Search Results

Search found 4879 results on 196 pages for 'geeks'.

Page 52/196 | < Previous Page | 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59  | Next Page >

• Silverlight Cream for June 16, 2010 -- #884

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Zoltan Arvai, Emiel Jongerius, Charles Petzold, Adam Kinney, Deepesh Mohnani, Timmy Kokke, and Damon Payne. Shoutouts: Andy Beaulieu reported his Coding4Fun: Shuffleboard Game for WP7 has been posted -- Big ol' Tutorial and 6 videos of WP7 goodness Karl Shifflett announced Three New WPF and Silverlight Designer Videos Posted Charles Petzold has a cool Flip-Number Clock in Silverlight posted... cool demo, and the source. From SilverlightCream.com: Data Driven Applications with MVVM Part II: Messaging, Unit Testing, and Live Data Sources Zoltan Arvai has part 2 of his Data-Driven Apps with MVVM up, and this one is also including Messaging, Unit Testing, and Live WCF Data... good tutorial and all the code. Silverlight DataContext Changed Event and Trigger Emiel Jongerius takes a hard swing at the lack of DataContextChanged... his solution involves two attached properties instead of one... check it out and see what you think! Orientation Strategies for Windows Phone 7 Charles Petzold is discussing WP7 Orientation... showing the problems you can get involved in, and how to work through them... and you might be surprised at how he does it :) ... pretty cool as usual, Charles! Debugging the TranslateZoomRotate WPF Behavior in Blend Adam Kinney talks through a bug reported about the WPF TranslateZoomRotate Behavior. Again, it's WPF, but it's in Blend, and ya never know when the solution might apply. I want my app to look like the Zune client Deepesh Mohnani demonstrates using the Cosmopolitan theme to get his app to have the same look as the Zune client. MVVM Project and Item Templates Timmy Kokke is continuing with his cool SilverAmp media player, using it to expand upon the new Blend and Silverlight 4 features. This episode touches very lightly on cranking up a new MVVM project in Blend. Great Features for MVVM Friendly Objects Part 0: Favor Composition Over Inheritance Damon Payne has the first part up of a series he's working on with 'MVVM Friendly' features... he's building out a lot of the infrastructure in this post for the ones that follow... all good stuff. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Symbolic Regular Expression Exploration

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  This is a pretty sweet little tool. Rex (Regular Expression Exploration) is a tool that allows you to give it a regular expression and it returns matching strings. The example below creates10 strings that start and end with a number and have at least 2 characters: > rex.exe "^\d.*\d$" /k:10 This is something I could use to validate/generate the Regular Expressions I have created with both UppercuT and RoundhousE. Check out the video below: Margus Veanes - Rex - Symbolic Regular Expression Exploration Margus Veanes, a Researcher from the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, gives an overview of Rex, a tool that generates matching string from .NET regular expressions. Rex turns regular expres...

  Read the article

• My Message to the Software Craftsmanship Group

  - by Liam McLennan

  This is a message I posted to the software craftsmanship group, looking for a week-long, pairing / skill sharing opportunity in the USA. I am a journeyman software craftsman, currenlty living and working in Brisbane Australia. In April I am going to travel to the US to attend Alt.Net Seattle and Seattle codecamp. In between the two conferences I have five days in which I would like to undertake a craftsmanship mini-apprenticeship, pairing and skill sharing with your company. I do not require any compensation other than the opportunity to assist you and learn from you. Although my conferences are in Seattle I am happy to travel anywhere in the USA and Canada (excluding Hawaii :) ). Things I am good at: .NET web development, javascript, creating software that solves problems Things I am learning: Ruby, Rails, javascript If you are interested in having me as visiting craftsman from the 12th to the 16th of April please reply on this mailing list or contact me directly. Liam McLennan Now I wait…

  Read the article

• Unification of TPL TaskScheduler and RX IScheduler

  - by JoshReuben

  using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Reactive.Concurrency; using System.Security; using System.Threading; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Windows.Threading; namespace TPLRXSchedulerIntegration { public class MyScheduler :TaskScheduler, IScheduler     { private readonly Dispatcher _dispatcher; private readonly DispatcherScheduler _rxDispatcherScheduler; //private readonly TaskScheduler _tplDispatcherScheduler; private readonly SynchronizationContext _synchronizationContext; public MyScheduler(Dispatcher dispatcher)         {             _dispatcher = dispatcher;             _rxDispatcherScheduler = new DispatcherScheduler(dispatcher); //_tplDispatcherScheduler = FromCurrentSynchronizationContext();             _synchronizationContext = SynchronizationContext.Current;         }         #region RX public DateTimeOffset Now         { get { return _rxDispatcherScheduler.Now; }         } public IDisposable Schedule<TState>(TState state, DateTimeOffset dueTime, Func<IScheduler, TState, IDisposable> action)         { return _rxDispatcherScheduler.Schedule(state, dueTime, action);         } public IDisposable Schedule<TState>(TState state, TimeSpan dueTime, Func<IScheduler, TState, IDisposable> action)         { return _rxDispatcherScheduler.Schedule(state, dueTime, action);         } public IDisposable Schedule<TState>(TState state, Func<IScheduler, TState, IDisposable> action)         { return _rxDispatcherScheduler.Schedule(state, action);         }         #endregion         #region TPL /// Simply posts the tasks to be executed on the associated SynchronizationContext         [SecurityCritical] protected override void QueueTask(Task task)         {             _dispatcher.BeginInvoke((Action)(() => TryExecuteTask(task))); //TryExecuteTaskInline(task,false); //task.Start(_tplDispatcherScheduler); //m_synchronizationContext.Post(s_postCallback, (object)task);         } /// The task will be executed inline only if the call happens within the associated SynchronizationContext         [SecurityCritical] protected override bool TryExecuteTaskInline(Task task, bool taskWasPreviouslyQueued)         { if (SynchronizationContext.Current != _synchronizationContext)             { SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext(_synchronizationContext);             } return TryExecuteTask(task);         } // not implemented         [SecurityCritical] protected override IEnumerable<Task> GetScheduledTasks()         { return null;         } /// Implementes the MaximumConcurrencyLevel property for this scheduler class. /// By default it returns 1, because a <see cref="T:System.Threading.SynchronizationContext"/> based /// scheduler only supports execution on a single thread. public override Int32 MaximumConcurrencyLevel         { get             { return 1;             }         } //// preallocated SendOrPostCallback delegate //private static SendOrPostCallback s_postCallback = new SendOrPostCallback(PostCallback); //// this is where the actual task invocation occures //private static void PostCallback(object obj) //{ //    Task task = (Task) obj; //    // calling ExecuteEntry with double execute check enabled because a user implemented SynchronizationContext could be buggy //    task.ExecuteEntry(true); //}         #endregion     } }     What Design Pattern did I use here?

