PC. First, bear in mind that PC manufacturers are buying in bulk and getting a better deal on each component. They also have to pay much less for a Windows license than the $120 or so it would cost you to to buy your own Windows license. This is all going to wipe out the cost savings you’ll see — with everything all told, you’ll probably spend more money building your own average desktop PC than you would picking one up from Amazon or the local electronics store. If you’re an average PC user that uses your desktop for the typical things, there’s no money to be saved from building your own PC. But maybe you’re looking for something higher end. Perhaps you want a high-end gaming PC with the fastest graphics card and CPU available. Perhaps you want to pick out each individual component and choose the exact components for your gaming rig. In this case, building your own PC may be a good option. As you start to look at more expensive, high-end PCs, you may start to see a price gap — but you may not. Let’s say you wanted to blow thousands of dollars on a gaming PC. If you’re looking at spending this kind of money, it would be worth comparing the cost of individual components versus a prebuilt gaming system. Still, the actual prices may surprise you. For example, if you wanted to upgrade Dell’s $2293 Alienware Aurora to include a second NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 graphics card, you’d pay an additional $600 on Alienware’s website. The same graphics card costs $650 on Amazon or Newegg, so you’d be spending more money building the system yourself. Why? Dell’s Alienware gets bulk discounts you can’t get — and this is Alienware, which was once regarded as selling ridiculously overpriced gaming PCs to people who wouldn’t build their own. Building your own PC still allows you to get the most freedom when choosing and combining components, but this is only valuable to a small niche of gamers and professional users — most people, even average gamers, would be fine going with a prebuilt system. If you’re an average person or even an average gamer, you’ll likely find that it’s cheaper to purchase a prebuilt PC rather than assemble your own. Even at the very high end, components may be more expensive separately than they are in a prebuilt PC. Enthusiasts who want to choose all the individual components for their dream gaming PC and want maximum flexibility may want to build their own PCs. Even then, building your own PC these days is more about flexibility and component choice than it is about saving money. In summary, you probably shouldn’t build your own PC. If you’re an enthusiast, you may want to — but only a small minority of people would actually benefit from building their own systems. Feel free to compare prices, but you may be surprised which is cheaper. Image Credit: Richard Jones on Flickr, elPadawan on Flickr, Richard Jones on Flickr     

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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• Personal Technology – Laptop Screen Blank – No Post – No BIOS – No Boot

  - by Pinal Dave

  If your laptop Screen is Blank and there is no POST, BIOS or boot, you can follow the steps mentioned here and there are chances that it will work if there is no hardware failure inside. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Those, who care about how I come up with this not SQL related blog post, here is the very funny true story. If you are a married man, you will know what I am going to describe next. May be you have faced the same situation or at least you feel and understand my situation. My wife’s computer suddenly stops working when she was searching for my daughter’s mathematics worksheets online. While the fatal accident happened with my wife’s computer (which was my loyal computer for over 4 years before she got it), I was working in my home office, fixing a high priority issue (live order’s database was corrupted) with one of the largest eCommerce websites.  While I was working on production server where I was fixing database corruption, my wife ran to my home office. Here is how the conversation went: Wife: This computer does not work. I: Restart it. Wife: It does not start. I: What did you do with it? Wife: Nothing, it just stopped working. I: Okey, I will look into it later, working on the very urgent issue. Wife: I was printing my daughter’s worksheet. I: Hm.. Okey. Wife: It was the mathematics worksheet, which you promised you will teach but you never get around to do it, so I am doing it myself. I: Thanks. I appreciate it. I am very busy with this issue as million dollar transaction are not happening as the database got corrupted and … Wife: So what … umm… You mean to say that you care about this customer more than your daughter. You know she got A+ in every other class but in mathematics she got only A. She missed that extra credit question. I: She is only 4, it is okay. Wife: She is 4.5 years old not 4. So you are not going to fix this computer which does not start at all. I think our daughter next time will even get lower grades as her dad is busy fixing something. I: Alright, I give up bring me that computer. Our daughter who was listening everything so far she finally decided to speak up. Daughter: Dad, it is a laptop not computer. I: Yes, sweety get that laptop here and your dad is going to fix the this small issue of million dollar issue later on. I decided to pay attention to my wife’s computer. She was right. No matter what I do, it will not boot up, it will not start, no BIOS, no POST screen. The computer starts for a second but nothing comes up on the screen. The light indicating hard drive comes up for a second and goes off. Nothing happens. I removed every single USB drive from the laptop but it still would not start. It was indeed no fun for me. Finally I remember my days when I was not married and used to study in University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I remembered that I used to have very old second (or maybe third or fourth) hand computer with me. In polite words, I had pre-owned computer and it used to face very similar issues again and again. I had small routine I used to follow to fix my old computer and I had decided to follow the same steps again with this computer. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Once I followed above process, her computer worked. I was very delighted, that now I can go back to solving the problem where millions of transactions were waiting as I was fixing corrupted database and it the current state of the database was in emergency mode. Once I fixed the computer, I looked at my wife and asked. I: Well, now this laptop is back online, can I get guaranteed that she will get A+ in mathematics in this week’s quiz? Wife: Sure, I promise. I: Fantastic. After saying that I started to look at my database corruption and my wife interrupted me again. Wife: Btw, I forgot to tell you. Our daughter had got A in mathematics last week but she had another quiz today and she already have received A+ there. I kept my promise. I looked at her and she started to walk outside room, before I say anything my phone rang. DBA from eCommerce company had called me, as he was wondering why there is no activity from my side in last 10 minutes. DBA: Hey bud, are you still connected. I see um… no activity in last 10 minutes. I: Oh, well, I was just saving the world. I am back now. After two hours I had fixed the database corruption and everything was normal. I was outsmarted by my wife but honestly I still respect and love her the same as she is the one who spends countless hours with our daughter so she does not miss me and I can continue writing blogs and keep on doing technology evangelism. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Visiting the Fire Station in Coromandel

