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• Cheating on Technical Debt

  - by Tony Davis

  One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code debt, is a convenient term to cover all the compromises between the ideal solution and the actual solution, reflecting the reality of the pressures of commercial coding. The one time you’re guaranteed to hear one developer, or DBA, pass judgment on another is when he or she inherits their project, and is surprised by the amount of technical debt left lying around in the form of inelegant architecture, incomplete tests, confusing interface design, no documentation, and so on. It is often expedient for a Project Manager to ignore the build-up of technical debt, the cut corners, not-quite-finished features and rushed designs that mean progress is satisfyingly rapid in the short term. It’s far less satisfying for the poor person who inherits the code. Nothing sends a colder chill down the spine than the dawning realization that you’ve inherited a system crippled with performance and functional issues that will take months of pain to fix before you can even begin to make progress on any of the planned new features. It’s often hard to justify this ‘debt paying’ time to the project owners and managers. It just looks as if you are making no progress, in marked contrast to your predecessor. There can be many good reasons for allowing technical debt to build up, at least in the short term. Often, rapid prototyping is essential, there is a temporary shortfall in test resources, or the domain knowledge is incomplete. It may be necessary to hit a specific deadline with a prototype, or proof-of-concept, to explore a possible market opportunity, with planned iterations and refactoring to follow later. However, it is a crime for a developer to build up technical debt without making this clear to the project participants. He or she needs to record it explicitly. A design compromise made in to order to hit a deadline, be it an outright hack, or a decision made without time for rigorous investigation and testing, needs to be documented with the same rigor that one tracks a bug. What’s the best way to do this? Ideally, we’d have some kind of objective assessment of the level of technical debt in a software project, although that smacks of Science Fiction even as I write it. I’d be interested of hear of any methods you’ve used, but I’m sure most teams have to rely simply on the integrity of their colleagues and the clear perceptions of the project manager… Cheers, Tony.

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• More Maintenance Plan Weirdness

  - by AjarnMark

  I’m not a big fan of the built-in Maintenance Plan functionality in SQL Server.  I like the interface in SQL 2005 better than 2000 (it looks more like building an SSIS package) but it’s still a bit of a black box.  You don’t really know what commands are being run based on the selections you have made, and you can easily make some unwise choices without realizing it, such as shrinking your database on a regular basis.  I really prefer to know exactly what commands and with which options are being run on my servers. Recently I had another very strange thing happen with a Maintenance Plan, this time in SQL 2005, SP3.  I inherited this server and have done a bit of cleanup on it, but had not yet gotten around to replacing the Maintenance Plans with all my own scripts.  However, one of the maintenance plans which was just responsible for doing LOG backups was running more frequently than that system needed, and I thought I would just tweak the schedule a bit.  So I opened the Maintenance Plan and edited the properties of the Subplan, setting a new schedule, saved it and figured all was good to go.  But the next execution of the Scheduled Job that triggers the Maintenance Plan code failed with an error about the Owner of the job.  Specifically the error was, “Unable to determine if the owner (OldDomain\OldDBAUserID) of job MaintenancePlanName.Subplan has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'OldDomain\OldDBAUserID’..”  I was really confused because I had previously updated all of the jobs to have current accounts as the owners.  At first I thought it was just a fluke, but it happened on the next scheduled cycle so I investigated further and sure enough, that job had the old DBA’s account listed as the owner.  I fixed it and the job successfully ran to completion. Now, I don’t really like mysteries like that, so I did some more testing and verified that, sure enough, just editing the Subplan schedule and saving the Maintenance Job caused the Scheduled Job to be recreated with the old credentials.  I don’t know where it is getting those credentials, but I can only assume that it is the same as the original creator of the Maintenance Plan, and for some reason it insists on using that ID for the job owner.  I looked through the options in SSMA and could not find anything would let me easily set the value that I wanted it to use.  I suspect that if I did something like executing sp_changeobjectowner against the Maintenance Plan that it would use that new ID instead.  I’m sure that there is good reason that it works this way, but rather than mess around with it much more, I’m just going to spend my time rolling out my replacement scripts instead. Chalk this little hidden oddity up as yet one more reason I’m not a fan of Maintenance Plans.