  Read the article

• C#: Why Decorate When You Can Intercept

  - by James Michael Hare

  We've all heard of the old Decorator Design Pattern (here) or used it at one time or another either directly or indirectly.  A decorator is a class that wraps a given abstract class or interface and presents the same (or a superset) public interface but "decorated" with additional functionality.   As a really simplistic example, consider the System.IO.BufferedStream, it itself is a descendent of System.IO.Stream and wraps the given stream with buffering logic while still presenting System.IO.Stream's public interface:   1: Stream buffStream = new BufferedStream(rawStream); Now, let's take a look at a custom-code example.  Let's say that we have a class in our data access layer that retrieves a list of products from a database:  1: // a class that handles our CRUD operations for products 2: public class ProductDao 3: { 4: ... 5:  6: // a method that would retrieve all available products 7: public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 8: { 9: var results = new List<Product>(); 10:  11: // must create the connection 12: using (var con = _factory.CreateConnection()) 13: { 14: con.ConnectionString = _productsConnectionString; 15: con.Open(); 16:  17: // create the command 18: using (var cmd = _factory.CreateCommand()) 19: { 20: cmd.Connection = con; 21: cmd.CommandText = _getAllProductsStoredProc; 22: cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; 23:  24: // get a reader and pass back all results 25: using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()) 26: { 27: while(reader.Read()) 28: { 29: results.Add(new Product 30: { 31: Name = reader["product_name"].ToString(), 32: ... 33: }); 34: } 35: } 36: } 37: }            38:  39: return results; 40: } 41: } Yes, you could use EF or any myriad other choices for this sort of thing, but the germaine point is that you have some operation that takes a non-trivial amount of time.  What if, during the production day I notice that my application is performing slowly and I want to see how much of that slowness is in the query versus my code.  Well, I could easily wrap the logic block in a System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch and log the results to log4net or other logging flavor of choice: 1:     // a class that handles our CRUD operations for products 2:     public class ProductDao 3:     { 4:         private static readonly ILog _log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(ProductDao)); 5:         ... 6:         7:         // a method that would retrieve all available products 8:         public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 9:         { 10:             var results = new List<Product>(); 11:             var timer = Stopwatch.StartNew(); 12:             13:             // must create the connection 14:             using (var con = _factory.CreateConnection()) 15:             { 16:                 con.ConnectionString = _productsConnectionString; 17:                 18:                 // and all that other DB code... 19:                 ... 20:             } 21:             22:             timer.Stop(); 23:             24:             if (timer.ElapsedMilliseconds > 5000) 25:             { 26:                 _log.WarnFormat("Long query in GetAvailableProducts() took {0} ms", 27:                     timer.ElapsedMillseconds); 28:             } 29:             30:             return results; 31:         } 32:     } In my eye, this is very ugly.  It violates Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), which says that a class should only ever have one responsibility, where responsibility is often defined as a reason to change.  This class (and in particular this method) has two reasons to change: If the method of retrieving products changes. If the method of logging changes. Well, we could “simplify” this using the Decorator Design Pattern (here).  If we followed the pattern to the letter, we'd need to create a base decorator that implements the DAOs public interface and forwards to the wrapped instance.  So let's assume we break out the ProductDAO interface into IProductDAO using your refactoring tool of choice (Resharper is great for this). Now, ProductDao will implement IProductDao and get rid of all logging logic: 1:     public class ProductDao : IProductDao 2:     { 3:         // this reverts back to original version except for the interface added 4:     } 5:  And we create the base Decorator that also implements the interface and forwards all calls: 1:     public class ProductDaoDecorator : IProductDao 2:     { 3:         private readonly IProductDao _wrappedDao; 4:         5:         // constructor takes the dao to wrap 6:         public ProductDaoDecorator(IProductDao wrappedDao) 7:         { 8:             _wrappedDao = wrappedDao; 9:         } 10:         11:         ... 12:         13:         // and then all methods just forward their calls 14:         public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 15:         { 16:             return _wrappedDao.GetAvailableProducts(); 17:         } 18:     } This defines our base decorator, then we can create decorators that add items of interest, and for any methods we don't decorate, we'll get the default behavior which just forwards the call to the wrapper in the base decorator: 1:     public class TimedThresholdProductDaoDecorator : ProductDaoDecorator 2:     { 3:         private static readonly ILog _log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(TimedThresholdProductDaoDecorator)); 4:         5:         public TimedThresholdProductDaoDecorator(IProductDao wrappedDao) : 6:             base(wrappedDao) 7:         { 8:         } 9:         10:         ... 11:         12:         public IEnumerable<Product> GetAvailableProducts() 13:         { 14:             var timer = Stopwatch.StartNew(); 15:             16:             var results = _wrapped.GetAvailableProducts(); 17:             18:             timer.Stop(); 19:             20:             if (timer.ElapsedMilliseconds > 5000) 21:             { 22:                 _log.WarnFormat("Long query in GetAvailableProducts() took {0} ms", 23:                     timer.ElapsedMillseconds); 24:             } 25:             26:             return results; 27:         } 28:     } Well, it's a bit better.  Now the logging is in its own class, and the database logic is in its own class.  But we've essentially multiplied the number of classes.  We now have 3 classes and one interface!  Now if you want to do that same logging decorating on all your DAOs, imagine the code bloat!  Sure, you can simplify and avoid creating the base decorator, or chuck it all and just inherit directly.  But regardless all of these have the problem of tying the logging logic into the code itself. Enter the Interceptors.  Things like this to me are a perfect example of when it's good to write an Interceptor using your class library of choice.  Sure, you could design your own perfectly generic decorator with delegates and all that, but personally I'm a big fan of Castle's Dynamic Proxy (here) which is actually used by many projects including Moq. What DynamicProxy allows you to do is intercept calls into any object by wrapping it with a proxy on the fly that intercepts the method and allows you to add functionality.  Essentially, the code would now look like this using DynamicProxy: 1: // Note: I like hiding DynamicProxy behind the scenes so users 2: // don't have to explicitly add reference to Castle's libraries. 3: public static class TimeThresholdInterceptor 4: { 5: // Our logging handle 6: private static readonly ILog _log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(TimeThresholdInterceptor)); 7:  8: // Handle to Castle's proxy generator 9: private static readonly ProxyGenerator _generator = new ProxyGenerator(); 10:  11: // generic form for those who prefer it 12: public static object Create<TInterface>(object target, TimeSpan threshold) 13: { 14: return Create(typeof(TInterface), target, threshold); 15: } 16:  17: // Form that uses type instead 18: public static object Create(Type interfaceType, object target, TimeSpan threshold) 19: { 20: return _generator.CreateInterfaceProxyWithTarget(interfaceType, target, 21: new TimedThreshold(threshold, level)); 22: } 23:  24: // The interceptor that is created to intercept the interface calls. 25: // Hidden as a private inner class so not exposing Castle libraries. 26: private class TimedThreshold : IInterceptor 27: { 28: // The threshold as a positive timespan that triggers a log message. 29: private readonly TimeSpan _threshold; 30:  31: // interceptor constructor 32: public TimedThreshold(TimeSpan threshold) 33: { 34: _threshold = threshold; 35: } 36:  37: // Intercept functor for each method invokation 38: public void Intercept(IInvocation invocation) 39: { 40: // time the method invocation 41: var timer = Stopwatch.StartNew(); 42:  43: // the Castle magic that tells the method to go ahead 44: invocation.Proceed(); 45:  46: timer.Stop(); 47:  48: // check if threshold is exceeded 49: if (timer.Elapsed > _threshold) 50: { 51: _log.WarnFormat("Long execution in {0} took {1} ms", 52: invocation.Method.Name, 53: timer.ElapsedMillseconds); 54: } 55: } 56: } 57: } Yes, it's a bit longer, but notice that: This class ONLY deals with logging long method calls, no DAO interface leftovers. This class can be used to time ANY class that has an interface or virtual methods. Personally, I like to wrap and hide the usage of DynamicProxy and IInterceptor so that anyone who uses this class doesn't need to know to add a Castle library reference.  As far as they are concerned, they're using my interceptor.  If I change to a new library if a better one comes along, they're insulated. Now, all we have to do to use this is to tell it to wrap our ProductDao and it does the rest: 1: // wraps a new ProductDao with a timing interceptor with a threshold of 5 seconds 2: IProductDao dao = TimeThresholdInterceptor.Create<IProductDao>(new ProductDao(), 5000); Automatic decoration of all methods!  You can even refine the proxy so that it only intercepts certain methods. This is ideal for so many things.  These are just some of the interceptors we've dreamed up and use: Log parameters and returns of methods to XML for auditing. Block invocations to methods and return default value (stubbing). Throw exception if certain methods are called (good for blocking access to deprecated methods). Log entrance and exit of a method and the duration. Log a message if a method takes more than a given time threshold to execute. Whether you use DynamicProxy or some other technology, I hope you see the benefits this adds.  Does it completely eliminate all need for the Decorator pattern?  No, there may still be cases where you want to decorate a particular class with functionality that doesn't apply to the world at large. But for all those cases where you are using Decorator to add functionality that's truly generic.  I strongly suggest you give this a try!