  Hm, I just tried to remember how we actually came up with this cool idea... but it's already too blurred and it doesn't really matter after all. Anyway, if I remember correctly (IIRC), it happened during one of the Linux meetups at Mugg & Bean, Bagatelle where Ajay and I brought our children along and we had a brief conversation about how cool it would be to check out one of the fire stations here in Mauritius. We both thought that it would be a great experience and adventure for the little ones. An idea takes shape And there we go, down the usual routine these... having an idea, checking out the options and discussing who's doing what. Except this time, it was all up to Ajay, and he did a fantastic job. End of August, he told me that he got in touch with one of his friends which actually works as a fire fighter at the station in Coromandel and that there could be an option to come and visit them (soon). A couple of days later - Confirmed! Be there, and in time... What time? Anyway, doesn't really matter... Everything was settled and arranged. I asked the kids on Friday afternoon if they might be interested to see the fire engines and what a fire fighter is doing. Of course, they were all in! Getting up early on Sunday morning isn't really a regular exercise for all of us but everything went smooth and after a short breakfast it was time to leave. Where are we going? Are we there yet? Now, we are in Bambous. Why do you go this way? The kids were so much into it. Absolutely amazing to see their excitement. Are we there yet? Well, we went through the sugar cane fields towards Chebel and then down into the industrial zone at Coromandel. Honestly, I had a clue where the fire station is located but having Google Maps in reach that shouldn't be a problem in case that we might get lost. But my worries were washed away when our children guided us... "There! Over there are the fire engines! We have to turn left, dad." - No comment, the kids were right! As we were there a little bit too early, we parked the car and the kids started to explore the area and outskirts of the fire station. Some minutes later, as if we had placed an order a unit of two cars had to go out for an alarm and the kids could witness them leaving as closely as possible. Sirens on and wow!!! Ladder truck L32 - MAN truck with Rosenbauer built-up and equipment by Metz Taking the tour Ajay arrived shortly after that and guided us finally inside the station to meet with his pal. The three guys were absolutely well-prepared and showed us around in the hall, explaining that there two units out at the moment. But the ladder truck (with max. 32m expandable height) was still around we all got a great insight into the technique and equipment on the vehicle. It was amazing to see all three kids listening to Mambo as give some figures about the truck and how the fire fighters are actually it. The children and 'our' fire fighters of the day had great fun with the various fire engines Absolutely fantastic that the children were allowed to experience this - we had so much fun! Ajay's son brought two of his toy fire engines along, shared them with ours, and they all played very well together. As a parent it was really amazing to see them at such an ease. Enough theory Shortly afterwards the ladder truck was moved outside, got stabilised and ready to go for 'real-life' exercising. With the additional equipment of safety helmets, security belts and so on, we all got a first-hand impression about how it could be as a fire-fighter. Actually, I was totally amazed by the curiousity and excitement of my BWE. She was really into it and asked lots of interesting questions - in general but also technical. And while our fighters were busy with Ajay and family, I gave her some more details and explanations about the truck, the expandable ladder, the safety cage at the top and other equipment available. Safety first! No exceptions and always be prepared for the worst case... Also, the equipped has been checked prior to excuse - This is your life saver... Hooked up and ready to go... ...of course not too high. This is just a demonstration - and 32 meters above ground isn't for everyone. Well, after that it was me that had the asking looks on me, and I finally revealed to the local fire fighters that I was in the auxiliary fire brigade, more precisely in the hazard department, for more than 10 years. So not a professional fire fighter but at least a passionate and educated one as them. Inside the station Our fire fighters really took their time to explain their daily job to kids, provided them access to operation seat on the ladder truck and how the truck cabin is actually equipped with the different radios and so on. It was really a great time. Later on we had a brief tour through the building itself, and again all of our questions were answered. We had great fun and started to joke about bits and pieces. For me it was also very interesting to see the comparison between the fire station here in Mauritius and the ones I have been to back in Germany. Amazing to see them completely captivated in the play - the children had lots of fun! Also, that there are currently ten fire stations all over the island, plus two additional but private ones at the airport and at the harbour. The newest one is actually down in Black River on the west coast because the time from Quatre Bornes takes too long to have any chance of an effective alarm at all. IMHO, a very good decision as time is the most important factor in getting fire incidents under control. After all it was great experience for all of us, especially for the children to see and understand that their toy trucks are only copies of the real thing and that the job of a (professional) fire fighter is very important in our society. Don't forget that those guys run into the danger zone while you're trying to get away from it as much as possible. Another unit just came back from a grass fire - and shortly after they went out again. No time to rest, too much to do! Mauritian Fire Fighters now and (maybe) in the future... Thank you! It was an honour to be around! Thank you to Ajay for organising and arranging this Sunday morning event, and of course of Big Thank You to the three guys that took some time off to have us at the Fire Station in Coromandel and guide us through their daily job! And remember to call 115 in case of emergencies!