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• Web Development Goes Pre-Visual InterDev

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  As a longtime and hardcore ASP.NET webforms developer, I’m finding the new client-side development world a bit of a grind.  I love learning new technologies, but I can’t help feeling we’ve regressed and lost our old RAD advantage as we move heavy lifting to the client. For my latest project, I’m using Telerik’s KendoUI in Visual Studio 2012. To say I feel clumsy writing this much JavaScript is an understatement. It seems like the only safe way to ‘write’ this code is by copying a working snippet from someone else and pasting it into my HTML page.  For me, JavaScript has largely been for small UI tasks like client-side validation and a bit of AJAX – and often emitted by a server-side control. I find myself today lost in nests of curly braces that Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D doesn’t seem to understand that well either. IntelliSense, my old syntax saviour, doesn’t seem to have kept up with this cobweb of code either. Code completion? Not seeing it. As I fumbled about this evening, I thought about how web development rocketed forward when Microsoft introduced Visual InterDev. Its Design-Time Controls (DTCs) changed the way we created sites. All the iterations of Visual Studio have enhanced that server-side experience where you let a tool write the bulk of the code and manually finesse it from there. What happened? Why am I typing  properties and values (especially default values!) into VS 2012 to get a client-side grid on a page? Where are the drag and drop objects that traditionally provided 70 percent of the mark-up and configuration?  Did we forget how to write Property Pages where you enter a value and the correct syntax appears magically in the source code? To me, the tooling was looking the other way as the scene shifted from server-side code to nimble client-side script. It’ll have to catch up. Although JavaScript is the lingua franca of web browsers, the language is unwieldy, tough to maintain, and messy to debug. If a .NET JIT compiler can turn our VB, F#, and C# source code into an Intermediate Language that executes on a computer, I don’t see why there can’t be a client-side compiler that turns a .NET language into JavaScript that browsers can consume.

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• OpenGL position from depth is wrong

  - by CoffeeandCode

  My engine is currently implemented using a deferred rendering technique, and today I decided to change it up a bit. First I was storing 5 textures as so: DEPTH24_STENCIL8 - Depth and stencil RGBA32F - Position RGBA10_A2 - Normals RGBA8 x 2 - Specular & Diffuse I decided to minimize it and reconstruct positions from the depth buffer. Trying to figure out what is wrong with my method currently has not been fun :/ Currently I get this: which changes whenever I move the camera... weird Vertex shader really simple #version 150 layout(location = 0) in vec3 position; layout(location = 1) in vec2 uv; out vec2 uv_f; void main(){ uv_f = uv; gl_Position = vec4(position, 1.0); } Fragment shader Where the fun (and not so fun) stuff happens #version 150 uniform sampler2D depth_tex; uniform sampler2D normal_tex; uniform sampler2D diffuse_tex; uniform sampler2D specular_tex; uniform mat4 inv_proj_mat; uniform vec2 nearz_farz; in vec2 uv_f; ... other uniforms and such ... layout(location = 3) out vec4 PostProcess; vec3 reconstruct_pos(){ float z = texture(depth_tex, uv_f).x; vec4 sPos = vec4(uv_f * 2.0 - 1.0, z, 1.0); sPos = inv_proj_mat * sPos; return (sPos.xyz / sPos.w); } void main(){ vec3 pos = reconstruct_pos(); vec3 normal = texture(normal_tex, uv_f).rgb; vec3 diffuse = texture(diffuse_tex, uv_f).rgb; vec4 specular = texture(specular_tex, uv_f); ... do lighting ... PostProcess = vec4(pos, 1.0); // Just for testing } Rendering code probably nothing wrong here, seeing as though it always worked before this->gbuffer->bind(); gl::Clear(gl::COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | gl::DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl::Enable(gl::DEPTH_TEST); gl::Enable(gl::CULL_FACE); ... bind geometry shader and draw models and shiz ... gl::Disable(gl::DEPTH_TEST); gl::Disable(gl::CULL_FACE); gl::Enable(gl::BLEND); ... bind textures and lighting shaders shown above then draw each light ... gl::BindFramebuffer(gl::FRAMEBUFFER, 0); gl::Clear(gl::COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | gl::DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl::Disable(gl::BLEND); ... bind screen shaders and draw quad with PostProcess texture ... Rinse_and_repeat(); // not actually a function ;) Why are my positions being output like they are?

