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• Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

  - by dapostolov

  So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face;  he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1   Best Regards D.

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• Phones, Nokia, Microsoft and More

  - by Bill Evjen

  The phone revolution that is under way at the moment is insanely interesting and continuously full of buzz about directions, failures, and promises. The movement started with Apple completely reinventing what a smart phone was all about and now we have the followers. Though – don’t dismiss the followers, they are usually the ones that come out with the leap frog products when most of the world is thinking about jumping on. Remember the often used analogy – the USA invented the TV – but it was Japan that took it to the next level and now all TVs are from somewhere else other than the USA. Really there are two camps for the phones – the Cool Kids and other kids that no one wants to hang out with anymore. When it comes to cool – for some reason, the phone is an important part of that factor. Everyone wants to show their phone and its configuration (apps installed, etc) to their friends as a sign of (1) “I have money” and (2) I have smarts/tastes/style/etc when it comes to my applications that are on my phone. For those that don’t know – the Cool Kids include: Apple – this is quite obvious as everything Apple produces is in the cool camp. Just having an Apple product on your person means you can dance. Google – this is one of the more interesting releases as they have created something called Android (which in it’s own right is a major brand in itself). Microsoft – you might be saying “Really, Microsoft is cool?”. I would argue that they are indeed cool as it is now associated with XBOX 360, Kinect, and Windows 7. Gone are the days of Bob and that silly paperclip. Well – that’s it. There is nobody else I would stick in that camp. The other kids that weren’t picked for that dodgeball team include: Nokia Motorola Palm Blackberry and many many more The sad part of all this is that no matter what this second camp does now, it won’t be able to get out of this bucket easily. They will always be associated as yesterday’s technology and that association will drive the sales of the phone purchasers of the world. For those in that group, the only possible way out is to get invited to the cool club by one of the cool club members in the hope that their coolness somehow rubs off. To me, this is the move that Nokia is making. They are at this point where they have realized that they don’t have the full scope of the required end to end solution to make this all work. They have the plants to build the phones and the reach of the retailers that sell what they have. What they are missing is the proper operating system for the new world of multi-touch form factor phones. Even the companies that come up with some sort of new operating system for this type of new device, they are still associated with the yesterday and lack the developer community behind them to be the real wave of adoption that this market needs. Think about that – this is a major different between Nokia/Blackberry when you compare it to the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. These three powerhouses having a very large and strong development community that will eagerly take on new initiatives using the skillsets that they have already cultivated over the years of already working with the company. This then results in a plethora of applications that are then placed on an app store of some kind. The developer gets a cut and then Apple/Google/Microsoft then get their cut. It is definitely a win-win. None of the other phone companies and wannabies can provide the same results. What Microsoft was missing was the major phone manufactures coming on board to create and push forward with the phones that are required to start the wave. This is where Nokia can come in and help Microsoft. They have the ability to promote the Windows Phone operating system on a new wave of phones. This does mean that Nokia will sell phones, but they lose out on the application store that they might have been thinking about making some money on as well as controlling the end to end solution. What is interesting is in questioning to oneself if Microsoft will purchase Nokia. It really depends upon how they want to compete and with whom Microsoft views as the major competitor. For instance, they can purchase Nokia and have their own hardware company and distribution network for phones – thereby taking on a model that is quite similar to Apple. On the other hand, they could just leave it up to the phone hardware companies such as Nokia and others to build and promote phones in a model that is similar to Google. Both ways have pluses and minuses. If they own the phone manufacturer, they really can put some thought into the design and technical specifications of the phone that is really designed to exactly how they want it. Microsoft has shown that they have this ability – especially with the XBOX initiative they have done over the years. Think about how good and powerful they have moved forward with XBOX – and I am not talking about just copying what others are doing, but coming up with leapfrog products that are steps ahead of everyone else. Though, if they didn’t do it themselves, they could then leave it up to the phone manufacturers to drive each other to build better and better phones that run the Microsoft OS – competition drives better products. We have seen this with the Android line of phones that are out there on the market. I have read a lot about Nokia investors really upset about the new Microsoft relationship – but really, this is a great thing. I for one am a fan of this relationship (I am also a Nokia stock holder btw). This will mean better days for Nokia.

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• UppercuT v1.0 and 1.1&ndash;Linux (Mono), Multi-targeting, SemVer, Nitriq and Obfuscation, oh my!

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on Linux using Mono! This is thanks mostly to Svein Ackenhausen for the patches and working with me on getting it all working while not breaking the windows builds!  This means you can use mono on Windows or Linux. Notice the shell files to execute with Linux that come as part of UC now. Multi-Targeting Perhaps one of the hardest things to do that requires an automated build is multi-targeting. At v1 this is early, and possibly prone to some issues, but available.  We believe in making everything stupid simple, so it’s as simple as adding a comma to the microsoft.framework property. i.e. “net-3.5, net-4.0” to suddenly produce both framework builds. When you build, this is what you get (if you meet each framework’s requirements): At this time you have to let UC override the build location (as it does by default) or this will not work.  Semantic Versioning By now many of you have been using UppercuT for awhile and have watched how we have done versioning. Many of you who use git already know we put the revision hash in the informational/product version as the last octet. At v1, UppercuT has adopted the semantic versioning scheme. What does that mean? This is a short read, but a good one: http://SemVer.org SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is really using versioning what it was meant for. You have three octets. Major.Minor.Patch as in 1.1.0.  UC will use three different versioning concepts, one for the assembly version, one for the file version, and one for the product version. All versions - The first three octects of the version are owned by SemVer. Major.Minor.Patch i.e.: 1.1.0 Assembly Version - The assembly version would much closer follow SemVer. Last digit is always 0. Major.Minor.Patch.0 i.e: 1.1.0.0 File Version - The file version occupies the build number as the last digit. Major.Minor.Patch.Build i.e.: 1.1.0.2650 Product/Informational Version - The last octect of your product/informational version is the source control revision/hash. Major.Minor.Patch.RevisionOrHash i.e. (TFS/SVN): 1.1.0.235 i.e. (Git/HG): 1.1.0.a45ace4346adef0 SemVer is not on by default, the passive versioning scheme is still in effect. Notice that version.use_semanticversioning has been added to the UppercuT.config file (and version.patch in support of the third octet): Gems Support Gems support was added at v1. This will probably be deprecated as some point once there is an announced sunset for Nu v1. Application gems may keep it around since there is no alternative for that yet though (CoApp would be a possible replacement). Nitriq Support Nitriq is a code analysis tool like NDepend. It’s built by Mr. Jon von Gillern. It uses LINQ query language, so you can use a familiar idiom when analyzing your code base. It’s a pretty awesome tool that has a free version for those looking to do code analysis! To use Nitriq with UC, you are going to need the console edition.  To take advantage of Nitriq, you just need to update the location of Nitriq in the config: Then add the nitriq project files at the root of your source. Please refer to the Nitriq documentation on how these are created. UppercuT v1.1 Obfuscation One thing I started looking into was an easy way to obfuscate my code. I came across EazFuscator, which is both free and awesome. Plus the GUI for it is super simple to use. How do you make obfuscation even easier? Make it a convention and a configurable property in the UC config file! And the code gets obfuscated! Closing Definitely get out and look at the new release. It contains lots of chocolaty (sp?) goodness. And remember, the upgrade path is almost as simple as drag and drop!

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• SQL ADO.NET shortcut extensions (old school!)

  - by Jeff

  As much as I love me some ORM's (I've used LINQ to SQL quite a bit, and for the MSDN/TechNet Profile and Forums we're using NHibernate more and more), there are times when it's appropriate, and in some ways more simple, to just throw up so old school ADO.NET connections, commands, readers and such. It still feels like a pain though to new up all the stuff, make sure it's closed, blah blah blah. It's pretty much the least favorite task of writing data access code. To minimize the pain, I have a set of extension methods that I like to use that drastically reduce the code you have to write. Here they are... public static void Using(this SqlConnection connection, Action<SqlConnection> action) {     connection.Open();     action(connection);     connection.Close(); } public static SqlCommand Command(this SqlConnection connection, string sql){    var command = new SqlCommand(sql, connection);    return command;}public static SqlCommand AddParameter(this SqlCommand command, string parameterName, object value){    command.Parameters.AddWithValue(parameterName, value);    return command;}public static object ExecuteAndReturnIdentity(this SqlCommand command){    if (command.Connection == null)        throw new Exception("SqlCommand has no connection.");    command.ExecuteNonQuery();    command.Parameters.Clear();    command.CommandText = "SELECT @@IDENTITY";    var result = command.ExecuteScalar();    return result;}public static SqlDataReader ReadOne(this SqlDataReader reader, Action<SqlDataReader> action){    if (reader.Read())        action(reader);    reader.Close();    return reader;}public static SqlDataReader ReadAll(this SqlDataReader reader, Action<SqlDataReader> action){    while (reader.Read())        action(reader);    reader.Close();    return reader;} It has been awhile since I've really revisited these, so you will likely find opportunity for further optimization. The bottom line here is that you can chain together a bunch of these methods to make a much more concise database call, in terms of the code on your screen, anyway. Here are some examples: public Dictionary<string, string> Get(){    var dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();    _sqlHelper.GetConnection().Using(connection =>        connection.Command("SELECT Setting, [Value] FROM Settings")            .ExecuteReader()            .ReadAll(r => dictionary.Add(r.GetString(0), r.GetString(1))));    return dictionary;} or... public void ChangeName(User user, string newName){    _sqlHelper.GetConnection().Using(connection =>         connection.Command("UPDATE Users SET Name = @Name WHERE UserID = @UserID")            .AddParameter("@Name", newName)            .AddParameter("@UserID", user.UserID)            .ExecuteNonQuery());} The _sqlHelper.GetConnection() is just some other code that gets a connection object for you. You might have an even cleaner way to take that step out entirely. This looks more fluent, and the real magic sauce for me is the reader bits where you can put any kind of arbitrary method in there to iterate over the results.

