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• How to Link VS2010 Database Project and LINQ to SQL

  - by Jason

  As I am working with the new database projects in VS2010, and as I am learning LINQ to SQL, I am curious as to the best way to link the two groups of information so that when I update one, the other updates along with it. From my research here at SO, as well as in Google, it appears the general rule of thumb is: "Build the database, and then create your LINQ to SQL classes." Of course, if I make a change in my database, the LINQ to SQL doesn't update automatically and I have to do it by hand. This is fairly simple right now as my database is small, but I am curious if there is an easier way for this to happen. In addition, the LINQ to SQL tool is pretty nice. The ability to create tables, add associations, and even create inheritance is very simple. As my second question, I am curious as to whether or not VS2010 can work the other way - I design the database in the DBLM file and then link it back to my database project. I appreciate any help with either of these two questions. I'm really interested in making this as easy as possible to reduce errors during development and improve the speed at which changes can be made.

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• ReSharper - Possible Null Assignment when using Microsoft.Contracts

  - by HVS

  Is there any way to indicate to ReSharper that a null reference won't occur because of Design-by-Contract Requires checking? For example, the following code will raise the warning (Possible 'null' assignment to entity marked with 'NotNull' attribute) in ReSharper on lines 7 and 8: private Dictionary<string, string> _Lookup = new Dictionary<string, string>(); public void Foo(string s) { Contract.Requires(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(s)); if (_Lookup.ContainsKey(s)) _Lookup.Remove(s); } What is really odd is that if you remove the Contract.Requires(...) line, the ReSharper message goes away. Update I found the solution through ExternalAnnotations which was also mentioned by Mike below. Here's an example of how to do it for a function in Microsoft.Contracts: Create a directory called Microsoft.Contracts under the ExternalAnnotations ReSharper directory. Next, Create a file called Microsoft.Contracts.xml and populate like so: <assembly name="Microsoft.Contracts"> <member name="M:System.Diagnostics.Contracts.Contract.Requires(System.Boolean)"> <attribute ctor="M:JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionMethodAttribute.#ctor"/> <parameter name="condition"> <attribute ctor="M:JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionConditionAttribute.#ctor(JetBrains.Annotations.AssertionConditionType)"> <argument>0</argument> </attribute> </parameter> </member> </assembly> Restart Visual Studio, and the message goes away!

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• Legit? Two foreign keys referencing the same primary key.

  - by Ryan

  Hi All, I'm a web developer and have recently started a project with a company. Currently, I'm working with their DBA on getting the schema laid out for the site, and we've come to a disagreement regarding the design on a couple tables, and I'd like some opinions on the matter. Basically, we are working on a site that will implement a "friends" network. All users of the site will be contained in a table tblUsers with (PersonID int identity PK, etc). What I am wanting to do is to create a second table, tblNetwork, that will hold all of the relationships between users, with (NetworkID int identity PK, Owners_PersonID int FK, Friends_PersonID int FK, etc). Or conversely, remove the NetworkID, and have both the Owners_PersonID and Friends_PersonID shared as the Primary key. This is where the DBA has his problem. Saying that "he would only implement this kind of architecture in a data warehousing schema, and not for a website, and this is just another example of web developers trying to take the easy way out." Now obviously, his remark was a bit inflammatory, and that have helped motivate me to find an suitable answer, but more so, I'd just like to know how to do it right. I've been developing databases and programming for over 10 years, have worked with some top-notch minds, and have never heard this kind of argument. What the DBA is wanting to do is instead of storing both the Owners_PersonId and Friends_PersonId in the same table, is to create a third table tblFriends to store the Friends_PersonId, and have the tblNetwork have (NetworkID int identity PK, Owner_PersonID int FK, FriendsID int FK(from TBLFriends)). All that tblFriends would house would be (FriendsID int identity PK, Friends_PersonID(related back to Persons)). To me, creating the third table is just excessive in nature, and does nothing but create an alias for the Friends_PersonID, and cause me to have to add (what I view as unneeded) joins to all my queries, not to mention the extra cycles that will be necessary to perform the join on every query. Thanks for reading, appreciate comments. Ryan

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• Invoice & Invoice lines: How do you store customer address information?