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks&ndash;Part 1: Extensions

  - by ToStringTheory

  I don’t know about you, but when it comes to development, I prefer my environment to be as free of clutter as possible.  It may surprise you to know that I have tried ReSharper, and did not like it, for the reason that I stated above.  In my opinion, it had too much clutter.  Don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of features that I did like about it (inversion of if blocks, code feedback), but for the most part, I actually felt that it was slowing me down. Introduction Another large factor besides intrusiveness/speed in my choice to dislike ReSharper would probably be that I have become comfortable with my current setup and extensions.  I believe I have a good collection, and am quite happy with what I can accomplish in a short amount of time.  I figured that I would share some of my tips/findings regarding Visual Studio productivity here, and see what you had to say. The first section of things that I would like to cover, are Visual Studio Extensions.  In case you have been living under a rock for the past several years, Extensions are available under the Tools menu in Visual Studio: The extension manager enables integrated access to the Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery online with access to a few thousand different extensions.  I have tried many extensions, but for reasons of lack reliability, usability, or features, have uninstalled almost all of them.  However, I have come across several that I find I can not do without anymore: NuGet Package Manager (Microsoft) Perspectives (Adam Driscoll) Productivity Power Tools (Microsoft) Web Essentials (Mads Kristensen) Extensions NuGet Package Manager To be honest, I debated on whether or not to put this in here.  Most people seem to have it, however, there was a time when I didn’t, and was always confused when blogs/posts would say to right click and “Add Package Reference…” which with one of the latest updates is now “Manage NuGet Packages”.  So, if you haven’t downloaded the NuGet Package Manager yet, or don’t know what it is, I would highly suggest downloading it now! Features Simply put, the NuGet Package Manager gives you a GUI and command line to access different libraries that have been uploaded to NuGet. Some of its features include: Ability to search NuGet for packages via the GUI, with information in the detail bar on the right. Quick access to see what packages are in a solution, and what packages have updates available, with easy 1-click updating. If you download a package that requires references to work on other NuGet packages, they will be downloaded and referenced automatically. Productivity Tip If you use any type of source control in Visual Studio as well as using NuGet packages, be sure to right-click on the solution and click "Enable NuGet Package Restore". What this does is add a NuGet package to the solution so that it will be checked in along side your solution, as well as automatically grab packages from NuGet on build if needed. This is an extremely simple system to use to manage your package references, instead of having to manually go into TFS and add the Packages folder. Perspectives I can't stand developing with just one monitor. Especially if it comes to debugging. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010, is that all of the panels and windows are floatable, and can dock to other screens. The only bad thing is, I don't use the same toolset with everything that I am doing. By this, I mean that I don't use all of the same windows for debugging a web application, as I do for coding a WPF application. Only thing is, Visual Studio doesn't save the screen positions for all of the undocked windows. So, I got curious one day and decided to check and see if there was an extension to help out. This is where I found Perspectives. Features Perspectives gives you the ability to configure window positions across any or your monitors, and then to save the positions in a profile. Perspectives offers a Panel to manage different presets/favorites, and a toolbar to add to the toolbars at the top of Visual Studio. Ability to 'Favorite' a profile to add it to the perspectives toolbar. Productivity Tip Take the time to setup profiles for each of your scenarios - debugging web/winforms/xaml, coding, maintenance, etc. Try to remember to use the profiles for a few days, and at the end of a week, you may find that your productivity was never better. Productivity Power Tools Ah, the Productivity Power Tools... Quite possibly one of my most used extensions, if not my most used. The tool pack gives you a variety of enhancements ranging from key shortcuts, interface tweaks, and completely new features to Visual Studio 2010. Features I don't want to bore you with all of the features here, so here are my favorite: Quick Find - Unobtrusive search box in upper-right corner of the code window. Great for searching in general, especially in a file. Solution Navigator - The 'Solution Explorer' on steroids. Easy to search for files, see defined members/properties/methods in files, and my favorite feature is the 'set as root' option. Updated 'Add Reference...' Dialog - This is probably my favorite enhancement period... The 'Add Reference...' dialog redone in a manner that resembles the Extension/Package managers. I especially love the ability to search through all of the references. "Ctrl - Click" for Definition - I am still getting used to this as I usually try to use my keyboard for everything, but I love the ability to hold Ctrl and turn property/methods/variables into hyperlinks, that you click on to see their definitions. Great for travelling down a rabbit hole in an application to research problems. While there are other commands/utilities, I find these to be the ones that I lean on the most for the usefulness. Web Essentials If you have do any type of web development in ASP .Net, ASP .Net MVC, even HTML, I highly suggest grabbing the Web Essentials right NOW! This extension alone is great for productivity in web development, and greatly decreases my development time on new features. Features Some of its best features include: CSS Previews - I say 'previews' because of the multiple kinds of previews in CSS that you get font-family, color, background/background-image previews. This is great for just tweaking UI slightly in different ways and seeing how they look in the CSS window at a glance. Live Preview - One word - awesome! This goes well with my multi-monitor setup. I put the site on one monitor in a Live Preview panel, and then as I make changes to CSS/cshtml/aspx/html, the preview window will update with each save/build automatically. For CSS, you can even turn on live-update, so as you are tweaking CSS, the style changes in real time. Great for tweaking colors or font-sizes. Outlining - Small, but I like to be able to collapse regions/declarations that are in the way of new work, or are just distracting. Commenting Shortcuts - I don't know why it wasn't included by default, but it is nice to have the key shortcuts for commenting working in the CSS editor as well. Productivity Tip When working on a site, hit CTRL-ALT-ENTER to launch the Live Preview window. Dock it to another monitor. When you make changes to the document/css, just save and glance at the other monitor. No need to alt tab, then alt tab before continuing editing. Conclusion These extensions are only the most useful and least intrusive - ones that I use every day. The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is the extensibility options that it gives developers to utilize. Have an extension that you use that isn't intrusive, but isn't listed here? Please, feel free to comment. I love trying new things, and am always looking for new additions to my toolset of the most useful. Finally, please keep an eye out for Part 2 on key shortcuts in Visual Studio. Also, if you are visiting my site (http://tostringtheory.com || http://geekswithblogs.net/tostringtheory) from an actual browser and not a feed, please let me know what you think of the new styling!