  Read the article

• Details of 5GB and 50GB SQL Azure databases have now been released, along with new price points

  - by Eric Nelson

  Like many others signed up to the Windows Azure Platform, I received an email overnight detailing the upcoming database size changes for SQL Azure. I know from our work with early adopters over the last 12 months that the 1GB and 10GB limits were sometimes seen as blockers, especially when migrating existing application to SQL Azure. On June 28th 2010, we will be increasing the size limits: SQL Azure Web Edition database from 1 GB to 5 GB SQL Azure Business Edition database will go from 10 GB to 50 GB Along with these changes comes new price points, including the option to increase in increments of 10GB: Web Edition: Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month Up to 5 GB relational database = $49.95 / month Business Edition: Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month Up to 20 GB relational database = $199.98 / month Up to 30 GB relational database = $299.97 / month Up to 40 GB relational database = $399.96 / month Up to 50 GB relational database = $499.95 / month Check out the full SQL Azure pricing. Related Links: http://ukazure.ning.com UK community site Getting started with the Windows Azure Platform

  Read the article

• ReplaceBetweenTags function with delegate to describe transformation

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  I've created a function that allow to replace content between XML tags with data, that depend on original content within tag, in particular to MAsk credit card number.The function uses MidBetween extension from My StringHelper class /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="thisString"></param> /// <param name="openTag"></param> /// <param name="closeTag"></param> /// <param name="transform"></param> /// <returns></returns> /// <example> /// // mask <AccountNumber>XXXXX4488</AccountNumber> ///requestAsString  = requestAsString.ReplaceBetweenTags("<AccountNumber>", "</AccountNumber>", CreditCard.MaskedCardNumber); ///mask cvv ///requestAsString = requestAsString.ReplaceBetweenTags("<FieldName>CC::VerificationCode</FieldName><FieldValue>", "</FieldValue>", cvv=>"XXX"); /// </example> public static string ReplaceBetweenTags(this string thisString, string openTag, string closeTag, Func<string, string> transform) { //See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1359412/c-sharp-remove-text-in-between-delimiters-in-a-string-regex string sRet = thisString; string between = thisString.MidBetween(openTag, closeTag, true); if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(between)) sRet=thisString.Replace(openTag + between + closeTag, openTag + transform(between) + closeTag); return sRet; } public static string ReplaceBetweenTags(this string thisString, string openTag, string closeTag, string newValue) { //See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1359412/c-sharp-remove-text-in-between-delimiters-in-a-string-regex string sRet = thisString; string between = thisString.MidBetween(openTag, closeTag, true); if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(between)) sRet = thisString.Replace(openTag + between + closeTag, openTag + newValue + closeTag); return sRet; }

  Read the article

• BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) tools for .Net

  - by tikrimi

  For several years, I use TDD (Test-Driven Development) to produce code. I no longer plans to work without using TDD. The use of TDD significantly increases code quality, but does not guarantee that the code is the code that corresponds to the requirements specifications (write the "right code" with BDD as opposed to the write "code right" with BDD). Dan North has described in an article in published in 2006 the foundations of the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development). In this article, he introduces the formalism "When Given Then". This formalism is used in all tools dedicated to BDD. This is a short list of open source BDD tools that you can use with .Net : SpecFlow: Here you can find an article in MSDN Magazine and 2 webcasts (http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/ASPNET-MVC-With-Community-Tools-Part-2-Spec-Flow-and-WatiN and http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/ASPNET-MVC-With-Community-Tools-Part-3-More-Spec-Flow-and-WatiN) published on Chanel9. NSpec: This is certainly the most used project. There are many examples on the web. StoryQ: This project is hosted on Codeplex. This small project is very simple to implement and very useful.