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• Setting up port forwarding for 7000 appliance VM in VirtualBox

  - by uejio

  I've been using the 7000 appliance VM for a lot of testing lately and relied on others to set up the networking for the VM for me, but finally, I decided to take the dive and do it myself.  After some experimenting, I came up with a very brief number of steps to do this all using the VirtualBox CLI instead of the GUI. First download the VM image and unpack it somewhere.  I put it in /var/tmp. Then, set your VBOX_USER_HOME to some place with lots of disk space and import the VM: export VBOX_USER_HOME=/var/tmp/MyVirtualBoxVBoxManage import /var/tmp/simulator/vbox-2011.1.0.0.1.1.8/Sun\ ZFS\ Storage\ 7000.ovf (go get a cup of tea...) Then, set up port forwarding of the VM appliance BUI and shell:First set up port as NAT:VBoxManage modifyvm Sun_ZFS_Storage_7000 --nic1 nat Then set up rules for port forwarding (pick some unused port numbers):VBoxManage modifyvm Sun_ZFS_Storage_7000 --natpf1 "guestssh,tcp,,4622,,22"VBoxManage modifyvm Sun_ZFS_Storage_7000 --natpf1 "guestbui,tcp,,46215,,215" Verify the settings using:VBoxManage showvminfo Sun_ZFS_Storage_7000 | grep -i nic Start the appliance:$ VBoxHeadless --startvm Sun_ZFS_Storage_7000 & Connect to it using your favorite RDP client.  I use a Sun Ray, so I use the Sun Ray Windows Connector client: $ /opt/SUNWuttsc/bin/uttsc -g 800x600 -P <portnumber> <your-hostname> & The portnumber is displayed in the output of the --startvm command.(This did not work after I updated to VirtualBox 4.1.12, so maybe at this point, you need to use the VirtualBox GUI.) It takes a while to first bring up the VM, so please be patient. The longest time is in loading the smf service descriptions, but fortunately, that only needs to be done the first time the VM boots.  There is also a delay in just booting the appliance, so give it some time. Be sure to set the NIC rule on only one port and not all ports otherwise there will be a conflict in ports and it won't work. After going through the initial configuration screen, you can connect to it using ssh or your browser: ssh -p 45022 root@<your-host-name> https://<your-host-name>:45215 BTW, for the initial configuration, I only had to set the hostname and password.  The rest of the defaults were set by VirtualBox and seemed to work fine.

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• Client-Server connection response timeout issues

  - by Srikar

  User creates a folder in client and in the client-side code I hit an API to the server to make this persistent for that user. But in some cases, my server is so busy that the request timesout. The server has executed my request but timedout before sending a response back to client. The timeout set is 10 seconds in client. At this point the client thinks that server has not executed its request (of creating a folder) and ends up sending it again. Now I have 2 folders on the server but the user has created only 1 folder in the client. How to prevent this? One of the ways to solve this is to use a unique ID with each new request. So the ID acts as a distinguisher between old and new requests from client. But this leads to storing these IDs on my server and do a lookup for each API call which I want to avoid. Other way is to increase the timeout duration. But I dont want to change this from 10 seconds. Something tells me that there are better solutions. I have posted this question in stackoverflow but I think its better suited here. UPDATE: I will make my problem even more explicit. The client is a webbrowser and the server is running nginx+django+mysql (standard stack). The user creates a folder in webbrowser. As a result I need to hit a server API. The API call responds back, thereby client knows API call was success. This is normal scenario. Sometimes though, server successfully completes the API request but the client-side (webbrowser) connection timesout before server can respond back. The client has no clue at this point. The user thinks the request was a fail & clicks again. This time it was a success but when the UI refreshes he sees 2 folders. I want to remedy this situation.