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• How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

  - by alexrussell

  Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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• Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

  - by user739873

  The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally.  I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models."  This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list.  In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut.  Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities.  Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale."   2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task.  We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes.  In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success.  Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on.  We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise.  Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations.  It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education.  In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above.  Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in.  The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Getting Caller Information

  - by James Michael Hare

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2013/07/25/c.net-little-wonders-getting-caller-information.aspx Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. There are times when it is desirable to know who called the method or property you are currently executing.  Some applications of this could include logging libraries, or possibly even something more advanced that may server up different objects depending on who called the method. In the past, we mostly relied on the System.Diagnostics namespace and its classes such as StackTrace and StackFrame to see who our caller was, but now in C# 5, we can also get much of this data at compile-time. Determining the caller using the stack One of the ways of doing this is to examine the call stack.  The classes that allow you to examine the call stack have been around for a long time and can give you a very deep view of the calling chain all the way back to the beginning for the thread that has called you. You can get caller information by either instantiating the StackTrace class (which will give you the complete stack trace, much like you see when an exception is generated), or by using StackFrame which gets a single frame of the stack trace.  Both involve examining the call stack, which is a non-trivial task, so care should be done not to do this in a performance-intensive situation. For our simple example let's say we are going to recreate the wheel and construct our own logging framework.  Perhaps we wish to create a simple method Log which will log the string-ified form of an object and some information about the caller.  We could easily do this as follows: 1: static void Log(object message) 2: { 3: // frame 1, true for source info 4: StackFrame frame = new StackFrame(1, true); 5: var method = frame.GetMethod(); 6: var fileName = frame.GetFileName(); 7: var lineNumber = frame.GetFileLineNumber(); 8: 9: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 10: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 11: fileName, lineNumber, method.Name, message); 12: } So, what we are doing here is grabbing the 2nd stack frame (the 1st is our current method) using a 2nd argument of true to specify we want source information (if available) and then taking the information from the frame.  This works fine, and if we tested it out by calling from a file such as this: 1: // File c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs 2:  3: public class CallerInfo 4: { 5: Log("Hello Logger!"); 6: } We'd see this: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! This works well, and in fact CallStack and StackFrame are still the best ways to examine deeper into the call stack.  But if you only want to get information on the caller of your method, there is another option… Determining the caller at compile-time In C# 5 (.NET 4.5) they added some attributes that can be supplied to optional parameters on a method to receive caller information.  These attributes can only be applied to methods with optional parameters with explicit defaults.  Then, as the compiler determines who is calling your method with these attributes, it will fill in the values at compile-time. These are the currently supported attributes available in the  System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespace": CallerFilePathAttribute – The path and name of the file that is calling your method. CallerLineNumberAttribute – The line number in the file where your method is being called. CallerMemberName – The member that is calling your method. So let’s take a look at how our Log method would look using these attributes instead: 1: static int Log(object message, 2: [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", 3: [CallerFilePath] string fileName = "", 4: [CallerLineNumber] int lineNumber = 0) 5: { 6: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 7: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 8: fileName, lineNumber, memberName, message); 9: } Again, calling this from our sample Main would give us the same result: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! However, though this seems the same, there are a few key differences. First of all, there are only 3 supported attributes (at this time) that give you the file path, line number, and calling member.  Thus, it does not give you as rich of detail as a StackFrame (which can give you the calling type as well and deeper frames, for example).  Also, these are supported through optional parameters, which means we could call our new Log method like this: 1: // They're defaults, why not fill 'em in 2: Log("My message.", "Some member", "Some file", -13); In addition, since these attributes require optional parameters, they cannot be used in properties, only in methods. These caveats aside, they do let you get similar information inside of methods at a much greater speed!  How much greater?  Well lets crank through 1,000,000 iterations of each.  instead of logging to console, I’ll return the formatted string length of each.  Doing this, we get: 1: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with StackTrace: 5096 ms 2: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with Attributes: 196 ms So you see, using the attributes is much, much faster!  Nearly 25x faster in fact.  Summary There are a few ways to get caller information for a method.  The StackFrame allows you to get a comprehensive set of information spanning the whole call stack, but at a heavier cost.  On the other hand, the attributes allow you to quickly get at caller information baked in at compile-time, but to do so you need to create optional parameters in your methods to support it. Technorati Tags: Little Wonders,CSharp,C#,.NET,StackFrame,CallStack,CallerFilePathAttribute,CallerLineNumberAttribute,CallerMemberName

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• Best Practices Generating WebService Proxies for Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM)

  - by asantaga

  I've recently been building a REST Service wrapper for Oracle Sales Cloud and initially all was going well, however as soon as I added all of my Web Service proxies I started to get weird errors..  My project structure looks like this What I found out was if I only had the InteractionsService & OpportunityService WebService Proxies then all worked ok, but as soon as I added the LocationsService Proxy, I would start to see strange JAXB errors. Example of the error message Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.ws.WebServiceException: Unable to create JAXBContextat com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.createJAXBContext(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:164)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.AbstractSEIModelImpl.postProcess(AbstractSEIModelImpl.java:94)at com.sun.xml.ws.model.RuntimeModeler.buildRuntimeModel(RuntimeModeler.java:281)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WSServiceDelegate.java:762)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.buildRuntimeModel(WLSProvider.java:982)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.createSEIPortInfo(WSServiceDelegate.java:746)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.addSEI(WSServiceDelegate.java:737)at com.sun.xml.ws.client.WSServiceDelegate.getPort(WSServiceDelegate.java:361)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate.internalGetPort(WLSProvider.java:934)at weblogic.wsee.jaxws.spi.WLSProvider$ServiceDelegate$PortClientInstanceFactory.createClientInstance(WLSProvider.java:1039)...... Looking further down I see the error message is related to JAXB not being able to find an objectFactory for one of its types Caused by: java.security.PrivilegedActionException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.IllegalAnnotationsException: 6 counts of IllegalAnnotationExceptionsThere's no ObjectFactory with an @XmlElementDecl for the element {http://xmlns.oracle.com/apps/crmCommon/activities/activitiesService/}AssigneeRsrcOrgIdthis problem is related to the following location:at protected javax.xml.bind.JAXBElement com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee.assigneeRsrcOrgId at com.oracle.xmlns.apps.crmcommon.activities.activitiesservice.ActivityAssignee This is very strange... My first thoughts are that when I generated the WebService Proxy I entered the package name as "oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.servicename" and left the generated types as blank. This way all the generated types get put into the same package hierarchy and when deployed they get merged... Sounds resaonable and appears to work but not in this case..  To resolve this I regenerate the proxy but this time setting : Package name : To the name of my package eg. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.interactionsRoot Package for Generated Types :  Package where the types will be generated to, e.g. oracle.demo.pts.fusionproxy.SalesParty.types When I ran the application now, it all works , awesome eh???? Alas no, there is a serious side effect. The problem now is that to help coding I've created a collection of helper classes , these helper classes take parameters which use some of the "generic" datatypes, like FindCriteria. e.g. This wont work any more public static FindCriteria createCustomFindCriteria(FindCriteria pFc,String pAttributes) Here lies a gremlin of a problem.. I cant use this method anymore, this is because the FindCriteria datatype is now being defined two, or more times, in the generated code for my project. If you leave the Root Package for types blank it will get generated to com.oracle.xmlns, and if you populate it then it gets generated to your custom package.. The two datatypes look the same, sound the same (and if this were a duck would sound the same), but THEY ARE NOT THE SAME... Speaking to development, they recommend you should not be entering anything in the Root Packages section, so the mystery thickens why does it work.. Well after spending sometime with some colleagues of mine in development we've identified the issue.. Alas different parts of Oracle Fusion Development have multiple schemas with the same namespace, when the WebService generator generates its classes its not seeing the other schemas properly and not generating the Object Factories correctly...  Thankfully I've found a workaround Solution Overview When generating the proxies leave the Root Package for Generated Types BLANK When you have finished generating your proxies, use the JAXB tool XJC and generate Java classes for all datatypes  Create a project within your JDeveloper11g workspace and import the java classes into this project Final bit.. within the project dependencies ensure that the JAXB/XJC generated classes are "FIRST" in the classpath Solution Details Generate the WebServices SOAP proxies When generating the proxies your generation dialog should look like this Ensure the "unwrap" parameters is selected, if it isn't then that's ok, it simply means when issuing a "get" you need to extract out the Element Generate the JAXB Classes using XJC XJC provides a command line switch called -wsdl, this (although is experimental/beta) , accepts a HTTP WSDL and will generate the relevant classes. You can put these into a single batch/shell script xjc -wsdl https://fusionservername:443/appCmmnCompInteractions/InteractionService?wsdlxjc -wsdl https://fusionservername443/opptyMgmtOpportunities/OpportunityService?wsdl Create Project in JDeveloper to store the XJC "generated" JAXB classes Within the project folder create a filesystem folder called "src" and copy the generated files into this folder. JDeveloper11g should then see the classes and display them, if it doesnt try clicking the "refresh" button In your main project ensure that the JDeveloper XJC project is selected as a dependancy and IMPORTANT make sure it is at the top of the list. This ensures that the classes are at the front of the classpath And voilà.. Hopefully you wont see any JAXB generation errors and you can use common datatypes interchangeably in your project, (e.g. FindCriteria etc)

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• boot issues - long delay, then "gave up waiting for root device"