  Read the article

• BUILD 2013 Session&ndash;Testing Your C# Base Windows Store Apps

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/build-2013-sessionndashtesting-your-c-base-windows-store-apps.aspx Testing an application is not what most people consider fun and the number of situation that need to be tested seems to grow exponentially when building mobile apps.  That is why I found the topic of this session interesting.  When I found out that the speaker, Francis Cheung, was from the Patterns and Practices group I knew I was in the right place.  I have admired that team since I first met Ron Jacobs around 2001.  So what did Francis have to offer? He started off in a rather confusing who’s on first fashion.  It seems that one of his tester was originally supposed to give the talk, but then it was decided that it would be better to have someone who does development present a testing topic.  This didn’t hinder the content of the talk in the least.  He broke the process down in a logical manner that would be straight forward to understand if not implement. Francis hit the main areas we usually think of such as tombstoning, network connectivity and asynchronous code, but he approached them with tools they we may not have thought of until now.  He relied heavily on Fiddler to intercept and change the behavior of network requests. Then there are the areas you might not normal think to check.  This includes localization, accessibility and updating client code to a new version.  These are important aspects of your app that can severely impact how customers feel about your app.  Take the time to view this session and get a new appreciation for testing and where it fits in your development lifecycle. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Testing,C#,Windows Store Apps,Fiddler

  Read the article

• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for June 09, 2010 -- #878

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Emiel Jongerius, Anton Polimenov, Andrew Veresov, SilverLaw, RoboBlob, Brandon Watson, and Charlie Kindel. From SilverlightCream.com: Implementing network protocol easily with a generic SocketClient Andrea Boschin has a post up at SilverlightShow about the SocketClient class and how to use it to implement a POP3 client ... source project included Passing parameters to a Silverlight XAP application Emiel Jongerius describes the two ways to pass parameters to your Silverlight app, with detailed code examples. WP7: What is Windows Phone 7 Anton Polimenov is beginning a WP7 series at SilvelightShow with this backgrounder article. I'm not sure where all of the info came from, but it's an interesting starter. Initialization State Manager Andrew Veresov has a post up discussing storing and managing state in your Silverlight app. The code isn't ready for prime time but it's available. How To Rotate A Regular Silverlight 3 and 4 ChildWindow SilverLaw responds to a forum post about rotating a child window. He's got a Silverlight 3 version on Expression Gallery, and describes the same in Silverlight 4 in this post. Silverlight MergedDictionaries – using styles and resources from Class Libraries RoboBlob has a very clearly-written post up about merged dictionaries, all the things possible with them, and all the code for the project. New Policies for Next Gen Windows Phone Marketplace Brandon Watson has an article up discussing the WP7 phone Marketplace. Lots of specifics and links out to more info... a definite read. Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud Charlie Kindel has a post up describing the concept of a beta distribution channel through the WP7 Marketplace... another definite read. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• OutOfMemoryException in Microsoft WSE 3.0 Diagnostics.TraceInputFilter

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  We are still using Microsoft WSE 3.0 and on test server started to get   Event Type:        Error Event Source:    Microsoft WSE 3.0 WSE054: An error occurred during the operation of the TraceInputFilter: System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.    at System.String.GetStringForStringBuilder(String value, Int32 startIndex, Int32 length, Int32 capacity)    at System.Text.StringBuilder.GetThreadSafeString(IntPtr& tid)    at System.Text.StringBuilder.set_Length(Int32 value)    at System.Xml.BufferBuilder.Clear()    at System.Xml.BufferBuilder.set_Length(Int32 value)    at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseText()    at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseElementContent()    at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Read()    at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadNode(Boolean skipOverWhitespace)    at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadDocSequence(XmlDocument parentDoc)    at System.Xml.XmlLoader.Load(XmlDocument doc, XmlReader reader, Boolean preserveWhitespace)    at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(XmlReader reader)    at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(Stream inStream)    at Microsoft.Web.Services3.Diagnostics.TraceInputFilter.OpenLoadExistingFile(String path)    at Microsoft.Web.Services3.Diagnostics.TraceInputFilter.Load(String path)    at Microsoft.Web.Services3.Diagnostics.TraceInputFilter.TraceMessage(String messageId, Collection`1 traceEntries).   After investigation it was found, that the problem related to trace files, that become too big. When they were deleted and new files were created, error gone.