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• First PC Build (Part 1)

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tonyt/archive/2014/08/05/157959.aspxA couple of months ago I made the decision to build myself a new computer. The intended use is gaming and for using the last real version of Photoshop. I was motivated by the poor state of console gaming and a simple desire to do something I haven’t done before – build a PC from the ground up. I’ve been using PCs for more than two decades. I’ve replaced a component hear and there, but for the last 10 years or so I’ve only used laptops. Therefore, this article will be written from the perspective of someone familiar with PCs, but completely new at building. I’m not an expert and this is not a definitive guide for building a PC, but I do hope that it encourages you to try it yourself. Component List Research There was a lot of research necessary, because building a PC is completely new to me, and I haven’t kept up with what’s out there. The first thing you want to do is nail down what your goals are. Your goals are going to be driven by what you want to do with your computer and personal choice. Don’t neglect the second one, because if you’re doing this for fun you want to get what you want. In my case, I focused on three things: performance, longevity, and aesthetics. The performance aspect is important for gaming and Photoshop. This will drive what components you get. For example, heavy gaming use is going to drive your choice of graphics card. Longevity is relevant to me, because I don’t want to be changing things out anytime soon for the next hot game. The consequence of performance and longevity is cost. Finally, aesthetics was my next consideration. I could have just built a box, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun for me. Aesthetics might not be important to you. They are for me. I also like gadgets and that played into at least one purchase for this build. I used PC Part Picker to put together my component list. I found it invaluable during the process and I’d recommend it to everyone. One caveat is that I wouldn’t trust the compatibility aspects. It does a pretty good job of not steering you wrong, but do your own research. The rest of it isn’t really sexy. I started out with what appealed to me and then I made changes and additions as I dived deep into researching each component and interaction I could find. The resources I used are innumerable. I used reviews, product descriptions, forum posts (praises and problems), et al. to assist me. I also asked friends into gaming what they thought about my component list. And when I got near the end I posted my list to the Reddit /r/buildapc forum. I cannot stress the value of extra sets of eyeballs and first hand experiences. Some of the resources I used: PC Part Picker Tom’s Hardware bit-tech Reddit Purchase PC Part Picker favors certain vendors. You should look at others too. In my case I found their favorites to be the best. My priorities were out-the-door price and shipping time. I knew that once I started getting parts I’d want to start building. Luckily, I timed it well and everything arrived within the span of a few days. Here are my opinions on the vendors I ended up using in alphabetical order. Amazon.com is a good, reliable choice. They have excellent customer service in my experience, and I knew I wouldn’t have trouble with them. However, shipping time is often a problem when you use their free shipping unless you order expensive items (I’ve found items over $100 ship quickly). Ultimately though, price wasn’t always the best and their collection of sales tax in my state turned me off them. I did purchase my case from them. I ordered the mouse as well, but I cancelled after it was stuck four days in a “shipping soon” state. I purchased the mouse locally. Best Buy is not my favorite place to do business. There’s a lot of history with poor, uninterested sales representatives and they used to have a lot of bad anti-consumer policies. That’s a lot better now, but the bad taste is still in my mouth. I ended up purchasing the accessories from them including mouse (locally) and headphones. NCIX is a company that I’ve never heard of before. It popped up as a recommendation for my CPU cooler on PC Part Picker. I didn’t do a lot of research on the company, because their policy on you buying insurance for your orders turned me off. That policy makes it clear to me that the company finds me responsible for the shipment once it leaves their dock. That’s not right, and may run afoul of state laws. Regardless they shipped my CPU cooler quickly and I didn’t have a problem. NewEgg.com is a well known company. I had never done business with them, but I’m glad I did. They shipped quickly and provided good visibility over everything. The prices were also the best in most cases. My main complaint is that they have a lot of exchange only return policies on components. To their credit those policies are listed in the cart underneath each item. The visibility tells me that they’re not playing any shenanigans and made me comfortable dealing with that risk. The vast majority of what I ordered came from them. Coming Next In the next part I’ll tackle my build experience.

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• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

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• Making Those PanelBoxes Behave