  - by chazomaticus

  I've had this issue on and off for about two years now. I noticed it on a new (custom built) machine running 10.04 when that first came out, but then it went away until a few months ago. I've gone through a number of hard drive changes but I can't say specifically what if anything I changed hardware-wise to make it stop or start happening. I had assumed upgrading to a modern Ubuntu version would fix the issue, so I installed 12.04 beta on a spare partition last night, but it's still happening. Here's the issue. After grub loads and I select a kernel to boot, the screen goes blank save for a blinking cursor. It sits in this state for many long minutes before it finally gives up and gives me an initramfs shell with the message gave up waiting for root device (and lists the /dev/disk/by-uuid/... path it was waiting for) but no other specific diagnostic information. Now, here's the tricky part. For one, the problem is intermittent - sometimes it progresses from the blinking cursor to the Ubuntu splash boot screen in a few seconds, and once it gets that far it always continues booting fine. The really bizarre thing is that I can "force" it to "find" the root device by repeatedly pressing the space bar and hitting the machine's power button. If I tap those enough, eventually I will notice the hard drive light coming on, at which point it will always continue the boot process after a few seconds. Interestingly, if I wait slightly too long before pressing the power button (30s?), as soon as I press it I get the gave up waiting message and the initramfs shell. I've tried setting up /etc/fstab (and the grub menu.lst or whatever it's called nowadays) to use device names (e.g. /dev/sda1) instead of UUIDs, but I get the same effect just with the device name, not UUID, in the error message. I should also mention that when I boot to Windows 7, there is no issue. It boots slowly all the time just by virtue of being Windows, but it never hangs indefinitely. This would seem to indicate it's a problem in Ubuntu, not the hardware. It's pretty annoying to have to babysit the computer every time it boots. Any ideas? I'm at a loss. Not even sure how to diagnose the issue. Thanks! EDIT: Here's some dmesg output from 10.04. The 15 second gap is where it was doing nothing. I pressed the power button and space bar a few times, and the stuff at 16 seconds happened. Not sure what any of it means. [ 1.320250] scsi18 : ahci [ 1.320294] scsi19 : ahci [ 1.320320] ata19: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfd4fe000 port 0xfd4fe100 ir q 18 [ 1.320323] ata20: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m8192@0xfd4fe000 port 0xfd4fe180 ir q 18 [ 1.403886] usb 2-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4 [ 1.562558] usb 2-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [ 16.477824] ata16: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477843] ata19: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477857] ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477895] ata15: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477906] ata20: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.477977] ata17: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478003] ata12: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478046] ata13: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478063] ata14: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478108] ata11: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478123] ata18: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) [ 16.478127] ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478157] ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 16.478193] ata18.00: ATAPI: MARVELL VIRTUALL, 1.09, max UDMA/66 After that, it took its sweet time, and I had to keep hitting space bar to coax it along. Here's some more dmesg output from a little later in the boot process: [ 17.982291] input: BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00 :13.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input4 [ 17.982335] generic-usb 0003:046E:5506.0002: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Key board [BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:13.0-2/input0 [ 18.005211] input: BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00 :13.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.1/input/input5 [ 18.005274] generic-usb 0003:046E:5506.0003: input,hiddev96,hidraw2: USB HID v1.10 Device [BTC USB Multimedia Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:13.0-2/input1 [ 22.484906] EXT4-fs (sda6): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem [ 22.484910] EXT4-fs (sda6): write access will be enabled during recovery [ 22.548542] EXT4-fs (sda6): recovery complete [ 22.549074] EXT4-fs (sda6): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode [ 32.516772] Adding 20482832k swap on /dev/sda5. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:20482832k [ 32.742540] udev: starting version 151 [ 33.002004] Bluetooth: Atheros AR30xx firmware driver ver 1.0 [ 33.008135] parport_pc 00:09: reported by Plug and Play ACPI [ 33.008186] parport0: PC-style at 0x378, irq 7 [PCSPP,TRISTATE] [ 33.012076] lp: driver loaded but no devices found [ 33.037271] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [ 33.090256] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven). Any clues in there?

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• Multiple Audio Issues

  - by Lerp

  I am having issues with my audio on Ubuntu 12.04, I will try and give as much detail as possible so sorry if there's too much detail. The Problem Audio plays from both speakers and headphone regardless of what connector I choose and regardless of the profile I use. The microphone is constantly being played through headphones & speakers. The headphone audio is extremely quiet but plays from both ears when I select "Headphones" for the connector in Sound Settings. The headphone audio only plays from one ear and is quiet (but not as quiet as above) when I select "Analogue Output" for the connector in Sound Settings. I can only select "Headphones" as the connector in Sound Settings if I set the profile to either "Analogue Stereo Output/Duplex", all others only allow me to choose "Analogue Output" for the connector. Despite the headphone sound issues, the speaker sound is fine apart from the fact that I am not able to select which output is used, they just both play. My headphone and microphone are plugged into the front and my speakers are plugged into the back. What I have tried I have put everything in alsamixer to 100 apart from "Front Mic Boost" which I have set to 0. Command Output aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog] Subdevices: 0/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: AD198x Digital [AD198x Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 2: AD198x Headphone [AD198x Headphone] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 arecord -l **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices **** card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog] Subdevices: 2/3 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Subdevice #1: subdevice #1 Subdevice #2: subdevice #2 cat /proc/asound/cards 0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel HDA Intel at 0xf7ff8000 irq 70 cat /proc/asound/modules 0 snd_hda_intel cat /proc/asound/card*/codec* | grep "Codec" Codec: Analog Devices AD1989B cat /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf # autoloader aliases install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-0 install sound-slot-1 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-1 install sound-slot-2 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-2 install sound-slot-3 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-3 install sound-slot-4 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-4 install sound-slot-5 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-5 install sound-slot-6 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-6 install sound-slot-7 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-7 # Cause optional modules to be loaded above generic modules install snd /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-ioctl32 ; /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq ; } # # Workaround at bug #499695 (reverted in Ubuntu see LP #319505) install snd-pcm /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-pcm $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-pcm-oss ; : ; } install snd-mixer /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-mixer $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-mixer-oss ; : ; } install snd-seq /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-seq $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq-midi ; /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq-oss ; : ; } # install snd-rawmidi /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-rawmidi $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq-midi ; : ; } # Cause optional modules to be loaded above sound card driver modules install snd-emu10k1 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-emu10k1 $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-emu10k1-synth ; } install snd-via82xx /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-via82xx $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq ; } # Load saa7134-alsa instead of saa7134 (which gets dragged in by it anyway) install saa7134 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install saa7134 $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist saa7134-alsa ; : ; } # Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0 options bt87x index=-2 options cx88_alsa index=-2 options saa7134-alsa index=-2 options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2 options snd-intel8x0m index=-2 options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2 options snd-usb-audio index=-2 options snd-usb-caiaq index=-2 options snd-usb-ua101 index=-2 options snd-usb-us122l index=-2 options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2 # Ubuntu #62691, enable MPU for snd-cmipci options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388 # Keep snd-pcsp from being loaded as first soundcard options snd-pcsp index=-2 # Keep snd-usb-audio from beeing loaded as first soundcard options snd-usb-audio index=-2 Hopefully I have provided enough information, I will happily provide anymore information needed. Thank you. Update Reinstalling alsa-base and pulseaudio fixed the headphone issues I was having.

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• Knowing your user is key--Part 1: Motivation

  - by erikanollwebb

  I was thinking where the best place to start in this blog would be and finally came back to a theme that I think is pretty critical--successful gamification in the enterprise comes down to knowing your user.  Lots of folks will say that gamification is about understanding that everyone is a gamer.  But at least in my org, that argument won't play for a lot of people.  Pun intentional.  It's not that I don't see the attraction to the idea--really, very few people play no games at all.  If they don't play video games, they might play solitaire on their computer.  They may play card games, or some type of sport.  Mario Herger has some great facts on how much game playing there is going on at his Enterprise-Gamification.com website. But at the end of the day, I can't sell that into my organization well.  We are Oracle.  We make big, serious software designed run your whole business.  We don't make Angry Birds out of your financial reporting tools.  So I stick with the argument that works better.  Gamification techniques are really just good principals of user experience packaged a little differently.  Feedback?  We already know feedback is important when using software.  Progress indicators?  Got that too.  Game mechanics may package things in a more explicit way but it's not really "new".  To know how to use game mechanics, and what a user experience team is important for, is totally understanding who our users are and what they are motivated by. For several years, I taught college psychology courses, including Motivation.  Motivation is generally broken down into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  There's intrinsic, which comes from within the individual.  And there's extrinsic, which comes from outside the individual.  Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from just a general sense of pleasure in the doing of something.  For example, I like to cook.  I like to cook a lot.  The kind of cooking I think is just fun makes other people--people who don't like to cook--cringe.  Like the cake I made this week--the star-spangled rhapsody from The Cake Bible: two layers of meringue, two layers of genoise flavored with a raspberry eau de vie syrup, whipped cream with berries and a mousseline buttercream, also flavored with raspberry liqueur and topped with fresh raspberries and blueberries. I love cooking--I ask for cooking tools for my birthday and Christmas, I take classes like sushi making and knife skills for fun.  I like reading about you can make an emulsion of egg yolks, melted butter and lemon, cook slowly and transform them into a sauce hollandaise (my use of all the egg yolks that didn't go into the aforementioned cake).  And while it's nice when people like what I cook, I don't do it for that.  I do it because I think it's fun.  My former boss, Ultan Ó Broin, loves to fish in the sea off the coast of Ireland.  Not because he gets prizes for it, or awards, but because it's fun.  To quote a note he sent me today when I asked if having been recently ill kept him from the beginning of mackerel season, he told me he had already been out and said "I can fish when on a deathbed" (read more of Ultan's work, see his blogs on User Assistance and Translation.). That's not the kind of intensity you get about something you don't like to do.  I'm sure you can think of something you do just because you like it. So how does that relate to gamification?  Gamification in the enterprise space is about uncovering the game within work.  Gamification is about tapping into things people already find motivating.  But to do that, you need to know what that user is motivated by. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those areas where over-the-top gamification seems to work (not to plug a competitor in this space, but you can search on what Bunchball* has done with a company just a little north of us on 101 for the CRM crowd).  Sales people are naturally competitive and thrive on that plus recognition of their sales work.  You can use lots of game mechanics like leaderboards and challenges and scorecards with this type of user and they love it.  Show my whole org I'm leading in sales for the quarter?  Bring it on!  However, take the average accountant and show how much general ledger activity they have done in the last week and expose it to their whole org on a leaderboard and I think you'd see a lot of people looking for a new job.  Why?  Because in general, accountants aren't extraverts who thrive on competition in their work.  That doesn't mean there aren't game mechanics that would work for them, but they won't be the same game mechanics that work for sales people.  It's a different type of user and they are motivated by different things. To break this up, I'll stop here and post now.  I'll pick this thread up in the next post. Thoughts? Questions? *Disclosure: To my knowledge, Oracle has no relationship with Bunchball at this point in time.