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• How can a solo programmer become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Walmart's Mobile Self-Checkout

  - by David Dorf

  Reuters recently reported that Walmart was testing an iPhone-based self-checkout at a store near its headquarters.  Consumers scan items as they're placed in the physical basket, then the virtual basket is transferred to an existing self-checkout station where payment is tendered.  A very solid solution, but not exactly original. Before we go further, let's look at the possible cost savings for Walmart.  According to the article: Pushing more shoppers to scan their own items and make payments without the help of a cashier could save Wal-Mart millions of dollars, Chief Financial Officer Charles Holley said on March 7. The company spends about $12 million in cashier wages every second at its Walmart U.S. stores. Um, yeah. Using back-of-the-napkin math, I calculated Walmart's cashiers are making $157k per hour.  A more accurate statement would be saving $12M per year for each second saved on the average transaction time.  So if this self-checkout approach saves 2 seconds per transaction on average, Walmart would save $24M per year on labor.  Maybe.  Sometimes that savings will be used to do other tasks in the store, so it may not directly translate to less employees. When I saw this approach demonstrated in Sweden, there were a few differences, which may or may not be in Walmart's plans.  First, the consumers were identified based on their loyalty card.  In order to offset the inevitable shrink, retailers need to save on labor but also increase basket size, typically via in-aisle promotions.  As they scan items, retailers should target promos, and that's easier to do if you know some shopping history.  Last I checked, Walmart had no loyalty program. Second, at the self-checkout station consumers were randomly selected for an audit in which they must re-scan all the items just like you do at a typical self-checkout.  If you were found to be stealing, your ability to use the system can be revoked.  That's a tough one in the US, especially when the system goes wrong, either by mistake or by lying.  At least in my view, the Swedes are bit more trustworthy than the people of Walmart. So while I think the idea of mobile self-checkout has merit, perhaps its not right for Walmart.

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• Visual WebGui's XAML based programming for web developers

  - by Webgui

  While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk. Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives. "When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui , I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui. Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability. The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production. VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side. Short demo video of VWG Sites markup. There is also a live sample available here.

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• Precise Touch Screen Dragging Issue: Trouble Aligning with the Finger due to Different Screen Resolution