  - by Duncan Mills

  I have a little problem to solve earlier this week - misbehaving <af:panelBox> components... What do I mean by that? Well here's the scenario, I have a page fragment containing a set of panelBoxes arranged vertically. As it happens, they are stamped out in a loop but that does not really matter. What I want to be able to do is to provide the user with a simple UI to close and open all of the panelBoxes in concert. This could also apply to showDetailHeader and similar items with a disclosed attrubute, but in this case it's good old panelBoxes.  Ok, so the basic solution to this should be self evident. I can set up a suitable scoped managed bean that the panelBoxes all refer to for their disclosed attribute state. Then the open all / close commandButtons in the UI can simply set the state of that bean for all the panelBoxes to pick up via EL on their disclosed attribute. Sound OK? Well that works basically without a hitch, but turns out that there is a slight problem and this is where the framework is attempting to be a little too helpful. The issue is that is the user manually discloses or hides a panelBox then that will override the value that the EL is setting. So for example. I start the page with all panelBoxes collapsed, all set by the EL state I'm storing on the session I manually disclose panelBox no 1. I press the Expand All button - all works as you would hope and all the panelBoxes are now disclosed, including of course panelBox 1 which I just expanded manually. Finally I press the Collapse All button and everything collapses except that first panelBox that I manually disclosed.  The problem is that the component remembers this manual disclosure and that overrides the value provided by the expression. If I change the viewId (navigate away and back) then the panelBox will start to behave again, until of course I touch it again! Now, the more astute amoungst you would think (as I did) Ah, sound like the MDS personalizaton stuff is getting in the way and the solution should simply be to set the dontPersist attribute to disclosed | ALL. Alas this does not fix the issue.  After a little noodling on the best way to approach this I came up with a solution that works well, although if you think of an alternative way do let me know. The principle is simple. In the disclosureListener for the panelBox I take a note of the clientID of the panelBox component that has been touched by the user along with the state. This all gets stored in a Map of Booleans in ViewScope which is keyed by clientID and stores the current disclosed state in the Boolean value.  The listener looks like this (it's held in a request scope backing bean for the page): public void handlePBDisclosureEvent(DisclosureEvent disclosureEvent) { String clientId = disclosureEvent.getComponent().getClientId(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()); boolean state = disclosureEvent.isExpanded(); pbState.addTouchedPanelBox(clientId, state); } The pbState variable referenced here is a reference to the bean which will hold the state of the panelBoxes that lives in viewScope (recall that everything is re-set when the viewid is changed so keeping this in viewScope is just fine and cleans things up automatically). The addTouchedPanelBox() method looks like this: public void addTouchedPanelBox(String clientId, boolean state) { //create the cache if needed this is just a Map<String,Boolean> if (_touchedPanelBoxState == null) { _touchedPanelBoxState = new HashMap<String, Boolean>(); } // Simply put / replace _touchedPanelBoxState.put(clientId, state); } So that's the first part, we now have a record of every panelBox that the user has touched. So what do we do when the Collapse All or Expand All buttons are pressed? Here we do some JavaScript magic. Basically for each clientID that we have stored away, we issue a client side disclosure event from JavaScript - just as if the user had gone back and changed it manually. So here's the Collapse All button action: public String CloseAllAction() { submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); _uiManager.closeAllBoxes(); return null; }  The _uiManager.closeAllBoxes() method is just manipulating the master-state that all of the panelBoxes are bound to using EL. The interesting bit though is the line:  submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); To break that down, the first part is a call to that viewScoped state holder to ask for a list of clientIDs that need to be "tweaked": public String getTouchedClientIds(boolean targetState) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); if (_touchedPanelBoxState != null && _touchedPanelBoxState.size() > 0) { for (Map.Entry<String, Boolean> entry : _touchedPanelBoxState.entrySet()) { if (entry.getValue() == targetState) { if (sb.length() > 0) { sb.append(','); } sb.append(entry.getKey()); } } } return sb.toString(); } You'll notice that this method only processes those panelBoxes that will be in the wrong state and returns those as a comma separated list. This is then processed by the submitDiscloseOverride() method: private void submitDiscloseOverride(String clientIdList, boolean targetDisclosureState) { if (clientIdList != null && clientIdList.length() > 0) { FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); StringBuilder script = new StringBuilder(); script.append("overrideDiscloseHandler('"); script.append(clientIdList); script.append("',"); script.append(targetDisclosureState); script.append(");"); Service.getRenderKitService(fctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class).addScript(fctx, script.toString()); } } This method constructs a JavaScript command to call a routine called overrideDiscloseHandler() in a script attached to the page (using the standard <af:resource> tag). That method parses out the list of clientIDs and sends the correct message to each one: function overrideDiscloseHandler(clientIdList, newState) { AdfLogger.LOGGER.logMessage(AdfLogger.INFO, "Disclosure Hander newState " + newState + " Called with: " + clientIdList); //Parse out the list of clientIds var clientIdArray = clientIdList.split(','); for (var i = 0; i < clientIdArray.length; i++){ var panelBox = flipPanel = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(clientIdArray[i]); if (panelBox.getComponentType() == "oracle.adf.RichPanelBox"){ panelBox.broadcast(new AdfDisclosureEvent(panelBox, newState)); } }  }  So there you go. You can see how, with a few tweaks the same code could be used for other components with disclosure that might suffer from the same problem, although I'd point out that the behavior I'm working around here us usually desirable. You can download the running example (11.1.2.2) from here. 

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• Sending notification after an event has remained open for a specified period

  - by Loc Nhan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Enterprise Manager (EM) 12c allows you to create an incident rule to send a notification and/or create an incident after an event has been open for a specified period. Such an incident rule will help prevent premature alerts on issues that may correct themselves within a certain amount of time. For example, there are some agents in an unstable network area, and often there are communication failures between the agents and the OMS lasting three, four minutes at a time. In this scenario, you may only want to receive alerts after an agent in that area has been in the Agent Unreachable status for at least five minutes. Note: Many non-target availability metrics allow users to specify the “number of occurrences” or the number of consecutive times metric values reach thresholds before a notification is sent. It is best to use the feature for such metrics. This article provides a step-by-step guide for creating an incident rule set to cater for the above scenario, that is, to create an incident and send a notification after the Agent Unreachable event has remained open for a five-minute duration. Steps to create the incident rule 1.     Log on to the console and navigate to Setup -> Incidents -> Incident Rules. Note: A non-super user requires the Create Enterprise Rule Set privilege, which is a resource privilege, to create an incident rule. The Incident Rules - All Enterprise Rules page displays. 2.     Click Create Rule Set … The Create Rule Set page displays. 3.     Enter a name for the rule set (e.g. Rule set for agents in flaky network areas), optionally enter a description, and leave everything else at default values, and click + Add. The Search and Select: Targets page pops up. Note:  While you can create a rule set for individual targets, it is a best practice to use a group for this purpose. 4.     Select an appropriate group, e.g. the AgentsInFlakyNework group. The Select button becomes enabled, click the button. The Create Rule Set page displays. 5.     Leave everything at default values, and click the Rules tab. The Create Rule Set page displays. 6.     Click Create… The Select Type of Rule to Create page pops up. 7.     Leave the Incoming events and updates to events option selected, and click Continue. The Create New Rule : Select Events page displays. 8.     Select Target Availability from the Type drop-down list. The page shows more options for Target Availability. 9.     Select the Specific events of type Target Availability option, and click + Add. The Select Target Availability events page pops up. 10.   Select Agent from the Target Type dropdown list. The page expands. 11.   Click the Agent unreachable checkbox, and click OK. Note: If you want to also receive a notification when the event is cleared, click the Agent unreachable end checkbox as well before clicking OK. The Create New Rule : Select Events page displays. 12.   Click Next. The Create New Rule : Add Actions page displays. 13.   Click + Add. The Add Actions page displays. 14.   Do the following: a.     Select the Only execute the actions if specified conditions match option (You don’t want the action to trigger always). The following options appear in the Conditions for Actions section. b.     Select the Event has been open for specified duration option. The Conditions for actions section expands. c.     Change the values of Event has been open for to 5 Minutes as shown below. d.     In the Create Incident or Update Incident section, click the Create Incident checkbox as following: e.     In the Notifications section, enter an appropriate EM user or email address in the E-mail To field. f.     Click Continue (in the top right hand corner). The Create New Rule : Add Actions page displays. 15.   Click Next. The Create New Rule : Specify name and Description page displays. 16.   Enter a rule name, and click Next. The Create New Rule : Review page appears. 17.   Click Continue, and proceed to save the rule set. The incident rule set creation completes. After one of the agents in the group specified in the rule set is stopped for over 5 minutes, EM will send a mail notification and create an incident as shown in the following screenshot. In conclusion, you have seen the steps to create an example incident rule set that only creates an incident and triggers a notification after an event has been open for a specified period. Such an incident rule can help prevent unnecessary incidents and alert notifications leaving EM administrators time to more important tasks. - Loc Nhan