  Read the article

• Microsoft&rsquo;s new technical computing initiative

  - by Randy Walker

  I made a mental note from earlier in the year.  Microsoft literally buys computers by the truckload.  From what I understand, it’s a typical practice amongst large software vendors.  You plug a few wires in, you test it, and you instantly have mega tera tera flops (don’t hold me to that number).  Microsoft has been trying to plug away at their cloud services (named Azure).  Which, for the layman, means Microsoft runs your software on their computers, and as demand increases you can allocate more computing power on the fly. With this in mind, it doesn’t surprise me that I was recently sent an executive email concerning Microsoft’s new technical computing initiative.  I find it to be a great marketing idea with actual substance behind their real work.  From the programmer academic perspective, in college we dreamed about this type of processing power.  This has decades of computer science theory behind it. A copy of the email received.  (note that I almost deleted this email, thinking it was spam due to it’s length) We don't often think about how complex life really is. Take the relatively simple task of commuting to and from work: it is, in fact, a complicated interplay of variables such as weather, train delays, accidents, traffic patterns, road construction, etc. You can however, take steps to shorten your commute - using a good, predictive understanding of a few of these variables. In fact, you probably are already taking these inputs and instinctively building a predictive model that you act on daily to get to your destination more quickly. Now, when we apply the same method to very complex tasks, this modeling approach becomes much more challenging. Recent world events clearly demonstrated our inability to process vast amounts of information and variables that would have helped to more accurately predict the behavior of global financial markets or the occurrence and impact of a volcano eruption in Iceland. To make sense of issues like these, researchers, engineers and analysts create computer models of the almost infinite number of possible interactions in complex systems. But, they need increasingly more sophisticated computer models to better understand how the world behaves and to make fact-based predictions about the future. And, to do this, it requires a tremendous amount of computing power to process and examine the massive data deluge from cameras, digital sensors and precision instruments of all kinds. This is the key to creating more accurate and realistic models that expose the hidden meaning of data, which gives us the kind of insight we need to solve a myriad of challenges. We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage. Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. That is why, across the scientific and engineering world, it is so hard to say with any certainty when or where the next volcano will erupt and what flight patterns it might affect, or to more accurately predict something like a global flu pandemic. So far, we just cannot collect, correlate and compute enough data to create an accurate forecast of the real world. But this is about to change. Innovations in technology are transforming our ability to measure, monitor and model how the world behaves. The implication for scientific research is profound, and it will transform the way we tackle global challenges like health care and climate change. It will also have a huge impact on engineering and business, delivering breakthroughs that could lead to the creation of new products, new businesses and even new industries. Because you are a subscriber to executive e-mails from Microsoft, I want you to be the first to know about a new effort focused specifically on empowering millions of the world's smartest problem solvers. Today, I am happy to introduce Microsoft's Technical Computing initiative. Our goal is to unleash the power of pervasive, accurate, real-time modeling to help people and organizations achieve their objectives and realize their potential. We are bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia and science at www.modelingtheworld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems. One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop. And as technology continues to advance, these models will become more complete and accurate in the way they represent the world. This will speed our ability to test new ideas, improve processes and advance our understanding of systems. Our technical computing initiative reflects the best of Microsoft's heritage. Ever since Bill Gates articulated the then far-fetched vision of "a computer on every desktop" in the early 1980's, Microsoft has been at the forefront of expanding the power and reach of computing to benefit the world. As someone who worked closely with Bill for many years at Microsoft, I am happy to share with you that the passion behind that vision is fully alive at Microsoft and is carried out in the creation of our new Technical Computing group. Enabling more people to make better predictions We have seen the impact of making greater computing power more available firsthand through our investments in high performance computing (HPC) over the past five years. Scientists, engineers and analysts in organizations of all sizes and sectors are finding that using distributed computational power creates societal impact, fuels scientific breakthroughs and delivers competitive advantages. For example, we have seen remarkable results from some of our current customers: Malaria strikes 300,000 to 500,000 people around the world each year. To help in the effort to eradicate malaria worldwide, scientists at Intellectual Ventures use software that simulates how the disease spreads and would respond to prevention and control methods, such as vaccines and the use of bed nets. Technical computing allows researchers to model more detailed parameters for more accurate results and receive those results in less than an hour, rather than waiting a full day. Aerospace engineering firm, a.i. solutions, Inc., needed a more powerful computing platform to keep up with the increasingly complex computational needs of its customers: NASA, the Department of Defense and other government agencies planning space flights. To meet that need, it adopted technical computing. Now, a.i. solutions can produce detailed predictions and analysis of the flight dynamics of a given spacecraft, from optimal launch times and orbit determination to attitude control and navigation, up to eight times faster. This enables them to avoid mistakes in any areas that can cause a space mission to fail and potentially result in the loss of life and millions of dollars. Western & Southern Financial Group faced the challenge of running ever larger and more complex actuarial models as its number of policyholders and products grew and regulatory requirements changed. The company chose an actuarial solution that runs on technical computing technology. The solution is easy for the company's IT staff to manage and adjust to meet business needs. The new solution helps the company reduce modeling time by up to 99 percent - letting the team fine-tune its models for more accurate product pricing and financial projections. Our Technical Computing direction Collaborating closely with partners across industry and academia, we must now extend the reach of technical computing even further to help predictive modelers and data explorers make faster, more accurate predictions. As we build the Technical Computing initiative, we will invest in three core areas: Technical computing to the cloud: Microsoft will play a leading role in bringing technical computing power to scientists, engineers and analysts through the cloud. Existing high- performance computing users will benefit from the ability to augment their on-premises systems with cloud resources that enable 'just-in-time' processing. This platform will help ensure processing resources are available whenever they are needed-reliably, consistently and quickly. Simplify parallel development: Today, computers are shipping with more processing power than ever, including multiple cores, but most modern software only uses a small amount of the available processing power. Parallel programs are extremely difficult to write, test and trouble shoot. However, a consistent model for parallel programming can help more developers unlock the tremendous power in today's modern computers and enable a new generation of technical computing. We are delivering new tools to automate and simplify writing software through parallel processing from the desktop... to the cluster... to the cloud. Develop powerful new technical computing tools and applications: We know scientists, engineers and analysts are pushing common tools (i.e., spreadsheets and databases) to the limits with complex, data-intensive models. They need easy access to more computing power and simplified tools to increase the speed of their work. We are building a platform to do this. Our development efforts will yield new, easy-to-use tools and applications that automate data acquisition, modeling, simulation, visualization, workflow and collaboration. This will allow them to spend more time on their work and less time wrestling with complicated technology. Thinking bigger There is so much left to be discovered and so many questions yet to be answered in the fascinating world around us. We believe the technical computing community will show us that we have not seen anything yet. Imagine just some of the breakthroughs this community could make possible: Better predictions to help improve the understanding of pandemics, contagion and global health trends. Climate change models that predict environmental, economic and human impact, accessible in real-time during key discussions and debates. More accurate prediction of natural disasters and their impact to develop more effective emergency response plans. With an ambitious charter in hand, this new team is ready to build on our progress to-date and execute Microsoft's technical computing vision over the months and years ahead. We will steadily invest in the right technologies, tools and talent, and work to bring together the technical computing community. I invite you to visit www.modelingtheworld.com today. We welcome your ideas and feedback. I look forward to making this journey with you and others who want to answer the world's biggest questions, discover solutions to problems that seem impossible and uncover a host of new opportunities to change the world we live in for the better. Bob

  Read the article

• BizTalk 2009 - BizTalk Server Best Practice Analyser

  - by StuartBrierley

  The BizTalk Server Best Practices Analyser  allows you to carry out a configuration level verification of your BizTalk installation, evaluating the deployed configuration but not modifying or tuning anything that it finds. The Best Practices Analyser uses "reading and reporting" to gather data from different sources, such as: Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes SQL Server databases Registry entries When I first ran the analyser I got a number of errors, if you get any errors these should all be acted upon to resolve them, you should then run the scan again and see if any thing else is reported that needs acting upon. As you can see in the image above, the initial issue that jumped out to me was that the SQL Server Agent was not started. The reasons for this was absent mindedness - this run was against my development PC and I don't have SQL/BizTalk actively running unless I am using them.  Starting the agent service and running the scan again gave me the following results: This resolved most of the issues for me, but next major issue to look at was that there was no tracking host running.  You can also see that I was still getting an error with two of the SQL jobs.  The problem here was that I had not yet configured these two SQL jobs.  Configuring the backup and purge jobs and then starting the tracking host before running the scan again gave: This had cleared all the critical issues, but I did stil have a number of warnings.  For example on this report I was warned that the BizTalk Message box is hosted on the BizTalk Server.  While this is known to be less than ideal, it is as I expected on my development environment where I have installed Visual Studio, SQL and BizTalk on my laptop and I was happy to ignore this and other similar warnings. In your case you should take a look at any warnings you receive and decide what you want to do about each of them in turn.

  Read the article

• WIF

  - by kaleidoscope

  Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) enables .NET developers to externalize identity logic from their application, improving developer productivity, enhancing application security, and enabling interoperability. It is a framework for implementing claims-based identity in your applications. With WIF one can create more secure applications by reducing custom implementations and using a single simplified identity model based on claims. Windows Identity Foundation is part of Microsoft's identity and access management solution built on Active Directory that also includes: · Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (formerly known as "Geneva" Server): a security token service for IT that issues and transforms claims and other tokens, manages user access and enables federation and access management for simplified single sign-on · Windows CardSpace 2.0 (formerly known as Windows CardSpace "Geneva"): for helping users navigate access decisions and developers to build customer authentication experiences for users. Reference : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/aa570351.aspx Geeta

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Upgrade Domain

  - by kaleidoscope

  Windows Azure automatically divides your role instances into some “logical” domains called upgrade domains. During upgrade, Azure is updating these domains one by one. This is a by design behavior to avoid nasty situations. Some of the last feature additions and enhancements on the platform was the ability to notify your role instances in case of “environment” changes, like adding or removing being most common. In such case, all your roles get a notification of this change. Imagine if you had 50 or 60 role instances, getting notified all at once and start doing various actions to react to this change. It will be a complete disaster for your service. The way to address this problem is upgrade domains. During upgrade Windows Azure updates them one by one and only the associated role instances to a specific domain get notified of the changes taking place. Only a small number of your role instances will get notified, react and the rest will remain intact providing a seamless upgrade experience and no service disruption or downtime. http://www.kefalidis.me/archive/2009/11/27/windows-azure-ndash-what-is-an-upgrade-domain.aspx   Lokesh, M