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• Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  It is pretty much accepted that you should use Areas instead of having many small Team Projects when you are using Team Foundation Server 2010. I have implemented this scenario many times and this is the current iteration of layout and considerations. If like me you work with many customers you will find that you get into a grove for how to set these things up to make them as easily understandable for everyone, while giving the best functionality. The trick is in making it as intuitive as possible for both you and the developers that need to work with it. There are five main places where you need to have the Product or Project name in prominence of any other value. Area Iteration Source Code Work Item Queries Build Once you decide how you are doing this in each of these places you need to keep to it religiously. Evan if you have one source code file to keep, make sure it is in the right place. This makes your developers and others working with the format familiar with where everything should go, as well as building up mussel memory. This prevents the neat system degenerating into a nasty mess. Areas Areas are traditionally used to separate out parts of your product / project so that you can see how much effort has gone into each. Figure: The top level areas are for reporting and work item separation There are massive advantages of using this method. You can: move work from one project to another rename a project / product It is far more likely that a project or product gets renamed than a department. Tip: If you have many projects, over 100, you should consider categorising them here, but make sure that the actual project name always sits at the same level so you know which is which. Figure: Always keep things that are the same at the same level Note: You may use these categories only at the Area/Iteration level to make it easier to select on drop down lists. You may not want to use them everywhere. On the other hand, for consistency it would be better to. Iterations Iterations are usually used to some sort of time based consideration. Here I am splitting into Iterations with periodic releases. Figure: Each product needs to be able to have its own cadence The ability to have each project run at its own pace and to enable them to have their own release schedule is often of paramount importance and you don’t want to fix your 100+ projects to all be released on the same date. Source Code Having a good structure for your source even if you are not branching or having multiple products under the same structure is always a good idea. Figure: Separate out your products source You need to think about both your branches as well as the structure of your source. All your code should be under “Source” and everything you need to build your solution including Build Scripts and 3rd party tools should be under your “Main” (branch) folder. This should them be branched by “Quality”, “Release” or both to get the most out of your branching structure. The important thing is to make sure you branch (or be able to branch) everything you need to build, test and deploy your application to an environment. That environment may be development, test or even production, but I can’t stress the importance of having everything your need. Note: You usually will not be able to install custom software on your build server. Store any *.dll’s or *.exe’s that you need under the “Tools\Tool1” folder. Note: Consult the Branching Guidance for Team Foundation Server 2010 for more on branching Figure: Adding category may be a necessary evil Even if you have to have a couple of categories called “Default”, it is better than not knowing the difference between a folder, Product and Branch. Work Item Queries Queries are used to load lists of Work Items out of TFS so you can see what work you have. This means that you want to also separate queries out by Product / project to make it easier to Figure: Again you have the same first level structure Having Folders also in Work Item Tracking we do the same thing. We put all the queries under a folder named for the Product / Project and change each query to have “AreaPath=[TeamProject]\[ProductX]” in the query instead of the standard “Project=@Project”. Tip: Don’t have a folder with new queries for each iteration. Instead have a single “Current” folder that has queries that point to the current iteration. Just change the queries as you move from one iteration to another. Tip: You can ctrl+drag the “Product1” folder to create your “Product2” folder. Builds You may have many builds both for individual products but also for different quality's. This can be further complicated by having some builds that action “Gated Check-In” and others that are specifically for “Release”, “Test” or another purpose. Figure: There are no folders, yet, for the builds so you need a good naming convention Its a pity that there are no folders under builds, some way to categorise would be nice. In lue of that at the moment you can use a functional naming convention that at least allows you to find what you want. Conclusion It is really easy to both achieve and to stick to this format if you take the time to do it. Unless you have 1000+ builds or 100+ Products you are unlikely run into any issues. Even then there are things you can do to mitigate the issues and I have describes some of them above. Let me know if you can think of any other things to make this easier.

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• JPRT: A Build & Test System

  - by kto

  DRAFT A while back I did a little blogging on a system called JPRT, the hardware used and a summary on my java.net weblog. This is an update on the JPRT system. JPRT ("JDK Putback Reliablity Testing", but ignore what the letters stand for, I change what they mean every day, just to annoy people :\^) is a build and test system for the JDK, or any source base that has been configured for JPRT. As I mentioned in the above blog, JPRT is a major modification to a system called PRT that the HotSpot VM development team has been using for many years, very successfully I might add. Keeping the source base always buildable and reliable is the first step in the 12 steps of dealing with your product quality... or was the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous... oh well, anyway, it's the first of many steps. ;\^) Internally when we make changes to any part of the JDK, there are certain procedures we are required to perform prior to any putback or commit of the changes. The procedures often vary from team to team, depending on many factors, such as whether native code is changed, or if the change could impact other areas of the JDK. But a common requirement is a verification that the source base with the changes (and merged with the very latest source base) will build on many of not all 8 platforms, and a full 'from scratch' build, not an incremental build, which can hide full build problems. The testing needed varies, depending on what has been changed. Anyone that was worked on a project where multiple engineers or groups are submitting changes to a shared source base knows how disruptive a 'bad commit' can be on everyone. How many times have you heard: "So And So made a bunch of changes and now I can't build!". But multiply the number of platforms by 8, and make all the platforms old and antiquated OS versions with bizarre system setup requirements and you have a pretty complicated situation (see http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/build/README-builds.html). We don't tolerate bad commits, but our enforcement is somewhat lacking, usually it's an 'after the fact' correction. Luckily the Source Code Management system we use (another antique called TeamWare) allows for a tree of repositories and 'bad commits' are usually isolated to a small team. Punishment to date has been pretty drastic, the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland' said 'Off With Their Heads', well trust me, you don't want to be the engineer doing a 'bad commit' to the JDK. With JPRT, hopefully this will become a thing of the past, not that we have had many 'bad commits' to the master source base, in general the teams doing the integrations know how important their jobs are and they rarely make 'bad commits'. So for these JDK integrators, maybe what JPRT does is keep them from chewing their finger nails at night. ;\^) Over the years each of the teams have accumulated sets of machines they use for building, or they use some of the shared machines available to all of us. But the hunt for build machines is just part of the job, or has been. And although the issues with consistency of the build machines hasn't been a horrible problem, often you never know if the Solaris build machine you are using has all the right patches, or if the Linux machine has the right service pack, or if the Windows machine has it's latest updates. Hopefully the JPRT system can solve this problem. When we ship the binary JDK bits, it is SO very important that the build machines are correct, and we know how difficult it is to get them setup. Sure, if you need to debug a JDK problem that only shows up on Windows XP or Solaris 9, you'll still need to hunt down a machine, but not as a regular everyday occurance. I'm a big fan of a regular nightly build and test system, constantly verifying that a source base builds and tests out. There are many examples of automated build/tests, some that trigger on any change to the source base, some that just run every night. Some provide a protection gateway to the 'golden' source base which only gets changes that the nightly process has verified are good. The JPRT (and PRT) system is meant to guard the source base before anything is sent to it, guarding all source bases from the evil developer, well maybe 'evil' isn't the right word, I haven't met many 'evil' developers, more like 'error prone' developers. ;\^) Humm, come to think about it, I may be one from time to time. :\^{ But the point is that by spreading the build up over a set of machines, and getting the turnaround down to under an hour, it becomes realistic to completely build on all platforms and test it, on every putback. We have the technology, we can build and rebuild and rebuild, and it will be better than it was before, ha ha... Anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Man, I gotta get out more often.. Anyway, now the nightly build and test can become a 'fetch the latest JPRT build bits' and start extensive testing (the testing not done by JPRT, or the platforms not tested by JPRT). Is it Open Source? No, not yet. Would you like to be? Let me know. Or is it more important that you have the ability to use such a system for JDK changes? So enough blabbering on about this JPRT system, tell me what you think. And let me know if you want to hear more about it or not. Stay tuned for the next episode, same Bloody Bat time, same Bloody Bat channel. ;\^) -kto

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 8 &ndash; Wireless Networking

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Explain how nodes exchange wireless signals Identify potential obstacles to successful transmission and their repercussions, such as interference and reflection Understand WLAN architecture Specify the characteristics of popular WLAN transmission methods including 802.11 a/b/g/n Install and configure wireless access points and their clients Describe wireless MAN and WAN technologies, including 802.16 and satellite communications The Wireless Spectrum All wireless signals are carried through the air by electromagnetic waves. The wireless spectrum is a continuum of the electromagnetic waves used for data and voice communication. The wireless spectrum falls between 9KHZ and 300 GHZ. Characteristics of Wireless Transmission Antennas Each type of wireless service requires an antenna specifically designed for that service. The service’s specification determine the antenna’s power output, frequency, and radiation pattern. A directional antenna issues wireless signals along a single direction. An omnidirectional antenna issues and receives wireless signals with equal strength and clarity in all directions The geographical area that an antenna or wireless system can reach is known as its range Signal Propagation LOS (line of sight) uses the least amount of energy and results in the reception of the clearest possible signal. When there is an obstacle in the way, the signal may… pass through the object or be obsrobed by the object or may be subject to reflection, diffraction or scattering. Reflection – waves encounter an object and bounces off it. Diffraction – signal splits into secondary waves when it encounters an obstruction Scattering – is the diffusion or the reflection in multiple different directions of a signal Signal Degradation Fading occurs as a signal hits various objects. Because of fading, the strength of the signal that reaches the receiver is lower than the transmitted signal strength. The further a signal moves from its source, the weaker it gets (this is called attenuation) Signals are also affected by noise – the electromagnetic interference) Interference can distort and weaken a wireless signal in the same way that noise distorts and weakens a wired signal. Frequency Ranges Older wireless devices used the 2.4 GHZ band to send and receive signals. This had 11 communication channels that are unlicensed. Newer wireless devices can also use the 5 GHZ band which has 24 unlicensed bands Narrowband, Broadband, and Spread Spectrum Signals Narrowband – a transmitter concentrates the signal energy at a single frequency or in a very small range of frequencies Broadband – uses a relatively wide band of the wireless spectrum and offers higher throughputs than narrowband technologies The use of multiple frequencies to transmit a signal is known as spread-spectrum technology. In other words a signal never stays continuously within one frequency range during its transmission. One specific implementation of spread spectrum is FHSS (frequency hoping spread spectrum). Another type is known as DSS (direct sequence spread spectrum) Fixed vs. Mobile Each type of wireless communication falls into one of two categories Fixed – the location of the transmitted and receiver do not move (results in energy saved because weaker signal strength is possible with directional antennas) Mobile – the location can change WLAN (Wireless LAN) Architecture There are two main types of arrangements Adhoc – data is sent directly between devices – good for small local devices Infrastructure mode – a wireless access point is placed centrally, that all devices connect with 802.11 WLANs The most popular wireless standards used on contemporary LANs are those developed by IEEE’s 802.11 committee. Over the years several distinct standards related to wireless networking have been released. Four of the best known standards are also referred to as Wi-Fi. They are…. 802.11b 802.11a 802.11g 802.11n These four standards share many characteristics. i.e. All 4 use half duplex signalling Follow the same access method Access Method 802.11 standards specify the use of CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) to access a shared medium. Using CSMA/CA before a station begins to send data on an 802.11 network, it checks for existing wireless transmissions. If the source node detects no transmission activity on the network, it waits a brief period of time and then sends its transmission. If the source does detect activity, it waits a brief period of time before checking again. The destination node receives the transmission and, after verifying its accuracy, issues an acknowledgement (ACT) packet to the source. If the source receives the ACK it assumes the transmission was successful, – if it does not receive an ACK it assumes the transmission failed and sends it again. Association Two types of scanning… Active – station transmits a special frame, known as a prove, on all available channels within its frequency range. When an access point finds the probe frame, it issues a probe response. Passive – wireless station listens on all channels within its frequency range for a special signal, known as a beacon frame, issued from an access point – the beacon frame contains information necessary to connect to the point. Re-association occurs when a mobile user moves out of one access point’s range and into the range of another. Frames Read page 378 – 381 about frames and specific 802.11 protocols Bluetooth Networks Sony Ericson originally invented the Bluetooth technology in the early 1990s. In 1998 other manufacturers joined Ericsson in the Special Interest Group (SIG) whose aim was to refine and standardize the technology. Bluetooth was designed to be used on small networks composed of personal communications devices. It has become popular wireless technology for communicating among cellular telephones, phone headsets, etc. Wireless WANs and Internet Access Refer to pages 396 – 402 of the textbook for details.