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• Restructuring a large Chrome Extension/WebApp

  - by A.M.K

  I have a very complex Chrome Extension that has gotten too large to maintain in its current format. I'd like to restructure it, but I'm 15 and this is the first webapp or extension of it's type I've built so I have no idea how to do it. TL;DR: I have a large/complex webapp I'd like to restructure and I don't know how to do it. Should I follow my current restructure plan (below)? Does that sound like a good starting point, or is there a different approach that I'm missing? Should I not do any of the things I listed? While it isn't relevant to the question, the actual code is on Github and the extension is on the webstore. The basic structure is as follows: index.html <html> <head> <link href="css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <!-- This holds the main app styles --> <link href="css/widgets.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <!-- And this one holds widget styles --> </head> <body class="unloaded"> <!-- Low-level base elements are "hardcoded" here, the unloaded class is used for transitions and is removed on load. i.e: --> <div class="tab-container" tabindex="-1"> <!-- Tab nav --> </div> <!-- Templates for all parts of the application and widgets are stored as elements here. I plan on changing these to <script> elements during the restructure since <template>'s need valid HTML. --> <template id="template.toolbar"> <!-- Template content --> </template> <!-- Templates end --> <!-- Plugins --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/plugins.js"></script> <!-- This contains the code for all widgets, I plan on moving this online and downloading as necessary soon. --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/widgets.js"></script> <!-- This contains the main application JS. --> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/script.js"></script> </body> </html> widgets.js (initLog || (window.initLog = [])).push([new Date().getTime(), "A log is kept during page load so performance can be analyzed and errors pinpointed"]); // Widgets are stored in an object and extended (with jQuery, but I'll probably switch to underscore if using Backbone) as necessary var Widgets = { 1: { // Widget ID, this is set here so widgets can be retreived by ID id: 1, // Widget ID again, this is used after the widget object is duplicated and detached size: 3, // Default size, medium in this case order: 1, // Order shown in "store" name: "Weather", // Widget name interval: 300000, // Refresh interval nicename: "weather", // HTML and JS safe widget name sizes: ["tiny", "small", "medium"], // Available widget sizes desc: "Short widget description", settings: [ { // Widget setting specifications stored as an array of objects. These are used to dynamically generate widget setting popups. type: "list", nicename: "location", label: "Location(s)", placeholder: "Enter a location and press Enter" } ], config: { // Widget settings as stored in the tabs object (see script.js for storage information) size: "medium", location: ["San Francisco, CA"] }, data: {}, // Cached widget data stored locally, this lets it work offline customFunc: function(cb) {}, // Widgets can optionally define custom functions in any part of their object refresh: function() {}, // This fetches data from the web and caches it locally in data, then calls render. It gets called after the page is loaded for faster loads render: function() {} // This renders the widget only using information from data, it's called on page load. } }; script.js (initLog || (window.initLog = [])).push([new Date().getTime(), "These are also at the end of every file"]); // Plugins, extends and globals go here. i.e. Number.prototype.pad = .... var iChrome = function(refresh) { // The main iChrome init, called with refresh when refreshing to not re-run libs iChrome.Status.log("Starting page generation"); // From now on iChrome.Status.log is defined, it's used in place of the initLog iChrome.CSS(); // Dynamically generate CSS based on settings iChrome.Tabs(); // This takes the tabs stored in the storage (see fetching below) and renders all columns and widgets as necessary iChrome.Status.log("Tabs rendered"); // These will be omitted further along in this excerpt, but they're used everywhere // Checks for justInstalled => show getting started are run here /* The main init runs the bare minimum required to display the page, this sets all non-visible or instantly need things (such as widget dragging) on a timeout */ iChrome.deferredTimeout = setTimeout(function() { iChrome.deferred(refresh); // Pass refresh along, see above }, 200); }; iChrome.deferred = function(refresh) {}; // This calls modules one after the next in the appropriate order to finish rendering the page iChrome.Search = function() {}; // Modules have a base init function and are camel-cased and capitalized iChrome.Search.submit = function(val) {}; // Methods within modules are camel-cased and not capitalized /* Extension storage is async and fetched at the beginning of plugins.js, it's then stored in a variable that iChrome.Storage processes. The fetcher checks to see if processStorage is defined, if it is it gets called, otherwise settings are left in iChromeConfig */ var processStorage = function() { iChrome.Storage(function() { iChrome.Templates(); // Templates are read from their elements and held in a cache iChrome(); // Init is called }); }; if (typeof iChromeConfig == "object") { processStorage(); } Objectives of the restructure Memory usage: Chrome apparently has a memory leak in extensions, they're trying to fix it but memory still keeps on getting increased every time the page is loaded. The app also uses a lot on its own. Code readability: At this point I can't follow what's being called in the code. While rewriting the code I plan on properly commenting everything. Module interdependence: Right now modules call each other a lot, AFAIK that's not good at all since any change you make to one module could affect countless others. Fault tolerance: There's very little fault tolerance or error handling right now. If a widget is causing the rest of the page to stop rendering the user should at least be able to remove it. Speed is currently not an issue and I'd like to keep it that way. How I think I should do it The restructure should be done using Backbone.js and events that call modules (i.e. on storage.loaded = init). Modules should each go in their own file, I'm thinking there should be a set of core files that all modules can rely on and call directly and everything else should be event based. Widget structure should be kept largely the same, but maybe they should also be split into their own files. AFAIK you can't load all templates in a folder, therefore they need to stay inline. Grunt should be used to merge all modules, plugins and widgets into one file. Templates should also all be precompiled. Question: Should I follow my current restructure plan? Does that sound like a good starting point, or is there a different approach that I'm missing? Should I not do any of the things I listed? Do applications written with Backbone tend to be more intensive (memory and speed) than ones written in Vanilla JS? Also, can I expect to improve this with a proper restructure or is my current code about as good as can be expected?