  - by elviejo

  Hi I'm developing an invoicing application. So the general idea is to have two tables: Invoice (ID, Date, CustomerAddress, CustomerState, CustomerCountry, VAT, Total); InvoiceLine (Invoice_ID, ID, Concept, Units, PricePerUnit, Total); As you can see this basic design leads to a lot of repetiton of records where the client will have the same addrres, state and country. So the alternative is to have an address table and then make a relationship Address<-Invoice. However I think that an invoice is immutable document and should be stored just the way it was first made. Sometimes customers change their addresses, or states and if it was coming from an Address catalog that will change all the previously made invoices. So What is your experience? How is the customer address stored in an invoice? In the Invoice table? an Address Table? or something else? Can you provide pointers to a book, article or document where this is discussed in further detail?

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• DDD: Aggregate Roots

  - by Mosh

  Hello, I need help with finding my aggregate root and boundary. I have 3 Entities: Plan, PlannedRole and PlannedTraining. Each Plan can include many PlannedRoles and PlannedTrainings. Solution 1: At first I thought Plan is the aggregate root because PlannedRole and PlannedTraining do not make sense out of the context of a Plan. They are always within a plan. Also, we have a business rule that says each Plan can have a maximum of 3 PlannedRoles and 5 PlannedTrainings. So I thought by nominating the Plan as the aggregate root, I can enforce this invariant. However, we have a Search page where the user searches for Plans. The results shows a few properties of the Plan itself (and none of its PlannedRoles or PlannedTrainings). I thought if I have to load the entire aggregate, it would have a lot of overhead. There are nearly 3000 plans and each may have a few children. Loading all these objects together and then ignoring PlannedRoles and PlannedTrainings in the search page doesn't make sense to me. Solution 2: I just realized the user wants 2 more search pages where they can search for Planned Roles or Planned Trainings. That made me realize they are trying to access these objects independently and "out of" the context of Plan. So I thought I was wrong about my initial design and that is how I came up with this solution. So, I thought to have 3 aggregates here, 1 for each Entity. This approach enables me to search for each Entity independently and also resolves the performance issue in solution 1. However, using this approach I cannot enforce the invariant I mentioned earlier. There is also another invariant that states a Plan can be changed only if it is of a certain status. So, I shouldn't be able to add any PlannedRoles or PlannedTrainings to a Plan that is not in that status. Again, I can't enforce this invariant with the second approach. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Mosh

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• fast similarity detection

  - by reinierpost

  I have a large collection of objects and I need to figure out the similarities between them. To be exact: given two objects I can compute their dissimilarity as a number, a metric - higher values mean less similarity and 0 means the objects have identical contents. The cost of computing this number is proportional to the size of the smaller object (each object has a given size). I need the ability to quickly find, given an object, the set of objects similar to it. To be exact: I need to produce a data structure that maps any object o to the set of objects no more dissimilar to o than d, for some dissimilarity value d, such that listing the objects in the set takes no more time than if they were in an array or linked list (and perhaps they actually are). Typically, the set will be very much smaller than the total number of objects, so it is really worthwhile to perform this computation. It's good enough if the data structure assumes a fixed d, but if it works for an arbitrary d, even better. Have you seen this problem before, or something similar to it? What is a good solution? To be exact: a straightforward solution involves computing the dissimilarities between all pairs of objects, but this is slow - O(n2) where n is the number of objects. Is there a general solution with lower complexity?

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• Stack and Hash joint

  - by Alexandru

  I'm trying to write a data structure which is a combination of Stack and HashSet with fast push/pop/membership (I'm looking for constant time operations). Think of Python's OrderedDict. I tried a few things and I came up with the following code: HashInt and SetInt. I need to add some documentation to the source, but basically I use a hash with linear probing to store indices in a vector of the keys. Since linear probing always puts the last element at the end of a continuous range of already filled cells, pop() can be implemented very easy without a sophisticated remove operation. I have the following problems: the data structure consumes a lot of memory (some improvement is obvious: stackKeys is larger than needed). some operations are slower than if I have used fastutil (eg: pop(), even push() in some scenarios). I tried rewriting the classes using fastutil and trove4j, but the overall speed of my application halved. What performance improvements would you suggest for my code? What open-source library/code do you know that I can try?