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• My error with upgrading 4.0 to 4.2- What NOT to do...

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Last week, I was helping a client upgrade from the 2011.1.4.0 code to the newest 2011.1.4.2 code. We downloaded the 4.2 update from MOS, upload and unpacked it on both controllers, and upgraded one of the controllers in the cluster with no issues at all. As this was a brand-new system with no networking or pools made on it yet, there were not any resources to fail back and forth between the controllers. Each controller had it's own, private, management interface (igb0 and igb1) and that's it. So we took controller 1 as the passive controller and upgraded it first. The first controller came back up with no issues and was now on the 4.2 code. Great. We then did a takeover on controller 1, making it the active head (although there were no resources for it to take), and then proceeded to upgrade controller 2. Upon upgrading the second controller, we ran the health check with no issues. We then ran the update and it ran and rebooted normally. However, something strange then happened. It took longer than normal to come back up, and when it did, we got the "cluster controllers on different code" error message that one gets when the two controllers of a cluster are running different code. But we just upgraded the second controller to 4.2, so they should have been the same, right??? Going into the Maintenance-->System screen of controller 2, we saw something very strange. The "current version" was still on 4.0, and the 4.2 code was there but was in the "previous" state with the rollback icon, as if it was the OLDER code and not the newer code. I have never seen this happen before. I would have thought it was a bad 4.2 code file, but it worked just fine with controller 1, so I don't think that was it. Other than the fact the code did not update, there was nothing else going on with this system. It had no yellow lights, no errors in the Problems section, and no errors in any of the logs. It was just out of the box a few hours ago, and didn't even have a storage pool yet. So.... We deleted the 4.2 code, uploaded it from scratch, ran the health check, and ran the upgrade again. once again, it seemed to go great, rebooted, and came back up to the same issue, where it came to 4.0 instead of 4.2. See the picture below.... HERE IS WHERE I MADE A BIG MISTAKE.... I SHOULD have instantly called support and opened a Sev 2 ticket. They could have done a shared shell and gotten the correct Fishwork engineer to look at the files and the code and determine what file was messed up and fixed it. The system was up and working just fine, it was just on an older code version, not really a huge problem at all. Instead, I went ahead and clicked the "Rollback" icon, thinking that the system would rollback to the 4.2 code.   Ouch... What happened was that the system said, "Fine, I will delete the 4.0 code and boot to your 4.2 code"... Which was stupid on my part because something was wrong with the 4.2 code file here and the 4.0 was just fine.  So now the system could not boot at all, and the 4.0 code was completely missing from the system, and even a high-level Fishworks engineer could not help us. I had messed it up good. We could only get to the ILOM, and I had to re-image the system from scratch using a hard-to-get-and-use FishStick USB drive. These are tightly controlled and difficult to get, almost always handcuffed to an engineer who will drive out to re-image a system. This took another day of my client's time.  So.... If you see a "previous version" of your system code which is actually a version higher than the current version... DO NOT ROLL IT BACK.... It did not upgrade for a very good reason. In my case, after the system was re-imaged to a code level just 3 back, we once again tried the same 4.2 code update and it worked perfectly the first time and is now great and stable.  Lesson learned.  By the way, our buddy Ryan Matthews wanted to point out the best practice and supported way of performing an upgrade of an active/active ZFSSA, where both controllers are doing some of the work. These steps would not have helpped me for the above issue, but it's important to follow the correct proceedure when doing an upgrade. 1) Upload software to both controllers and wait for it to unpack 2) On controller "A" navigate to configuration/cluster and click "takeover" 3) Wait for controller "B" to finish restarting, then login to it, navigate to maintenance/system, and roll forward to the new software. 4) Wait for controller "B" to apply the update and finish rebooting 5) Login to controller "B", navigate to configuration/cluster and click "takeover" 6) Wait for controller "A" to finish restarting, then login to it, navigate to maintenance/system, and roll forward to the new software. 7) Wait for controller "A" to apply the update and finish rebooting 8) Login to controller "B", navigate to configuration/cluster and click "failback"

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• Null Values And The T-SQL IN Operator

  - by Jesse

  I came across some unexpected behavior while troubleshooting a failing test the other day that took me long enough to figure out that I thought it was worth sharing here. I finally traced the failing test back to a SELECT statement in a stored procedure that was using the IN t-sql operator to exclude a certain set of values. Here’s a very simple example table to illustrate the issue: Customers CustomerId INT, NOT NULL, Primary Key CustomerName nvarchar(100) NOT NULL SalesRegionId INT NULL   The ‘SalesRegionId’ column contains a number representing the sales region that the customer belongs to. This column is nullable because new customers get created all the time but assigning them to sales regions is a process that is handled by a regional manager on a periodic basis. For the purposes of this example, the Customers table currently has the following rows: CustomerId CustomerName SalesRegionId 1 Customer A 1 2 Customer B NULL 3 Customer C 4 4 Customer D 2 5 Customer E 3   How could we write a query against this table for all customers that are NOT in sales regions 2 or 4? You might try something like this: 1: SELECT 2: CustomerId, 3: CustomerName, 4: SalesRegionId 5: FROM Customers 6: WHERE SalesRegionId NOT IN (2,4)   Will this work? In short, no; at least not in the way that you might expect. Here’s what this query will return given the example data we’re working with: CustomerId CustomerName SalesRegionId 1 Customer A 1 5 Customer E 5   I was expecting that this query would also return ‘Customer B’, since that customer has a NULL SalesRegionId. In my mind, having a customer with no sales region should be included in a set of customers that are not in sales regions 2 or 4.When I first started troubleshooting my issue I made note of the fact that this query should probably be re-written without the NOT IN clause, but I didn’t suspect that the NOT IN clause was actually the source of the issue. This particular query was only one minor piece in a much larger process that was being exercised via an automated integration test and I simply made a poor assumption that the NOT IN would work the way that I thought it should. So why doesn’t this work the way that I thought it should? From the MSDN documentation on the t-sql IN operator: If the value of test_expression is equal to any value returned by subquery or is equal to any expression from the comma-separated list, the result value is TRUE; otherwise, the result value is FALSE. Using NOT IN negates the subquery value or expression. The key phrase out of that quote is, “… is equal to any expression from the comma-separated list…”. The NULL SalesRegionId isn’t included in the NOT IN because of how NULL values are handled in equality comparisons. From the MSDN documentation on ANSI_NULLS: The SQL-92 standard requires that an equals (=) or not equal to (<>) comparison against a null value evaluates to FALSE. When SET ANSI_NULLS is ON, a SELECT statement using WHERE column_name = NULL returns zero rows even if there are null values in column_name. A SELECT statement using WHERE column_name <> NULL returns zero rows even if there are nonnull values in column_name. In fact, the MSDN documentation on the IN operator includes the following blurb about using NULL values in IN sub-queries or expressions that are used with the IN operator: Any null values returned by subquery or expression that are compared to test_expression using IN or NOT IN return UNKNOWN. Using null values in together with IN or NOT IN can produce unexpected results. If I were to include a ‘SET ANSI_NULLS OFF’ command right above my SELECT statement I would get ‘Customer B’ returned in the results, but that’s definitely not the right way to deal with this. We could re-write the query to explicitly include the NULL value in the WHERE clause: 1: SELECT 2: CustomerId, 3: CustomerName, 4: SalesRegionId 5: FROM Customers 6: WHERE (SalesRegionId NOT IN (2,4) OR SalesRegionId IS NULL)   This query works and properly includes ‘Customer B’ in the results, but I ultimately opted to re-write the query using a LEFT OUTER JOIN against a table variable containing all of the values that I wanted to exclude because, in my case, there could potentially be several hundred values to be excluded. If we were to apply the same refactoring to our simple sales region example we’d end up with: 1: DECLARE @regionsToIgnore TABLE (IgnoredRegionId INT) 2: INSERT @regionsToIgnore values (2),(4) 3:  4: SELECT 5: c.CustomerId, 6: c.CustomerName, 7: c.SalesRegionId 8: FROM Customers c 9: LEFT OUTER JOIN @regionsToIgnore r ON r.IgnoredRegionId = c.SalesRegionId 10: WHERE r.IgnoredRegionId IS NULL By performing a LEFT OUTER JOIN from Customers to the @regionsToIgnore table variable we can simply exclude any rows where the IgnoredRegionId is null, as those represent customers that DO NOT appear in the ignored regions list. This approach will likely perform better if the number of sales regions to ignore gets very large and it also will correctly include any customers that do not yet have a sales region.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

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• ASP.NET Multi-Select Radio Buttons