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• c# Properties.Settings.Default Doesn't work as expected

  - by Jack

  I've been working on a program to automate my backup checks with LogMeIn backup (a windows forms based program). I now need a way to store user settings, to save information easily. I've never worked with the Application/User settings that is somewhat "built-in" - and decided to try it, but ran into problems. I added four settings for now: IncludeCriteria (Specialized.StringCollection) ExcludeCriteria (Specialized.StringCollection) ReportPath (string) ReportType (int) But the behavior doesn't act as expected (go figure). After saving some values in my program, I go back into edit/view my settings values using the VS 2008 settings editor. None of my values are stored. While I think this may be because those values are just default values, wouldn't that be where they can be stored/read/changed? Here is my load form code (still very unrefined): private void setupForm() { txtPath.Text = BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ReportPath == null ? "" : BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ReportPath; if (BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ReportType == 0) { radioHTML.Checked = true; } else radioExcel.Checked = true; if (BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.IncludeCriteria.Count > 0) { listIncludeCriteria.DataSource = Properties.Settings.Default.IncludeCriteria; //foreach (string s in Properties.Settings.Default.IncludeCriteria) // listIncludeCriteria.Items.Add(s); } if (BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ExcludeCriteria.Count > 0) { listExcludeCriteria.DataSource = BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ExcludeCriteria; //foreach (string s in Properties.Settings.Default.ExcludeCriteria) // listExcludeCriteria.Items.Add(s); } } listIncludeCriteria is just a listbox. When the user saves I call this method: private void saveSettings() { //var settings = BackupReport.Properties.Settings; if (txtPath.Text != "") { BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ReportPath = txtPath.Text; } if (listIncludeCriteria.Items.Count > 0) { //BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.IncludeCriteria = (StringCollection)listIncludeCriteria.Items.AsQueryable(); foreach (var i in listIncludeCriteria.Items) { if (!isIncludeDuplicate(i.ToString())) BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.IncludeCriteria.Add(i.ToString()); } } if (listExcludeCriteria.Items.Count > 0) { //BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ExcludeCriteria = (StringCollection)listExcludeCriteria.Items.AsQueryable(); foreach (var i in listExcludeCriteria.Items) { if (!isExcludeDuplicate(i.ToString())) Properties.Settings.Default.ExcludeCriteria.Add(i.ToString()); } } if (radioExcel.Checked == true) BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ReportType = 1; else BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.ReportType = 0; BackupReport.Properties.Settings.Default.Save(); //Properties.Settings.Default.Save(); this.DialogResult = DialogResult.OK; this.Close(); } The wierd thing is when the form loads, the path I put in the first time seems to come up (ReportPath) - even the listBoxes are populated with a bunch of crap I put in - yet I cant find these values anywhere. Any help would be appreciated! Josh

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• Automatic incremental SQL Script generation for incremental, nightly builds when using Team Build in

  - by Steve Johnson

  hi all, hope that everybody here is OK. We are using VS 2008 as development tool, TFS 2008 as version control as well as build automation. Some of our developer use dbpro for databases changes and some use SQL Server management studio. I am trying to automate build for Web Application built using C# and VB.Net. Our scenario is such that we have a central database to which our web application connects. Whenever we supply our clients with a new functionality or a bug fix, we supply them incremental builds. The SQL script is checked into source control for every incremental build when they have made and tested there changes on our central DB Server. I want to generate Differential script that can be run at the client as an incremental update script. Now to come about it is a problem. Sometimes our developers tend to forget the database change-sets and the script in the source control is missing an SP or a two. Also, sometimes we need to insert default data into some of the tables that have strict stringent values and not test values. Like a table that contains Services provided by the panel, we add a new service name, signature, credentials and service address, etc etc in the ServiceTable. Besides this many other tables may have test data that may not be needed. If we use DataCompare, it will generate changeset for required data (important for client to enable certain services) and our test data that was added to the database as a result of our testing of the functionality or bug fix. Currently i am using SQLSchemaCompareTask (from Visual Studio 2008 Team Database Professional Power Tools API) in the TFSBuild.proj file of the build definition for TFS 2008. Using SQLSchemaCompareTask, the script generated contains database names like [dbo]. etc which are not desired as the script fails when run against SQL Server 2000 databses (Some of our client still use SQL Server 2000) databases as teh backend of the application. Also default data can't be generated by this process. To overcome this problem, i have to come up with a solution that can compare databases and generate script automatically that does not have to be manually reviewed again before being sent to the client. Please suggest effective methodology of such SQL script generation and suggest whether two different databases may be used or something ? Is there any toolkit or api that can enable build automation for SQL Server databases? Thank you all. Regards Steve

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• SSH login with expect(1). How to exit expect and remain in SSH?