  Read the article

• What I&rsquo;m Up To: November 2012

  - by Brian T. Jackett

  This is a short personal post to let any regular readers know what I’m up to (and why I’ll be in reduced blogging mode for a bit). Writing 2 chapters for a SharePoint 2013 book (more to announce closer to publish date) Doing research, proof of concepts, and testing for above said writing Developing a SharePoint PowerShell diagnostic script to clean up issues found by the Health Analyzer Prepping for teaching SharePoint 2013 content to customers    There are some other community and personal commitments taking up my time (in addition to normal work responsibilities).  Since the number of hours in a day is limited to 24 hours I’m making a late addition to my goals for 2012 for the year of learning and adopting more personal productivity practices.  Before the end of this year I’ll be posting a couple that I’ve already adopted that are working well for me.  Scott Hanselman posted a great video recently that sparked me down this path.  I highly recommend you watch.   “It’s not what you read it’s what you ignore” video – Scott Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgnoreVideoOfScottHanselmansPersonalProductivityTips.aspx         -Frog Out

  Read the article

• License name in startup in Visual studio 2010

  - by anirudha

  Whenever we install Visual studio in our system. we found that Express edition and visual studio never show our name in startup by default they show Microsoft. here is a way to change them with your name or organization name if you want. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion go their and check the value for RegisteredOrganization for changing orgranization name in bottom of username or change the RegisteredOwner for changing the name of user.

  Read the article

• MVVM Light V4 preview 2 (BL0015) #mvvmlight

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Over the past few weeks, I have worked hard on a few new features for MVVM Light V4. Here is a second early preview (consider this pre-alpha if you wish). The features are unit-tested, but I am now looking for feedback and there might be bugs! Bug correction: Messenger.CleanupList is now thread safe This was an annoying bug that is now corrected: In some circumstances, an exception could be thrown when the Messenger’s recipients list was cleaned up (i.e. the “dead” instances were removed). The method is called now and then and the exception was thrown apparently at random. In fact it was really a multi-threading issue, which is now corrected. Bug correction: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers prevents EventToCommand to work This is a particularly annoying regression bug that was introduced in BL0014. In order to allow MVVM Light to work in XBAPs too, I added the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute to the assemblies. However, we just found out that this causes issues when using EventToCommand. In order to allow EventToCommand to continue working, I reverted to the previous state by removing the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute for now. I will work with my friends at Microsoft to try and find a solution. Stay tuned. Bug correction: XML documentation file is now generated in Release configuration The XML documentation file was not generated for the Release configuration. This was a simple flag in the project file that I had forgotten to set. This is corrected now. Applying EventToCommand to non-FrameworkElements This feature has been requested in order to be able to execute a command when a Storyboard is completed. I implemented this, but unfortunately found out that EventToCommand can only be added to Storyboards in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not in WPF or in Windows Phone 7. This obviously limits the usefulness of this change, but I decided to publish it anyway, because it is pretty damn useful in Silverlight… Why not in WPF? In WPF, Storyboards added to a resource dictionary are frozen. This is a feature of WPF which allows to optimize certain objects for performance: By freezing them, it is a contract where we say “this object will not be modified anymore, so do your perf optimization on them without worrying too much”. Unfortunately, adding a Trigger (such as EventTrigger) to an object in resources does not work if this object is frozen… and unfortunately, there is no way to tell WPF not to freeze the Storyboard in the resources… so there is no way around that (at least none I can see. In Silverlight, objects are not frozen, so an EventTrigger can be added without problems. Why not in WP7? In Windows Phone 7, there is a totally different issue: Adding a Trigger can only be done to a FrameworkElement, which Storyboard is not. Here I think that we might see a change in a future version of the framework, so maybe this small trick will work in the future. Workaround? Since you cannot use the EventToCommand on a Storyboard in WPF and in WP7, the workaround is pretty obvious: Handle the Completed event in the code behind, and call the Command from there on the ViewModel. This object can be obtained by casting the DataContext to the ViewModel type. This means that the View needs to know about the ViewModel, but I never had issues with that anyway. New class: NotifyPropertyChanged Sometimes when you implement a model object (for example Customer), you would like to have it implement INotifyPropertyChanged, but without having all the frills of a ViewModelBase. A new class named NotifyPropertyChanged allows you to do that. This class is a simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChaned (with all the overloads of RaisePropertyChanged that were implemented in BL0014). In fact, ViewModelBase inherits NotifyPropertyChanged. ViewModelBase does not implement IDisposable anymore The IDisposable interface and the Dispose method had been marked obsolete in the ViewModelBase class already in V3. Now they have been removed. Note: By this, I do not mean that IDisposable is a bad interface, or that it shouldn’t be used on viewmodels. In the contrary, I know that this interface is very useful in certain circumstances. However, I think that having it by default on every instance of ViewModelBase was sending a wrong message. This interface has a strong meaning in .NET: After Dispose has been executed, the instance should not be used anymore, and should be ready for garbage collection. What I really wanted to have on ViewModelBase was rather a simple cleanup method, something that can be executed now and then during runtime. This is fulfilled by the ICleanup interface and its Cleanup method. If your ViewModels need IDisposable, you can still use it! You will just have to implement the interface on the class itself, because it is not available on ViewModelBase anymore. What’s next? I have a couple exciting new features implemented already but that need more testing before they go live… Just stay tuned and by MIX11 (12-14 April 2011), we should see at least a major addition to MVVM Light Toolkit, as well as another smaller feature which is pretty cool nonetheless More about this later! Happy Coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

  Read the article

• OCS 2007 R2 User Properties Error Message

  - by BWCA

  When I attempted to configure one of our user’s Meeting settings using the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Administration Tool   I received an Validation failed – Validation failed with HRESULT = 0XC3EC7E02 dialog box error message. I received the same error message when I tried to configure the user’s Telephony and Other settings. Using ADSI Edit, I compared the settings of an user that I had no problems configuring and the user that I had problems configuring.  For the user I had problems configuring, I noticed a trailing space after the last phone number digit for the user’s msRTCSIP-Line attribute. After I removed the trailing space for the attribute and waited for Active Directory replication to complete, I was able to configure the user’s Meeting settings (and Telephony/Other settings) without any problems. If you get the error message, check your user’s msRTCSIP-xxxxx attributes in Active Directory using ADSI Edit for any trailing spaces, typos, or any other mistakes.