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  “HERESY!” you say, “Radio buttons are for single-select items!  If you want multi-select, use checkboxes!”  Well, I would agree, and that is why I consider this a significant bug that ASP.NET developers need to be aware of.  Here’s the situation. If you use ASP:RadioButton controls on your WebForm, then you know that in order to get them to behave properly, that is, to define a group in which only one of them can be selected by the user, you use the Group attribute and set the same value on each one.  For example: 1: <asp:RadioButton runat="server" ID="rdo1" Group="GroupName" checked="true" /> 2: <asp:RadioButton runat="server" ID="rdo2" Group="GroupName" /> With this configuration, the controls will render to the browser as HTML Input / Type=radio tags and when the user selects one, the browser will automatically deselect the other one so that only one can be selected (checked) at any time. BUT, if you user server-side code to manipulate the Checked attribute of these controls, it is possible to set them both to believe that they are checked. 1: rdo2.Checked = true; // Does NOT change the Checked attribute of rdo1 to be false. As long as you remain in server-side code, the system will believe that both radio buttons are checked (you can verify this in the debugger).  Therefore, if you later have code that looks like this 1: if (rdo1.Checked) 2: { 3: DoSomething1(); 4: } 5: else 6: { 7: DoSomethingElse(); 8: } then it will always evaluate the condition to be true and take the first action.  The good news is that if you return to the client with multiple radio buttons checked, the browser tries to clean that up for you and make only one of them really checked.  It turns out that the last one on the screen wins, so in this case, you will in fact end up with rdo2 as checked, and if you then make a trip to the server to run the code above, it will appear to be working properly.  However, if your page initializes with rdo2 checked and in code you set rdo1 to checked also, then when you go back to the client, rdo2 will remain checked, again because it is the last one and the last one checked “wins”. And this gets even uglier if you ever set these radio buttons to be disabled.  In that case, although the client browser renders the radio buttons as though only one of them is checked the system actually retains the value of both of them as checked, and your next trip to the server will really frustrate you because the browser showed rdo2 as checked, but your DoSomething1() routine keeps getting executed. The following is sample code you can put into any WebForm to test this yourself. 1: <body> 2: <form id="form1" runat="server"> 3: <h1>Radio Button Test</h1> 4: <hr /> 5: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdBlankPostback" Text="Blank Postback" /> 6: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 7: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdEnable" Text="Enable All" OnClick="cmdEnable_Click" /> 8: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 9: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdDisable" Text="Disable All" OnClick="cmdDisable_Click" /> 10: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 11: <asp:Button runat="server" ID="cmdTest" Text="Test" OnClick="cmdTest_Click" /> 12: <br /><br /><br /> 13: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R1" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 1" Checked="true" /><br /> 14: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R2" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 2" /><br /> 15: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG1R3" GroupName="Group1" runat="server" Text="Group 1 Radio 3" /><br /> 16: <hr /> 17: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG2R1" GroupName="Group2" runat="server" Text="Group 2 Radio 1" /><br /> 18: <asp:RadioButton ID="rdoG2R2" GroupName="Group2" runat="server" Text="Group 2 Radio 2" Checked="true" /><br /> 19:  20: </form> 21: </body> 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3:  4: } 5:  6: protected void cmdEnable_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 7: { 8: rdoG1R1.Enabled = true; 9: rdoG1R2.Enabled = true; 10: rdoG1R3.Enabled = true; 11: rdoG2R1.Enabled = true; 12: rdoG2R2.Enabled = true; 13: } 14:  15: protected void cmdDisable_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 16: { 17: rdoG1R1.Enabled = false; 18: rdoG1R2.Enabled = false; 19: rdoG1R3.Enabled = false; 20: rdoG2R1.Enabled = false; 21: rdoG2R2.Enabled = false; 22: } 23:  24: protected void cmdTest_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 25: { 26: rdoG1R2.Checked = true; 27: rdoG2R1.Checked = true; 28: } 29: 30: protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e) 31: { 32:  33: } After you copy the markup and page-behind code into the appropriate files.  I recommend you set a breakpoint on Page_Load as well as cmdTest_Click, and add each of the radio button controls to the Watch list so that you can walk through the code and see exactly what is happening.  Use the Blank Postback button to cause a postback to the server so you can inspect things without making any changes. The moral of the story is: if you do server-side manipulation of the Checked status of RadioButton controls, then you need to set ALL of the controls in a group whenever you want to change one.

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• Visual Tree Enumeration

  - by codingbloke

  I feel compelled to post this blog because I find I’m repeatedly posting this same code in silverlight and windows-phone-7 answers in Stackoverflow. One common task that we feel we need to do is burrow into the visual tree in a Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application (actually more recently I found myself doing this in WPF as well).  This allows access to details that aren’t exposed directly by some controls.  A good example of this sort of requirement is found in the “Restoring exact scroll position of a listbox in Windows Phone 7”  question on stackoverflow.  This required that the scroll position of the scroll viewer internal to a listbox be accessed. A caveat One caveat here is that we should seriously challenge the need for this burrowing since it may indicate that there is a design problem.  Burrowing into the visual tree or indeed burrowing out to containing ancestors could represent significant coupling between module boundaries and that generally isn’t a good idea. Why isn’t this idea just not cast aside as a no-no?  Well the whole concept of a “Templated Control”, which are in extensive use in these applications, opens the coupling between the content of the visual tree and the internal code of a control.   For example, I can completely change the appearance and positioning of elements that make up a ComboBox.  The ComboBox control relies on specific template parts having set names of a specified type being present in my template.  Rightly or wrongly this does kind of give license to writing code that has similar coupling. Hasn’t this been done already? Yes it has.  There are number of blogs already out there with similar solutions.  In fact if you are using Silverlight toolkit the VisualTreeExtensions class already provides this feature.  However I prefer my specific code because of the simplicity principle I hold to.  Only write the minimum code necessary to give all the features needed.  In this case I add just two extension methods Ancestors and Descendents, note I don’t bother with “Get” or “Visual” prefixes.  Also I haven’t added Parent or Children methods nor additional “AndSelf” methods because all but Children is achievable with the addition of some other Linq methods.  I decided to give Descendents an additional overload for depth hence a depth of 1 is equivalent to Children but this overload is a little more flexible than simply Children. So here is the code:- VisualTreeEnumeration public static class VisualTreeEnumeration {     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root, int depth)     {         int count = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(root);         for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)         {             var child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(root, i);             yield return child;             if (depth > 0)             {                 foreach (var descendent in Descendents(child, --depth))                     yield return descendent;             }         }     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Descendents(this DependencyObject root)     {         return Descendents(root, Int32.MaxValue);     }     public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> Ancestors(this DependencyObject root)     {         DependencyObject current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(root);         while (current != null)         {             yield return current;             current = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(current);         }     } }   Usage examples The following are some examples of how to combine the above extension methods with Linq to generate the other axis scenarios that tree traversal code might require. Missing Axis Scenarios var parent = control.Ancestors().Take(1).FirstOrDefault(); var children = control.Descendents(1); var previousSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).TakeWhile(c => c != control)); var followingSiblings = control.Ancestors().Take(1)     .SelectMany(p => p.Descendents(1).SkipWhile(c => c != control).Skip(1)); var ancestorsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Ancestors()); var descendentsAndSelf = Enumerable.Repeat((DependencyObject)control, 1)     .Concat(control.Descendents()); You might ask why I don’t just include these in the VisualTreeEnumerator.  I don’t on the principle of only including code that is actually needed.  If you find that one or more of the above  is needed in your code then go ahead and create additional methods.  One of the downsides to Extension methods is that they can make finding the method you actually want in intellisense harder. Here are some real world usage scenarios for these methods:- Real World Scenarios //Gets the internal scrollviewer of a ListBox ScrollViewer sv = someListBox.Descendents().OfType<ScrollViewer>().FirstOrDefault(); // Get all text boxes in current UserControl:- var textBoxes = this.Descendents().OfType<TextBox>(); // All UIElement direct children of the layout root grid:- var topLevelElements = LayoutRoot.Descendents(0).OfType<UIElement>(); // Find the containing `ListBoxItem` for a UIElement:- var container = elem.Ancestors().OfType<ListBoxItem>().FirstOrDefault(); // Seek a button with the name "PinkElephants" even if outside of the current Namescope:- var pinkElephantsButton = this.Descendents()     .OfType<Button>()     .FirstOrDefault(b => b.Name == "PinkElephants"); //Clear all checkboxes with the name "Selector" in a Treeview foreach (CheckBox checkBox in elem.Descendents()     .OfType<CheckBox>().Where(c => c.Name == "Selector")) {     checkBox.IsChecked = false; }   The last couple of examples above demonstrate a common requirement of finding controls that have a specific name.  FindName will often not find these controls because they exist in a different namescope. Hope you find this useful, if not I’m just glad to be able to link to this blog in future stackoverflow answers.

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• Web Services Example - Part 2: Programmatic

  - by Denis T

  In this edition of the ADF Mobile blog we'll tackle part 2 of our Web Service examples.  In this posting we'll take a look at using a SOAP Web Service but calling it programmatically in code and parsing the return into a bean. Getting the sample code: Just click here to download a zip of the entire project.  You can unzip it and load it into JDeveloper and deploy it either to iOS or Android.  Please follow the previous blog posts if you need help getting JDeveloper or ADF Mobile installed.  Note: This is a different workspace than WS-Part1 Defining our Web Service: Just like our first installment, we are using the same public weather forecast web service provided free by CDYNE Corporation.  Sometimes this service goes down so please ensure you know it's up before reporting this example isn't working. We're going to concentrate on the same two web service methods, GetCityForecastByZIP and GetWeatherInformation. Defing the Application: The application setup is identical to the Weather1 version.  There are some improvements to the data that is displayed as part of this example though.  Now we are able to show the associated image along with each forecast line when using the Forecast By Zip feature.  We've also added the temperature Hi/Low values into the UI. Summary of Fundamental Changes In This Application The most fundamental change is that we're binding the UI to the Bean Data Controls instead of directly to the Web Service Data Controls.  This gives us much more flexibility to control the shape of the data and allows us to do caching of the data outside of the Web Service.  This way if your application is, say offline, your bean could still populate with data from a local cache and still show you some UI as opposed to completely failing because you don't have any connectivity. In general we promote this type of programming technique with ADF Mobile to insulate your application from any issues with network connectivity. What's different with this example? We have setup the Web Service DC the same way but now we have managed beans to process the data.  The following classes define the "Model" of our application:  CityInformation-CityForecast-Forecast, WeatherInformation-WeatherDescription.  We use WeatherBean for UI interaction to the model layer.  If you look through this example, we don't really do that much with the java code except use it to grab the image URL from the weather description.  In a more realistic example, you might be using some JDBC classes to persist the data to a local database. To have a good architecture it is always good to keep your model and UI layers separate.  This gets muddied if you start to use bindings on a page invoked from Java code and this java code starts to become your "model" layer.  Since bindings are page specific, your model layer starts to become entwined with your UI.  Not good!  To help with this, we've added some utility functions that let you invoke DC methods without having a binding and thus execute methods from your "model" layer without requiring a binding in your page definition.  We do this with the invokeDataControlMethod of the AdfmfJavaUtilities class.  An example of this method call is available in line 95 of WeatherInformation.java and line 93 of CityInformation.Java. What's a GenericType? Because Web Service Data Controls (and also URL Data Controls AKA REST) use generic name/value pairs to define their structure and don't have strongly typed objects, these are actually stored internally as GenericType objects.  The GenericType class is simply a property map of name/value pairs that can be hierarchical.  There are methods like getAttribute where you supply the index of the attribute or it's string property name.  Why is this important to know?  Because invokeDataControlMethod returns GenericType objects and developers either need to parse these GenericType objects themselves or use one of our helper functions. GenericTypeBeanSerializationHelper This class does exactly what it's name implies.  It's a helper class for developers to aid in serialization of GenericTypes to/from java objects.  This is extremely handy if you have a large GenericType object with many attributes (or you're just lazy like me!) and you just want to parse it out into a real java object you can use more easily.  Here you would use the fromGenericType method.  This method takes the class of the Java object you wish to return and the GenericType as parameters.  The method then parses through each attribute in the GenericType and uses reflection to set that same attribute in the Java class.  Then the method returns that new object of the class you specified.  This is obviously very handy to avoid a lot of shuffling code between GenericType and your own Java classes.  The reverse method, toGenericType is also available when you want to go the other way.  In this case you supply the string that represents the package location in the DataControl definition (Example: "MyDC.myParams.MyCollection") and then pass in the Java object you have that holds the data and a GenericType is returned to you.  Again, it will use reflection to calculate the attributes that match between the java class and the GenericType and call the getters/setters on those. Issues and Possible Improvements: In the next installment we'll show you how to make your web service calls asynchronously so your UI will fill dynamically when the service call returns but in the meantime you show the data you have locally in your bean fed from some local cache.  This gives your users instant delivery of some data while you fetch other data in the background.