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• Best pattern for storing (product) attributes in SQL Server

  - by EdH

  We are starting a new project where we need to store product and many product attributes in a database. The technology stack is MS SQL 2008 and Entity Framework 4.0 / LINQ for data access. The products (and Products Table) are pretty straightforward (a SKU, manufacturer, price, etc..). However there are also many attributes to store with each product (think industrial widgets). These may range from color to certification(s) to pipe size. Every product may have different attributes, and some may have multiples of the same attribute (Ex: Certifications). The current proposal is that we will basically have a name/value pair table with a FK back to the product ID in each row. An example of the attributes Table may look like this: ProdID AttributeName AttributeValue 123 Color Blue 123 FittingSize 1.25 123 Certification AS1111 123 Certification EE2212 123 Certification FM.3 456 Pipe 11 678 Color Red 999 Certification AE1111 ... Note: Attribute name would likely come from a lookup table or enum. So the main question here is: Is this the best pattern for doing something like this? How will the performance be? Queries will be based on a JOIN of the product and attributes table, and generally need many WHEREs to filter on specific attributes - the most common search will be to find a product based on a set of known/desired attributes. If anyone has any suggestions or a better pattern for this type of data, please let me know. Thanks! -Ed

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• Algorithm to match list of regular expressions

  - by DSII

  I have two algorithmic questions for a project I am working on. I have thought about these, and have some suspicions, but I would love to hear the community's input as well. Suppose I have a string, and a list of N regular expressions (actually they are wildcard patterns representing a subset of full regex functionality). I want to know whether the string matches at least one of the regular expressions in the list. Is there a data structure that can allow me to match the string against the list of regular expressions in sublinear (presumably logarithmic) time? This is an extension of the previous problem. Suppose I have the same situation: a string and a list of N regular expressions, only now each of the regular expressions is paired with an offset within the string at which the match must begin (or, if you prefer, each of the regular expressions must match a substring of the given string beginning at the given offset). To give an example, suppose I had the string: This is a test string and the regex patterns and offsets: (a) his.* at offset 0 (b) his.* at offset 1 The algorithm should return true. Although regex (a) does not match the string beginning at offset 0, regex (b) does match the substring beginning at offset 1 ("his is a test string"). Is there a data structure that can allow me to solve this problem in sublinear time? One possibly useful piece of information is that often, many of the offsets in the list of regular expressions are the same (i.e. often we are matching the substring at offset X many times). This may be useful to leverage the solution to problem #1 above. Thank you very much in advance for any suggestions you may have!

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• Can the Diamond Problem be really solved?

  - by Mecki

  A typical problem in OO programming is the diamond problem. I have parent class A with two sub-classes B and C. A has an abstract method, B and C implement it. Now I have a sub-class D, that inherits of B and C. The diamond problem is now, what implementation shall D use, the one of B or the one of C? People claim Java knows no diamond problem. I can only have multiple inheritance with interfaces and since they have no implementation, I have no diamond problem. Is this really true? I don't think so. See below: [removed vehicle example] Is a diamond problem always the cause of bad class design and something neither programmer nor compiler needs to solve, because it shouldn't exist in the first place? Update: Maybe my example was poorly chosen. See this image Of course you can make Person virtual in C++ and thus you will only have one instance of person in memory, but the real problem persists IMHO. How would you implement getDepartment() for GradTeachingFellow? Consider, he might be student in one department and teach in another one. So you can either return one department or the other one; there is no perfect solution to the problem and the fact that no implementation might be inherited (e.g. Student and Teacher could both be interfaces) doesn't seem to solve the problem to me.

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• Flexible Decorator Pattern?