  Read the article

• List of Commonly Used Value Types in XNA Games

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  Most XNA programmers are concerned about generating garbage. More specifically about allocating GC-managed memory (GC stands for “garbage collector” and is both the name of the class that provides access to the garbage collector and an acronym for the garbage collector (as a concept) itself). Two of the major target platforms for XNA (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360) use variants of the .NET Compact Framework. On both variants, the GC runs under various circumstances (Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360). Of concern to XNA programmers is the fact that it runs automatically after a fixed amount of GC-managed memory has been allocated (currently 1MB on both systems). Many beginning XNA programmers are unaware of what constitutes GC-managed memory, though. So here’s a quick overview. In .NET, there are two different “types” of types: value types and reference types. Only reference types are managed by the garbage collector. Value types are not managed by the garbage collector and are instead managed in other ways that are implementation dependent. For purposes of XNA programming, the important point is that they are not managed by the GC and thus do not, by themselves, increment that internal 1 MB allocation counter. (n.b. Structs are value types. If you have a struct that has a reference type as a member, then that reference type, when instantiated, will still be allocated in the GC-managed memory and will thus count against the 1 MB allocation counter. Putting it in a struct doesn’t change the fact that it gets allocated on the GC heap, but the struct itself is created outside of the GC’s purview). Both value types and reference types use the keyword ‘new’ to allocate a new instance of them. Sometimes this keyword is hidden by a method which creates new instances for you, e.g. XmlReader.Create. But the important thing to determine is whether or not you are dealing with a value types or a reference type. If it’s a value type, you can use the ‘new’ keyword to allocate new instances of that type without incrementing the GC allocation counter (except as above where it’s a struct with a reference type in it that is allocated by the constructor, but there are no .NET Framework or XNA Framework value types that do this so it would have to be a struct you created or that was in some third-party library you were using for that to even become an issue). The following is a list of most all of value types you are likely to use in a generic XNA game: AudioCategory (used with XACT; not available on WP7) AvatarExpression (Xbox 360 only, but exposed on Windows to ease Xbox development) bool BoundingBox BoundingSphere byte char Color DateTime decimal double any enum (System.Enum itself is a class, but all enums are value types such that there are no GC allocations for enums) float GamePadButtons GamePadCapabilities GamePadDPad GamePadState GamePadThumbSticks GamePadTriggers GestureSample int IntPtr (rarely but occasionally used in XNA) KeyboardState long Matrix MouseState nullable structs (anytime you see, e.g. int? something, that ‘?’ denotes a nullable struct, also called a nullable type) Plane Point Quaternion Ray Rectangle RenderTargetBinding sbyte (though I’ve never seen it used since most people would just use a short) short TimeSpan TouchCollection TouchLocation TouchPanelCapabilities uint ulong ushort Vector2 Vector3 Vector4 VertexBufferBinding VertexElement VertexPositionColor VertexPositionColorTexture VertexPositionNormalTexture VertexPositionTexture Viewport So there you have it. That’s not quite a complete list, mind you. For example: There are various structs in the .NET framework you might make use of. I left out everything from the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.PackedVector namespace, since everything in there ventures into the realm of advanced XNA programming anyway (n.b. every single instantiable thing in that namespace is a struct and thus a value type; there are also two interfaces but interfaces cannot be instantiated at all and thus don’t figure in to this discussion). There are so many enums you’re likely to use (PlayerIndex, SpriteSortMode, SpriteEffects, SurfaceFormat, etc.) that including them would’ve flooded the list and reduced its utility. So I went with “any enum” and trust that you can figure out what the enums are (and it’s rare to use ‘new’ with an enum anyway). That list also doesn’t include any of the pre-defined static instances of some of the classes (e.g. BlendState.AlphaBlend, BlendState.Opaque, etc.) which are already allocated such that using them doesn’t cause any new allocations and therefore doesn’t increase that 1 MB counter. That list also has a few misleading things. VertexElement, VertexPositionColor, and all the other vertex types are structs. But you’re only likely to ever use them as an array (for use with VertexBuffer or DynamicVertexBuffer), and all arrays are reference types (even arrays of value types such as VertexPositionColor[ ] or int[ ]). * So that’s it for now. The note below may be a bit confusing (it deals with how the GC works and how arrays are managed in .NET). If so, you can probably safely ignore it for now but feel free to ask any questions regardless. * Arrays of value types (where the value type doesn’t contain any reference type members) are much faster for the GC to examine than arrays of reference types, so there is a definite benefit to using arrays of value types where it makes sense. But creating arrays of value types does cause the GC’s allocation counter to increase. Indeed, allocating a large array of a value type is one of the quickest ways to increment the allocation counter since a .NET array is a sequential block of memory. An array of reference types is just a sequential block of references (typically 4 bytes each) while an array of value types is a sequential block of instances of that type. So for an array of Vector3s it would be 12 bytes each since each float is 4 bytes and there are 3 in a Vector3; for an array of VertexPositionNormalTexture structs it would typically be 32 bytes each since it has two Vector3s and a Vector2. (Note that there are a few additional bytes taken up in the creation of an array, typically 12 but sometimes 16 or possibly even more, which depend on the implementation details of the array type on the particular platform the code is running on).

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for December 13, 2010 -- #1010

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Rénald Nollet, Benjamin Gavin, Dennis Doomen, Tim Greenfield, Mike Taulty, Jeff Blankenburg, Michael Crump, Laurent Duveau, Dragos Manolescu, KeyboardP, Yochay Kiriaty. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight RIA Services and Basic, Anonymous Authentication" Benjamin Gavin WP7: "lving Circular Navigation in Windows Phone Silverlight Applications" Yochay Kiriaty SQL Azure: "SQL Azure Database Manager – Part 1 : How to connect to your SQL Azure DB" Rénald Nollet Shoutouts: Yochay Kiriaty has a post up on the Windows Phone Devloper Blog about open source (MSPL) projects helping WP7 devs: Windows Phone Recipes – Helping the Community Jesse Liberty's latest Yet Another Podcast is up and thie time it's Joe Stagner: Yet Another Podcast #18 – Joe Stagner Josh Schwartzberg sent me this link to what is apparently his yearly web-only rock Christmas album: MetalXmas... done in Silverlight and RIA Services From SilverlightCream.com: SQL Azure Database Manager – Part 1 : How to connect to your SQL Azure DB Rénald Nollet posted Part 1 of a series on a SQL Azure database manager all in Silverlight... has a live demo running, some description, and is making us wait for the next part! Silverlight RIA Services and Basic, Anonymous Authentication Benjamin Gavin has a quick post up resolving a basic RIA Services problem that I bet a lot of folks are looking for the answer on... like 500 series errors... cool little find he ferreted out... A night of Silverlight, WPF, unit testing and Caliburn Micro Dennis Doomen in concert with his employer gave a couple talks at the local DotNED user group, and covered literally a cornucopia of topics... slides, and example code for both talks... lotsa material here... Tim Greenfield on PuzzleTouch WP7 Application Tim Greenfield is the latest WP7 app developer to be interviewed by the SilverlightShow crew... lots of interesting comments and insight from Tim. Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 4) Mike Taulty has part 4 of his PDC 2010 Silverlight app construction project up and is taking the app into Blend, and the considerations that brought to the table. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #2 Jeff Blankenburg continues his "What I Learned" series with this discussion about fonts, the Non-Linear Navigation service I mention below, and possible WP7 jobs. Part 3 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers Michael Crump has Part 3 of his Tips/Tricks up today. Lots of goodies this time: underlining in a TextBlock, getting browser info, startup params, VisualTreeHelper, and child windows. My Windows Phone 7 presentation in Montreal Laurent Duveau gave a WP7 presentation in Montreal as part of the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer's Briefing, and has posted his materials and slide deck WP7 Code: Mocking Event Streams with IEnumerable Dragos Manolescu has a very cool post up on using IEnumerable to Mock event streams by leveraging the IObservable/IEnumerable duality, and uses the 2D bubble app that you can run and test in the emulator without needing an accelerometer Transparent Wallpapers – Video Tutorial KeyboardP has had so many queries about his Transparent wallpaper for WP7 that he produced a video tutorial for it... Solving Circular Navigation in Windows Phone Silverlight Applications Yochay Kiriaty discusses the first recipe they are releasing ... see the shoutout above, a Nonlinear Navigation Service ... to help with apps that have loops in navigation. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