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• Soft lockup after upgrade - cannot install from live CD

  - by nbm

  I dual-boot MacIntel Core 2 duo. nVidia graphics. Ran upgrade from ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 (64 bit). On restart ran into {numbers} Bug: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [swapper/0:1] Tried loading earlier kernel: same problem Tried re-installing ubuntu from a liveCD that has worked in the past: version 13.04. Same problem. Tried re-partitioning hard drive using Mac OS X disk utility and then installing ubuntu 14.04LTS from liveCD. Same problem. Not possible to verify liveCD disk (creates same "soft lockup" bug.) Tried installing from the liveCD with version 13.04 that I know works (that's how I got Ubuntu on this machine in the first place.) Same problem. I know this is not a hardware problem as OS X works just fine, I am using it right now on the same machine. I have been using various versions of Ubuntu for 2 years. Things I cannot do: Open a terminal Verify CD image Start ubuntu from CD (same soft lockup problem) This problem is similar to some other questions, none of which have been satisfactorily answered: Ubuntu 14.04 soft lockup on Vostro 3500 Cannot do fresh install of Ubuntu 13.04 while booting from DVD: "soft lockup" bug Live CD stalls when installing Ubuntu 13.10 UPDATE 6/11/14: Following some much-appreciated advice from bain (see below) I burned a 12.04LTS disk and started with kernel parameters: noapic, no1apic, acpi=off, nomodeset, elevator=deadline, and clocksource=jiffies. With all of these parameters I was able to load the 12.04LTS CD ("Try without installing"). It worked fine. However, as soon as I tried to install Ubuntu from the CD, my wired ethernet (eth0) connection would hang. There are already various askubuntu questions and bug reports about this problem, none of which had answers for me. (E.g., dhclient eth0 does nothing, none of the various reset commands does anything, manually setting IP &etc does nothing. I could reliably kill the ethernet connection by clicking "install ubuntu" every single time.) I could go ahead and install 12.04 without an internet connection, but the install would freeze after mostly completing (I tried several times.) There were some relevant error messages in the details of the install output script that, IIRC, had to do with searching for missing files and not being able to access eth0 (internet) to get them. To be honest I gave up at that point and I'm not sure I wrote those down. If I find some notes I will post them. At this point I no longer have Ubuntu on my system. I wiped the partitions and am using exclusively OS X. I am leaving this question in case it helps anyone else with similar problems. I love open source and I love Linux, and the next machine I get I will probably just build from Arch. At the moment I miss repositories and a lot of other things about Ubuntu, but the OS X terminal is 'nix, I can pretty much use all the open source apps I like, and while I am not a fan of the Apple software it gets the job done for me. Unlike Ubuntu, which can't even install. I realize this isn't necessarily a place for a soapbox speech, but when I first installed 12.04 several years ago there were already people in the community complaining that Canonical was going too "commercial". But I loved it. Several years later and all I've seen is Canonical adding more not-so-useful bells and whistles to Ubuntu while continually failing to fix basic problems on upgrades. With a dual-boot (and sometimes triple-boot) system it always took me some tweaking to get an upgrade to work, and to some extent that is okay. But at this point I feel like Canonical ought to just put a price tag on Ubuntu. All I see is more commercialism and advertising and product tie-ins, and ongoing problems do not get fixed. I am a big fan of open-source, not-for profit enterprise. I am also a big fan of for-profit enterprise, which certainly has its place and usefulness. I am not a fan of companies who pretend to be in favor of open source but really are just out to make a buck, and IMNSHO that is what Canonical has become. This is a great community and I wish you all the best, but my next install of Linux will not be Ubuntu.

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• How to break out of if statement

  - by TheBroodian

  I'm not sure if the title is exactly an accurate representation of what I'm actually trying to ask, but that was the best I could think of. I am experiencing an issue with my character class. I have developed a system so that he can perform chain attacks, and something that was important to me was that 1)button presses during the process of an attack wouldn't interrupt the character, and 2) at the same time, button presses should be stored so that the player can smoothly queue up chain attacks in the middle of one so that gameplay doesn't feel rigid or unresponsive. This all begins when the player presses the punch button. Upon pressing the punch button, the game checks the state of the dpad at the moment of the button press, and then translates the resulting combined buttons into an int which I use as an enumerator relating to a punch method for the character. The enumerator is placed into a List so that the next time the character's Update() method is called, it will execute the next punch in the list. It only executes the next punch if my character is flagged with acceptInput as true. All attacks flag acceptInput as false, to prevent the interruption of attacks, and then at the end of an attack, acceptInput is set back to true. While accepting input, all other actions are polled for, i.e. jumping, running, etc. In runtime, if I attack, and then queue up another attack behind it (by pressing forward+punch) I can see the second attack visibly execute, which should flag acceptInput as false, yet it gets interrupted and my character will stop punching and start running if I am still holding down the dpad. Included is some code for context. This is the input region for my character. //Placed this outside the if (acceptInput) tree because I want it //to be taken into account whether we are accepting input or not. //This will queue up attacks, which will only be executed if we are accepting input. //This creates a desired effect that helps control the character in a // smoother fashion for the player. if (Input.justPressed(buttonManager.Punch)) { int dpadPressed = Input.DpadState(0); if (attackBuffer.Count() < 1) { attackBuffer.Add(CheckPunch(dpadPressed)); } else { attackBuffer.Clear(); attackBuffer.Add(CheckPunch(dpadPressed)); } } if (acceptInput) { if (attackBuffer.Count() > 0) { ExecutePunch(attackBuffer[0]); attackBuffer.RemoveAt(0); } //If D-Pad left is being held down. if (Input.DpadDirectionHeld(0, buttonManager.Left)) { flipped = false; if (onGround) { newAnimation = "run"; } velocity = new Vector2(velocity.X - acceleration, velocity.Y); if (walking == true && velocity.X <= -walkSpeed) { velocity.X = -walkSpeed; } else if (walking == false && velocity.X <= -maxSpeed) { velocity.X = -maxSpeed; } } //If D-Pad right is being held down. if (Input.DpadDirectionHeld(0, buttonManager.Right)) { flipped = true; if (onGround) { newAnimation = "run"; } velocity = new Vector2(velocity.X + acceleration, velocity.Y); if (walking == true && velocity.X >= walkSpeed) { velocity.X = walkSpeed; } else if (walking == false && velocity.X >= maxSpeed) { velocity.X = maxSpeed; } } //If jump/accept button is pressed. if (Input.justPressed(buttonManager.JumpAccept)) { if (onGround) { Jump(); } } //If toggle element next button is pressed. if (Input.justPressed(buttonManager.ToggleElementNext)) { if (elements.Count != 0) { elementInUse++; if (elementInUse >= elements.Count) { elementInUse = 0; } } } //If toggle element last button is pressed. if (Input.justPressed(buttonManager.ToggleElementLast)) { if (elements.Count != 0) { elementInUse--; if (elementInUse < 0) { elementInUse = Convert.ToSByte(elements.Count() - 1); } } } //If character is in the process of jumping. if (jumping == true) { if (Input.heldDown(buttonManager.JumpAccept)) { velocity.Y -= fallSpeed.Y; maxJumpTime -= elapsed; } if (Input.justReleased(buttonManager.JumpAccept) || maxJumpTime <= 0) { jumping = false; maxJumpTime = 0; } } //Won't execute abilities if input isn't being accepted. foreach (PlayerAbility ability in playerAbilities) { if (buffer.Matches(ability)) { if (onGround) { ability.Activate(); } if (!onGround && ability.UsableInAir) { ability.Activate(); } else if (!onGround && !ability.UsableInAir) { buffer.Clear(); } } } } When the attackBuffer calls ExecutePunch(int) method, ExecutePunch() will call one of the following methods: private void NeutralPunch1() //0 { acceptInput = false; busy = true; newAnimation = "punch1"; numberOfAttacks++; timeSinceLastAttack = 0; } private void ForwardPunch2(bool toLeft) //true == 7, false == 4 { forwardPunch2Timer = 0f; acceptInput = false; busy = true; newAnimation = "punch2begin"; numberOfAttacks++; timeSinceLastAttack = 0; if (toLeft) { velocity.X -= 800; } if (!toLeft) { velocity.X += 800; } } I assume the attack is being interrupted due to the fact that ExecutePunch() is in the same if statement as running, but I haven't been able to find a suitable way to stop this happening. Thank you ahead of time for reading this, I apologize for it having become so long winded.

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• "Imprinting" as a language feature?