  - by Omar Kooheji

  I was looking for a pattern to model something I'm thinking of doing in a personal project and I was wondering if a modified version of the decorator patter would work. Basicly I'm thinking of creating a game where the characters attributes are modified by what items they have equiped. The way that the decorator stacks it's modifications is perfect for this, however I've never seen a decorator that allows you to drop intermediate decorators, which is what would happen when items are unequiped. Does anyone have experience using the decorator pattern in this way? Or am I barking up the wrong tree? Clarification To explain "Intermediate decorators" if for example my base class is coffe which is decorated with milk which is decorated with sugar (using the example in Head first design patterns) milk would be an intermediate decorator as it decorates the base coffee, and is decorated by the sugar. Yet More Clarification :) The idea is that items change stats, I'd agree that I am shoehorning the decorator into this. I'll look into the state bag. essentially I want a single point of call for the statistics and for them to go up/down when items are equiped/unequiped. I could just apply the modifiers to the characters stats on equiping and roll them back when unequiping. Or whenever a stat is asked for iterate through all the items and calculate the stat. I'm just looking for feedback here, I'm aware that I might be using a chainsaw where scissors would be more appropriate...

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• Database migration pattern for Java?

  - by Eno

  Im working on some database migration code in Java. Im also using a factory pattern so I can use different kinds of databases. And each kind of database im using implements a common interface. What I would like to do is have a migration check that is internal to the class and runs some database schema update code automatically. The actual update is pretty straight forward (I check schema version in a table and compare against a constant in my app to decide whether to migrate or not and between which versions of schema). To make this automatic I was thinking the test should live inside (or be called from) the constructor. OK, fair enough, that's simple enough. My problem is that I dont want the test to run every single time I instantiate a database object (it runs a query so having it run on every construction is not efficient). So maybe this should be a class static method? I guess my question is, what is a good design pattern for this type of problem? There ought to be a clean way to ensure the migration test runs only once OR is super-efficient.

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• How can I place validating constraints on my method input parameters?

  - by rcampbell

  Here is the typical way of accomplishing this goal: public void myContractualMethod(final String x, final Set<String> y) { if ((x == null) || (x.isEmpty())) { throw new IllegalArgumentException("x cannot be null or empty"); } if (y == null) { throw new IllegalArgumentException("y cannot be null"); } // Now I can actually start writing purposeful // code to accomplish the goal of this method I think this solution is ugly. Your methods quickly fill up with boilerplate code checking the valid input parameters contract, obscuring the heart of the method. Here's what I'd like to have: public void myContractualMethod(@NotNull @NotEmpty final String x, @NotNull final Set<String> y) { // Now I have a clean method body that isn't obscured by // contract checking If those annotations look like JSR 303/Bean Validation Spec, it's because I borrowed them. Unfortunitely they don't seem to work this way; they are intended for annotating instance variables, then running the object through a validator. Which of the many Java design-by-contract frameworks provide the closest functionality to my "like to have" example? The exceptions that get thrown should be runtime exceptions (like IllegalArgumentExceptions) so encapsulation isn't broken.

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• Explaining the need to avoid horizontal scroll

  - by Bradley Herman

  I need help explaining to my boss why her design is poor on a client's website. She has no knowledge of the web, and it can be difficult as a web developer working with a woman who is a graphic designer (not even a web designer really). On a current site she has designed, an image bar "needs" to be ~1200px according to her, though it isn't necessary with the content. A quick sketch to illustrate what's going on: As you see, the banner spills out past the 960px of the content and as wide as 1200px. This creates a horizontal scroll when all the content is viewable within the 960px wide viewport. I need to make this an <img and not a CSS background because it's a jQuery slideshow that fades from image to image. I think this is a big problem because a lot of people are going to get a horizontal scroll bar imposed in their browser when they're still able to see all the relevant content. She thinks no one will notice and it'll be fine; I think it's very bad practice and confusing to the end user. How do I explain the problem to her?