  Read the article

• Mirroring git and mercurial repos the lazy way

  - by Greg Malcolm

  I maintain Python Koans on mirrored on both Github using git and Bitbucket using mercurial. I get pull requests from both repos but it turns out keeping the two repos in sync is pretty easy. Here is how it's done... Assuming I’m starting again on a clean laptop, first I clone both repos ~/git $ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/gregmalcolm/python_koans ~/git $ git clone [email protected]:gregmalcolm/python_koans.git python_koans2 The only thing that makes a folder a git or mercurial repository is the .hg folder in the root of python_koans and the .git folder in the root of python_koans2. So I just need to move the .git folder over into the python_koans folder I'm using for mercurial: ~/git $ rm -rf python_koans/.git ~/git $ mv python_koans2/.git python_koans ~/git $ ls -la python_koans total 48 drwxr-xr-x 11 greg staff 374 Mar 17 15:10 . drwxr-xr-x 62 greg staff 2108 Mar 17 14:58 .. drwxr-xr-x 12 greg staff 408 Mar 17 14:58 .git -rw-r--r-- 1 greg staff 34 Mar 17 14:54 .gitignore drwxr-xr-x 13 greg staff 442 Mar 17 14:54 .hg -rw-r--r-- 1 greg staff 48 Mar 17 14:54 .hgignore -rw-r--r-- 1 greg staff 365 Mar 17 14:54 Contributor Notes.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 greg staff 1082 Mar 17 14:54 MIT-LICENSE -rw-r--r-- 1 greg staff 5765 Mar 17 14:54 README.txt drwxr-xr-x 10 greg staff 340 Mar 17 14:54 python 2 drwxr-xr-x 10 greg staff 340 Mar 17 14:54 python 3 That’s about it! Now git and mercurial are tracking files in the same folder. Of course you will still need to set up your .gitignore to ignore mercurial’s dotfiles and .hgignore to ignore git’s dotfiles or there will be squabbling in the backseat. ~/git $ cd python_koans/ ~/git/python_koans $ cat .gitignore *.pyc *.swp .DS_Store answers .hg <-- Ignore mercurial ~/git/python_koans $ cat .hgignore syntax: glob *.pyc *.swp .DS_Store answers .git <-- Ignore git Because both my mirrors are both identical as far as tracked files are concerned I won’t yet see anything if I check statuses at this point: ~/git/python_koans $ git status # On branch master nothing to commit (working directory clean) ~/git/python_koans $ hg status ~/git/python_koans But how about if I accept a pull request from the bitbucket (mercuial) site? ~/git/python_koans $ hg status ~/git/python_koans $ git status # On branch master # Your branch is behind 'origin/master' by 1 commit, and can be fast-forwarded. # # Changed but not updated: # (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed) # (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory) # # modified: python 2/koans/about_decorating_with_classes.py # modified: python 2/koans/about_iteration.py # modified: python 2/koans/about_with_statements.py # modified: python 3/koans/about_decorating_with_classes.py # modified: python 3/koans/about_iteration.py # modified: python 3/koans/about_with_statements.py Mercurial doesn’t have any changes to track right now, but git has changes. Commit and push them up to github and balance is restored to the force: ~/git/python_koans $ git commit -am "Merge from bitbucket mirror: 'gpiancastelli - Fix for issue #21 and some other tweaks'" [master 79ca184] Merge from bitbucket mirror: 'gpiancastelli - Fix for issue #21 and some other tweaks' 6 files changed, 78 insertions(+), 63 deletions(-) ~/git/python_koans $ git push origin master Or just use hg-git? The github developers have actually published a plugin for automatic mirroring: http://hg-git.github.com I haven’t used it because at the time I tried it a couple of years ago I was having problems getting all the parts to play nice with each other. Probably works fine now though..

  Read the article

• MIX 2010 recap podcast

  - by Chris Williams

  from www.slickthought.net: Spaghetti Code Podcast: Recapping the MIX Conference 4/2/2010 11:06:10 AM Spaghetti Code (Jeff Brand) is joined by Mike Hodnic, Jason Bock, Adam Grocholski and Chris Williams to share their thoughts and impressions from the Microsoft MIX Conference and their thoughts on Windows Phone, Silverlight 4, and more. Direct Download - click here Subscribe - click here iTunes - click here

  Read the article

• Receiving an MVP Award and Credibility

  - by Joe Mayo

  The post titled, The Problem with MVPs, by Steve Barbour was interesting because it makes you think about the thousands of MVPs around the world and what their value really is. Having been the recipient of multiple MVP awards, it’s an opportunity to reflect and judge my own performance. This is not a dangerous thing to do, but quite the opposite. If a person believes in self improvement, then critical analysis is an important part of that process. A lot of MVPs will tell you that they would be doing the same thing, regardless of whether they were an MVP or not; helping others in the community, which is also where I prefer to hang my hat. I’ve never defined myself as an expert and never will; this determination is left to others. In fact, let me just come out and say it, “I don’t know everything”. Shocked? Sometimes the gap between expectations and reality extends beyond a reasonable measure. Being labeled as a technical expert feels good for one's self esteem and is certainly a useful motivational technique. A problem can emerge though when an individual believes, too much, in what they are told. The problem is not with a pat on the back, but with a person does with the positive reinforcement. Is narcissism too strong a word? How often have you been in a public forum reading a demeaning response to a question that only serves in attempt to raise the stature of the person providing the response? Such behavior compromises one’s credibility, raises questions about validity of the MVP award, and is limited in community value. I’m currently under consideration for another MVP award on April 1st. If it happens, it will be good. Otherwise, I’ll keep writing articles, coding open source software, and whatever else I enjoy doing; with the best reward being that people find value in what I do. Joe

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59  | Next Page >