  - by Koroviev

  So I wanted to automate my SSH logins. The host I'm with doesn't allow key authentication on this server, so I had to be more inventive. I don't know much about shell scripting, but some research showed me the command 'expect' and some scripts using it for exactly this purpose. I set up a script and ran it, it worked perfectly to login. #!/usr/bin/env expect -f set password "my_password" match_max 1000 spawn ssh -p 2222 "my_username"@11.22.11.22 expect "*?assword:*" send -- "$password\r" send -- "\r" expect eof Initially, it runs as it should. Last login: Wed May 12 21:07:52 on ttys002 esther:~ user$ expect expect-test.exp spawn ssh -p 2222 [email protected] [email protected]'s password: Last login: Wed May 12 15:44:43 2010 from 20.10.20.10 -jailshell-3.2$ But that's where the success ends. Commands do not work, but hitting enter just makes a new line. Arrow keys and other non-alphanumeric keys produce symbols like '^[[C', '^[[A', '^[OQ' etc.[1] No other prompt appears except the two initially created by the expect script. Any ignored commands will be executed by my local shell once expect times out. An example: -jailshell-3.2$ whoami ls pwd hostname (...time passes, expect times out...) esther:~ user$ whoami user esther:~ ciaran$ ls Books Documents Movies Public Code Downloads Music Sites Desktop Library Pictures expect-test.exp esther:~ ciaran$ pwd /Users/ciaran esther:~ ciaran$ hostname esther.local As I said, I have no shell scripting experience, but I think it's being caused because I'm still "inside of" expect, but not "inside of" SSH. Is there any way to terminate expect once I've logged in, and have it hand over the SSH session to me? I've tried commands like 'close' and 'exit', after " send -- "\r" ". Yeah, they do what I want and expect dies, but it vindictively takes the SSH session down with it, leaving me back where I started. What I really need is for expect to do its job and terminate, leaving the SSH session back in my hands as if I did it manually. All help is appreciated, thanks. [1] I know there's a name for this, but I don't know what it is. And this is one of those frightening things which can't be googled, because the punctuation characters are ignored. As a side question, what's the story here?

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• Reduce Multiple Errors logging in sysssislog

  - by Akshay

  Need help. I am trying to automate error notifications to be sent in mailers. For that I am querying the sysssislog table. I have pasted an "Execute SQl task" on the package event handler "On error". For testing purpose, I am deliberately trying to load duplicate keys in a table which consists of a Primary key column(so as to get an error). But instead of having just one error, "Violation of primary key constraint", SSIS records 3 in the table. PFA the screenshot as well. How can i restrict the tool to log only one error and not multiple ??? Package Structure. Package ("On error Event handler") - DFT - Oledb Source - Oledb Destination SSIS Error Code DTS_E_OLEDBERROR. An OLE DB error has occurred. Error code: 0x80004005. An OLE DB record is available. Source: "Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 10.0" Hresult: 0x80004005 Description: "The statement has been terminated.". An OLE DB record is available. Source: "Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 10.0" Hresult: 0x80004005 Description: "Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK_SalesPerson_SalesPersonID'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.SalesPerson'.". SSIS Error Code DTS_E_INDUCEDTRANSFORMFAILUREONERROR. The "input "OLE DB Destination Input" (56)" failed because error code 0xC020907B occurred, and the error row disposition on "input "OLE DB Destination Input" (56)" specifies failure on error. An error occurred on the specified object of the specified component. There may be error messages posted before this with more information about the failure. SSIS Error Code DTS_E_PROCESSINPUTFAILED. The ProcessInput method on component "OLE DB Destination" (43) failed with error code 0xC0209029 while processing input "OLE DB Destination Input" (56). The identified component returned an error from the ProcessInput method. The error is specific to the component, but the error is fatal and will cause the Data Flow task to stop running. There may be error messages posted before this with more information about the failure. Please guide me. Your help is very much appreciated. Thanks

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• Using JUnit as an acceptance test framework

  - by Chris Knight

  OK, so I work for a company who has openly adopted agile practices for development in recent years. Our unit tests and code quality are improving. One area we still are working on is to find what works best for us in the automated acceptance test arena. We want to take our well formed user stories and use these to drive the code in a test driven manner. This will also give us acceptance level tests for each user story which we can then automate. To date, we've tried Fit, Fitnesse and Selenium. Each have their advantages, but we've also had real issues with them as well. With Fit and Fitnesse, we can't help but feel they overcomplicate things and we've had many technical issues using them. The business haven't fully bought in these tools and aren't particularly keen on maintaining the scripts all the time (and aren't big fans of the table style). Selenium is really good, but slow and relies on real time data and resources. One approach we are now considering is the use of the JUnit framework to provide similiar functionality. Rather than testing just a small unit of work using JUnit, why not use it to write a test (using the JUnit framework) to cover an acceptance level swath of the application? I.e. take a new story ("As a user I would like to see basic details of my policy...") and write a test in JUnit which starts executing application code at the point of entry for the policy details link but covers all code and logic down to the stubbed data access layer and back to the point of forwarding to the next page in the application, asserting on what data the user should see on that page. This seems to me to have the following advantages: Simplicity (no additional frameworks required) Zero effort to integrate with our Continuous Integration build server (since it already handles our JUnit tests) Full skillset already present in the team (its just a JUnit test after all) And the downsides being: Less customer involvement (though they are heavily involved in writing the user stories in the first place from which the acceptance tests will be written) Perhaps more difficult to understand (or make understood) the user story and acceptance criteria in a JUnit class verses a freetext specification ala Fit or Fitnesse So, my question is really, have you ever tried this method? Ever considered it? What are your thoughts? What do you like and dislike about this approach? Finally, please only mention alternative frameworks if you can say why you like or dislike them more than this approach.

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