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• Users in database server or database tables

  - by Batcat

  Hi all, I came across an interesting issue about client server application design. We have this browser based management application where it has many users using the system. So obvisously within that application we have an user management module within it. I have always thought having an user table in the database to keep all the login details was good enough. However, a senior developer said user management should be done in the database server layer if not then is poorly designed. What he meant was, if a user wants to use the application then a user should be created in the user table AND in the database server as a user account as well. So if I have 50 users using my applications, then I should have 50 database server user logins. I personally think having just one user account in the database server for this database was enough. Just grant this user with the allowed privileges to operate all the necessary operation need by the application. The users that are interacting with the application should have their user accounts created and managed within the database table as they are more related to the application layer. I don't see and agree there is need to create a database server user account for every user created for the application in the user table. A single database server user should be enough to handle all the query sent by the application. Really hope to hear some suggestions / opinions and whether I'm missing something? performance or security issues? Thank you very much.

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• Explaining to boss why we need to avoid horizontal scroll

  - by Bradley Herman

  I need help explaining to my boss why her design is poor on a clients website. She has no knowledge of web and it can be difficult as a web developer working with a woman who is a graphic designer (not even a web designer really). On a current site she has designed, an image bar "needs" to be like 1200px according to her, though it isn't necessary with the content. I'll show a quick sketch to illustrate what's going on: http://imgur.com/MNGOT.jpg As you see, the banner spills out past the 960px of the content and as wide as 1200px. This creates a horizontal scroll when all the content is viewable within the 960px wide viewport. I need to make this an img and not a css background because it's a jquery slideshow that fades from image to image. I think this is a big problem because a lot of people are going to get a horizontal scroll bar imposed in their browser when they're still able to see all the relevant content. How do I help her explain it. She thinks no one will notice and it'll be fine, I think it's very bad practice and confusing to the end user. Any help?

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• Add multiple entities to Javascript namespace from different files

  - by Brian M. Hunt

  Given a namespaces ns used in two different files: abc.js ns = ns || (function () { foo = function() { ... }; return { abc : foo }; }()); def.js // is this correct? ns = ns || {} ns.def = ns.def || (function () { defoo = function () { ... }; return { deFoo: defoo }; }()); Is this the proper way to add def to the ns to a namespace? In other words, how does one merge two contributions to a namespace in javascript? If abc.js comes before def.js I'd expect this to work. If def.js comes before abc.js I'd expect ns.abc to not exist because ns is defined at the time. It seems there ought to be a design pattern to eliminate any uncertainty of doing inclusions with the javascript namespace pattern. I'd appreciate thoughts and input on how best to go about this sort of 'inclusion'. Thanks for reading. Brian

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• Naming convention for non-virtual and abstract methods

  - by eagle

  I frequently find myself creating classes which use this form (A): abstract class Animal { public void Walk() { // TODO: do something before walking // custom logic implemented by each subclass WalkInternal(); // TODO: do something after walking } protected abstract void WalkInternal(); } class Dog : Animal { protected override void WalkInternal() { // TODO: walk with 4 legs } } class Bird : Animal { protected override void WalkInternal() { // TODO: walk with 2 legs } } Rather than this form (B): abstract class Animal { public abstract void Walk(); } class Dog : Animal { public override void Walk() { // TODO: do something before walking // custom logic implemented by each subclass // TODO: walk with 4 legs // TODO: do something after walking } } class Bird : Animal { public override void Walk() { // TODO: do something before walking // custom logic implemented by each subclass // TODO: walk with 2 legs // TODO: do something after walking } } As you can see, the nice thing about form A is that every time you implement a subclass, you don't need to remember to include the initialization and finalization logic. This is much less error prone than form B. What's a standard convention for naming these methods? I like naming the public method Walk since then I can call Dog.Walk() which looks better than something like Dog.WalkExternal(). However, I don't like my solution of adding the suffix "Internal" for the protected method. I'm looking for a more standardized name. Btw, is there a name for this design pattern?