  - by MKO

  Idea I had this idea for a language feature that I think would be useful, does anyone know of a language that implements something like this? The idea is that besides inheritance a class can also use something called "imprinting" (for lack of better term). A class can imprint one or several (non-abstract) classes. When a class imprints another class it gets all it's properties and all it's methods. It's like the class storing an instance of the imprinted class and redirecting it's methods/properties to it. A class that imprints another class therefore by definition also implements all it's interfaces and it's abstract class. So what's the point? Well, inheritance and polymorphism is hard to get right. Often composition gives far more flexibility. Multiple inheritance offers a slew of different problems without much benefits (IMO). I often write adapter classes (in C#) by implementing some interface and passing along the actual methods/properties to an encapsulated object. The downside to that approach is that if the interface changes the class breaks. You also you have to put in a lot of code that does nothing but pass things along to the encapsulated object. A classic example is that you have some class that implements IEnumerable or IList and contains an internal class it uses. With this technique things would be much easier Example (c#) [imprint List<Person> as peopleList] public class People : PersonBase { public void SomeMethod() { DoSomething(this.Count); //Count is from List } } //Now People can be treated as an List<Person> People people = new People(); foreach(Person person in people) { ... } peopleList is an alias/variablename (of your choice)used internally to alias the instance but can be skipped if not needed. One thing that's useful is to override an imprinted method, that could be achieved with the ordinary override syntax public override void Add(Person person) { DoSomething(); personList.Add(person); } note that the above is functional equivalent (and could be rewritten by the compiler) to: public class People : PersonBase , IList<Person> { private List<Person> personList = new List<Person>(); public override void Add(object obj) { this.personList.Add(obj) } public override int IndexOf(object obj) { return personList.IndexOf(obj) } //etc etc for each signature in the interface } only if IList changes your class will break. IList won't change but an interface that you, someone in your team, or a thirdparty has designed might just change. Also this saves you writing a whole lot of code for some interfaces/abstract classes. Caveats There's a couple of gotchas. First we, syntax must be added to call the imprinted classes's constructors from the imprinting class constructor. Also, what happends if a class imprints two classes which have the same method? In that case the compiler would detect it and force the class to define an override of that method (where you could chose if you wanted to call either imprinted class or both) So what do you think, would it be useful, any caveats? It seems it would be pretty straightforward to implement something like that in the C# language but I might be missing something :) Sidenote - Why is this different from multiple inheritance Ok, so some people have asked about this. Why is this different from multiple inheritance and why not multiple inheritance. In C# methods are either virtual or not. Say that we have ClassB who inherits from ClassA. ClassA has the methods MethodA and MethodB. ClassB overrides MethodA but not MethodB. Now say that MethodB has a call to MethodA. if MethodA is virtual it will call the implementation that ClassB has, if not it will use the base class, ClassA's MethodA and you'll end up wondering why your class doesn't work as it should. By the terminology sofar you might already confused. So what happens if ClassB inherits both from ClassA and another ClassC. I bet both programmers and compilers will be scratching their heads. The benefit of this approach IMO is that the imprinting classes are totally encapsulated and need not be designed with multiple inheritance in mind. You can basically imprint anything.

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• SQL Server - Rebuilding Indexes

  - by Renso

  Goal: Rebuild indexes in SQL server. This can be done one at a time or with the example script below to rebuild all index for a specified table or for all tables in a given database. Why? The data in indexes gets fragmented over time. That means that as the index grows, the newly added rows to the index are physically stored in other sections of the allocated database storage space. Kind of like when you load your Christmas shopping into the trunk of your car and it is full you continue to load some on the back seat, in the same way some storage buffer is created for your index but once that runs out the data is then stored in other storage space and your data in your index is no longer stored in contiguous physical pages. To access the index the database manager has to "string together" disparate fragments to create the full-index and create one contiguous set of pages for that index. Defragmentation fixes that. What does the fragmentation affect?Depending of course on how large the table is and how fragmented the data is, can cause SQL Server to perform unnecessary data reads, slowing down SQL Server’s performance.Which index to rebuild?As a rule consider that when reorganize a table's clustered index, all other non-clustered indexes on that same table will automatically be rebuilt. A table can only have one clustered index.How to rebuild all the index for one table:The DBCC DBREINDEX command will not automatically rebuild all of the indexes on a given table in a databaseHow to rebuild all indexes for all tables in a given database:USE [myDB]    -- enter your database name hereDECLARE @tableName varchar(255)DECLARE TableCursor CURSOR FORSELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tablesWHERE table_type = 'base table'OPEN TableCursorFETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @tableNameWHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0BEGINDBCC DBREINDEX(@tableName,' ',90)     --a fill factor of 90%FETCH NEXT FROM TableCursor INTO @tableNameENDCLOSE TableCursorDEALLOCATE TableCursorWhat does this script do?Reindexes all indexes in all tables of the given database. Each index is filled with a fill factor of 90%. While the command DBCC DBREINDEX runs and rebuilds the indexes, that the table becomes unavailable for use by your users temporarily until the rebuild has completed, so don't do this during production  hours as it will create a shared lock on the tables, although it will allow for read-only uncommitted data reads; i.e.e SELECT.What is the fill factor?Is the percentage of space on each index page for storing data when the index is created or rebuilt. It replaces the fill factor when the index was created, becoming the new default for the index and for any other nonclustered indexes rebuilt because a clustered index is rebuilt. When fillfactor is 0, DBCC DBREINDEX uses the fill factor value last specified for the index. This value is stored in the sys.indexes catalog view. If fillfactor is specified, table_name and index_name must be specified. If fillfactor is not specified, the default fill factor, 100, is used.How do I determine the level of fragmentation?Run the DBCC SHOWCONTIG command. However this requires you to specify the ID of both the table and index being. To make it a lot easier by only requiring you to specify the table name and/or index you can run this script:DECLARE@ID int,@IndexID int,@IndexName varchar(128)--Specify the table and index namesSELECT @IndexName = ‘index_name’    --name of the indexSET @ID = OBJECT_ID(‘table_name’)  -- name of the tableSELECT @IndexID = IndIDFROM sysindexesWHERE id = @ID AND name = @IndexName--Show the level of fragmentationDBCC SHOWCONTIG (@id, @IndexID)Here is an example:DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'Tickets' table...Table: 'Tickets' (1829581556); index ID: 1, database ID: 13TABLE level scan performed.- Pages Scanned................................: 915- Extents Scanned..............................: 119- Extent Switches..............................: 281- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 7.7- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 40.78% [115:282]- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 16.28%- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 99.16%- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 2457.0- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 69.64%DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.What's important here?The Scan Density; Ideally it should be 100%. As time goes by it drops as fragmentation occurs. When the level drops below 75%, you should consider re-indexing.Here are the results of the same table and clustered index after running the script:DBCC SHOWCONTIG scanning 'Tickets' table...Table: 'Tickets' (1829581556); index ID: 1, database ID: 13TABLE level scan performed.- Pages Scanned................................: 692- Extents Scanned..............................: 87- Extent Switches..............................: 86- Avg. Pages per Extent........................: 8.0- Scan Density [Best Count:Actual Count].......: 100.00% [87:87]- Logical Scan Fragmentation ..................: 0.00%- Extent Scan Fragmentation ...................: 22.99%- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 639.8- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 92.10%DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator.What's different?The Scan Density has increased from 40.78% to 100%; no fragmentation on the clustered index. Note that since we rebuilt the clustered index, all other index were also rebuilt.

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• Private Cloud: Putting some method behind the madness

  - by Sudip Datta

  Finally, I decided to join the blogging community. And what could be a better time to start than the week after OpenWorld 2012. 50K+ attendees, demonstrations, speaker sessions and a whole lot of buzz on Oracle Cloud..It was raining clouds in this year's Openworld. I am not here to write about Oracle's cloud strategy in general, but on Enterprise Manager's cloud management capabilities. This year's Openworld was the first after we announced the 12c Cloud Control and we were happy to share the stage with quite a few early adopters. Stay tuned for videos from our customers and partners, I will post them as they get published. I met a number of platform administrators in Oracle-DBAs, Middleware Admins, SOA Admins...The cloud has affected them all, at least to the point where it beckoned more than just curiosity..Most IT infrastructure are already heavily virtualized (on VMWare and on others including Oracle VM), and some would claim they are already on “cloud” (at least their Sysadmins told them so). But none of them were confident of the benefits because their pain points continued to grow.. Isn't cloud supposed to ease those? Instead, they were chasing hundreds of databases running on hundreds of VMs, often with as much certainty propounded by Heisenberg. What happened to the age-old IT discipline around administration, compliance, configuration management? VMs are great for what they are. I personally think they have opened the doors to new approaches in which an application stack gets provisioned and updated. In fact, Enterprise Manager 12c is possibly the only tool out there that can provision full-fledged application as VM Assemblies. In this year's Openworld, customers talked on how they provisioned RAC and Siebel assemblies, which as the techies out there know, are not trivial (hearing provisioning time for Siebel down from weeks to hours was gratifying indeed). However, I do have an issue with a "one-size fits all" approach to cloud. In a week's span, I met several personas: Project owners requiring an EC2 like VM instance for their projects Admins needing the same for Sparc-Solaris. DBAs requiring dedicated databases for new projects APEX Developers needing just a ready-to-consume schema as a service Java Developers looking for a runtime platform QA engineers needing a fast clone of their production environment If you drill down further, you will end up peeling more layers of the details. For example, the requirements for Load testing and Functional testing are very different. For Load testing the test environment should ideally be the same as the production. You shouldn't run production on Exadata and load test on a VM; they will just not be good representations of one another. For Functional testing it does not possibly matter. DBAs seem to be at the worst affected of the lot. It seems they have been asked to choose between agile provisioning and  faster runtime performance. And in some cases, it is really a Hobson's choice, because their infrastructure provider made no distinction between the OLTP application and the Virtual desktop! Sad indeed. When one looks at the portfolio of services that we already offer (vanilla IaaS, VM Assembly based PaaS, DBaaS) or have announced (Java PaaS, Instant Cloning, Schema-aaS), one can possibly think that we are trying to be the "renaissance man" ! Well I would have possibly digested that had it not been for the various personas that I described above. Getting the use cases right is very important for an application such as cloud management. We iterate and iterate over these over and over again and re-validate them in CABs (Customer Advisory Boards). We consider over the major aspects of tenancy: service placement, resource isolation (can a tenant execute an expensive SQL and run away with all the resources), quota and security. We, in Engineering, keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with enterprise clouds. We owe it to our customer base ! In the coming posts, I will drill down more into each of the services. In the meanwhile, here are some collateral and  demos for starters with EM 12c. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/cloud-mgmt/index.html Sudip Datta The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter --

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