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• How to record different authentication types (username / password vs token based) in audit log

  - by RM

  I have two types of users for my system, normal human users with a username / password, and delegation authorized accounts through OAuth (i.e. using a token identifier). The information that is stored for each is quite different, and are managed by different subsytems. They do however interact with the same tables / data within the system, so I need to maintain the audit trail regardless of whether human user, or token-based user modified the data. My solution at the moment is to have a table called something like AuditableIdentity, and then have the two types inheriting off that table (either in the single table, or as two seperate tables with 1 to 1 PK with AuditableIdentity. All operations would use the common AuditableIdentity PK for CreatedBy, ModifiedBy etc columns. There isn't any FK constraint on the audit columns, so any text can go in there, but I want an easy way to easily determine whether it was a human or system that made the change, and joining to the one AuditableIdentity table seems like a clean way to do that? Is there a best practice for this scenario? Is this an appropriate way of approaching the problem - or would you not bother with the common table and just rely on joins (to the two seperate un-related user / token tables) later to determine which user type matches which audit records?

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• SQL Concurrent test update question

  - by ptoinson

  Howdy Folks, I have a SQLServer 2008 database in which I have a table for Tags. A tag is just an id and a name. The definition of the tags table looks like: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Tag]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [Name] [varchar](255) NOT NULL CONSTRAINT [PK_Tag] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ( [ID] ASC )WITH (PAD_INDEX = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS = ON) ) Name is also a unique index. further I have several processes adding data to this table at a pretty rapid rate. These processes use a stored proc that looks like: ALTER PROC [dbo].[lg_Tag_Insert] @Name varchar(255) AS DECLARE @ID int SET @ID = (select ID from Tag where Name=@Name ) if @ID is null begin INSERT Tag(Name) VALUES (@Name) RETURN SCOPE_IDENTITY() end else begin return @ID end My issues is that, other than being a novice at concurrent database design, there seems to be a race condition that is causing me to occasionally get an error that I'm trying to enter duplicate keys (Name) into the DB. The error is: Cannot insert duplicate key row in object 'dbo.Tag' with unique index 'IX_Tag_Name'. This makes sense, I'm just not sure how to fix this. If it where code I would know how to lock the right areas. SQLServer is quite a different beast. First question is what is the proper way to code this 'check, then update pattern'? It seems I need to get an exclusive lock on the row during the check, rather than a shared lock, but it's not clear to me the best way to do that. Any help in the right direction will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• Proper Usage of SqlConnection in .NET

  - by Jojo

  Hi guys, I just want an opinion on the proper usage or a proper design with regards to using SqlConnection object. Which of the 2 below is the best use: A data provider class whose methods (each of them) contain SqlConnection object (and disposed when done). Like: IList<Employee> GetAllEmployees() { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(this.connectionString)) { // Code goes here... } } Employee GetEmployee(int id) { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(this.connectionString)) { // Code goes here... } } or SqlConnection connection; // initialized in constructor IList<Employee> GetAllEmployees() { this.TryOpenConnection(); // tries to open member SqlConnection instance // Code goes here... this.CloseConnection(); // return } Employee GetEmployee(int id) { this.TryOpenConnection(); // tries to open member SqlConnection instance // Code goes here... this.CloseConnection(); // return } Or is there a better approach than this? I have a focused web crawler type of application and this application will crawl 50 or more websites simultaneously (multithreaded) with each website contained in a crawler object and each crawler object has an instance of a data provider class (above). Please advise. Thanks.

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• Horizontally align rows in multiple tables using web user control

  - by goku_da_master

  I need to align rows in different tables that are layed out horizontally. I'd prefer to put the html code in a single web user control so I can create as many instances of that control as I want and lay them out horizontally. The problem is, the text in the rows needs to wrap. So some rows may expand vertically and some may not (see the example below). When that happens, the rows in the other tables aren't aligned horizontally. I know I can accomplish all this by using a single table, but that would mean I'd have to duplicate the name, address and phone html code instead of dynamically creating new instances of my user control (in reality there are many more fields than this, but I'm keeping it simple). Is there any way to do this whether with div's, tables or something else? Here's the problem: Mary Jane's address field expands 2 lines, causing her phone field to not align properly with John's and Bob's. Name: John Doe Name: Mary Jane Name: Bob Smith Address: 123 broadway Address: Some really long address Address: Short address Phone: 123-456 that takes up multiple lines Phone: 111-2222 Phone: 456-789 I'm not restricted in any way how to do this (other than using asp.net), but I'd prefer to use a single web control that I instantiate X times at design time (in this example, it's 3 times). I'm using VS2008, and .Net 3.5

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• How can we best represent the SDLC process as a board game?

  - by Innogetics

  I recently got interested in financial board games and saw how they can be very useful in educating children about certain concepts. It got me thinking whether it was also possible to represent certain aspects of executing a software project via a boardgame and make it fun. Here are a few things that I have come up so far: human resources and tools / techniques are represented as cards. requirements are also represented as cards, which are dealt equally to each player, and the objective is to move all requirement cards through an "SDLC" board (one per player) that represent a series of squares grouped according to phases (design all the way to deployment) the passage of time is represented in a main square board like monopoly, and completing a trip around the board (passing "Go") allows the player to move each of the requirement cards a number of steps through the SDLC board depending on the capability of the resource cards (senior programmer allows one requirement to move two squares in the dev phase, junior programmer only one, etc.) players will start with play money representing the project budget, and at every pass at "Go" is payday. the player is out of the game if he runs out of funds. the main board also has "chance" / "risk" cards, which represent things that can mess up a project. damage is applied at the roll of a die, and chance modifiers depend on whether the user has "bought" tools / techniques. I haven't implemented this idea yet as I'm still looking at more play elements that can make the game more engaging, as well as soliciting for more ideas. I am planning to release this under Creative Commons license but haven't decided on the exact license yet. Any more game play suggestions are welcome. UPDATE: This was posted in BoardGameGeek and there's now an active discussion thread there. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/4436694

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• Java library class to handle scheduled execution of "callbacks"?

  - by Hanno Fietz

  My program has a component - dubbed the Scheduler - that lets other components register points in time at which they want to be called back. This should work much like the Unix cron service, i. e. you tell the Scheduler "notify me at ten minutes past every full hour". I realize there are no real callbacks in Java. Here's my approach, is there a library which already does this stuff? Feel free to suggest improvements, too. Register call to Scheduler passes: a time specification containing hour, minute, second, year month, dom, dow, where each item may be unspecified, meaning "execute it every hour / minute etc." (just like crontabs) an object containing data that will tell the calling object what to do when it is notified by the Scheduler. The Scheduler does not process this data, just stores it and passes it back upon notification. a reference to the calling object Upon startup, or after a new registration request, the Scheduler starts with a Calendar object of the current system time and checks if there are any entries in the database that match this point in time. If there are, they are executed and the process starts over. If there aren't, the time in the Calendar object is incremented by one second and the entreis are rechecked. This repeats until there is one entry or more that match(es). (Discrete Event Simulation) The Scheduler will then remember that timestamp, sleep and wake every second to check if it is already there. If it happens to wake up and the time has already passed, it starts over, likewise if the time has come and the jobs have been executed. Edit: Thanks for pointing me to Quartz. I'm looking for something much smaller, however.

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• Natural vs surrogate keys on support tables

  - by Bugeo

  I have read many articles about the battle between natural versus surrogate primary keys. I agree in the use of surrogate keys to identify records of tables whose contents are created by the user. But in the case of supporting tables what should I use? For example, in a hypothetical table "orderStates". If you use a natural key would have the following data: TABLE ORDERSTATES {ID: "NEW", NAME: "New"} {ID: "MANAGEMENT" NAME: "Management"} {ID: "SHIPPED" NAME: "Shipped"} If I use a surrogate key would have the following data: TABLE ORDERSTATES {ID: 1 CODE: "NEW", NAME: "New"} {ID: 2 CODE: "MANAGEMENT" NAME: "Management"} {ID: 3 CODE: "SHIPPED" NAME: "Shipped"} Now let's take an example: a user enters a new order. In the case in which use natural keys, in the code I can write this: newOrder.StateOrderId = "NEW"; With the surrogate keys instead every time I have an additional step. stateOrderId_NEW = .... I retrieve the id corresponding to the recod code "NEW" newOrder.StateOrderId = stateOrderId_NEW; The same will happen every time I have to move the order in a new status. So, in this case, what are the reason to chose one key type vs the other one?

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