  - by David Dimalanta

  Please, I need your help. I'm trying to make a game that will drag-n-drop a sprite/image while my finger follows precisely with the image without being offset. When I'm trying on a 900x1280 (in X [900] and Y [1280]) screen resolution of the Google Nexus 7 tablet, it follows precisely. However, if I try testing on a phone smaller than 900x1280, my finger and the image won't aligned properly and correctly except it still dragging. This is the code I used for making a sprite dragging with my finger under touchDragged(): x = ((screenX + Gdx.input.getX())/2) - (fruit.width/2); y = ((camera_2.viewportHeight * multiplier) - ((screenY + Gdx.input.getY())/2) - (fruit.width/2)); This code above will make the finger and the image/sprite stays together in place while dragging but only works on 900x1280. You'll be wondering there's camera_2.viewportHeight in my code. Here are for two reasons: to prevent inverted drag (e.g. when you swipe with your finger downwards, the sprite moves upward instead) and baseline for reading coordinate...I think. Now when I'm adding another orthographic camera named camera_1 and changing its setting, I recently used it for adjusting the falling object by meter per pixel. Also, it seems effective independently for smartphones that has smaller resolution and this is what I used here: show() camera_1 = new OrthographicCamera(); camera_1.viewportHeight = 280; // --> I set it to a smaller view port height so that the object would fall faster, decreasing the chance of drag force. camera_1.viewportWidth = 196; // --> Make it proportion to the original screen view size as possible. camera_1.position.set(camera_1.viewportWidth * 0.5f, camera_1.viewportHeight * 0.5f, 0f); camera_1.update(); touchDragged() x = ((screenX + (camera_1.viewportWidth/Gdx.input.getX()))/2) - (fruit.width/2); y = ((camera_1.viewportHeight * multiplier) - ((screenY + (camera_1.viewportHeight/Gdx.input.getY()))/2) - (fruit.width/2)); But the result instead of just following the image/sprite closely to my finger, it still has a space/gap between the sprite/image and the finger. It is possibly dependent on coordinates based on the screen resolution. I'm trying to drag the blueberry sprite with my finger. My expectation did not met since I want my finger and the sprite/image (blueberry) to stay close together while dragging until I release it. Here's what it looks like: I got to figure it out how to make independent on all screen sizes by just following the image/sprite closely to my finger while dragging even on most different screen sizes instead.

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• Managing Joomla via Android

  Surprisingly, it was only today that I actually looked for possible solutions to write more content for my blog. Since quite some time I'm using my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for all kind of social media activities like Google+, FB, etc. but also for my casual mail during the evening hours. And yes, I feel a little bit guilty about missing the chance to use my tablet to write some content here... OK, only a little bit. ;-) These are not the droids you are looking for But those lazy times are over! While searching the Play Store with the expression 'joomla' I got three interesting hits: - Joomla Admin Mobile! - Joooid - Joomla! Security Checklist After reading the reviews I installed the two later apps. Joomla! Security Checklist The author clearly outlines here that the app is primarily for his personal purpose to have safety checklist at hand at anytime. I guess that any reader of this article has an Android based smartphone or tablet, so that simple app should be part of your toolbox when using Joomla! for your websites. Joooid plugin & app Although I was looking for an app that could work with the default XML RPC interface of Joomla I have to admit that this combination of an enhanced Web service suits me better, mainly due to performance reason. The official website has not only the downloads for Joomla versions 1.5 - 2.5 but also very good and easy to follow step-by-step instructions to prepare your server for the Android app. It will take you less than 5 minutes to get it up and running. For safety reasons, I recommend that you should configure your Web server to have an additional authentication layer on the plugins folder. The smartphone app has the ability to run against HTTP authentication. Personally, I like the look and feel of the app. It is a little bit different compared to the web UI but still easy to use. In fact, this article is the first one written in the Joooid app. At the moment, I only miss the ability to have list tags. Quick and easy Writing full-fledged articles with images, a couple of hyperlinks and some styling here and there should be left to the desktop. At least for the moment. Let's see whether I'm going to change my mind on this during the upcoming months... I'll give it a try, and hope to publish at least once per month to write some content using Joooid. Actually, it would be great to have some feedback about other Joomla! clients in the wild.

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• Who should control navigation in an MVVM application?

  - by SonOfPirate

  Example #1: I have a view displayed in my MVVM application (let's use Silverlight for the purposes of the discussion) and I click on a button that should take me to a new page. Example #2: That same view has another button that, when clicked, should open up a details view in a child window (dialog). We know that there will be Command objects exposed by our ViewModel bound to the buttons with methods that respond to the user's click. But, what then? How do we complete the action? Even if we use a so-called NavigationService, what are we telling it? To be more specific, in a traditional View-first model (like URL-based navigation schemes such as on the web or the SL built-in navigation framework) the Command objects would have to know what View to display next. That seems to cross the line when it comes to the separation of concerns promoted by the pattern. On the other hand, if the button wasn't wired to a Command object and behaved like a hyperlink, the navigation rules could be defined in the markup. But do we want the Views to control application flow and isn't navigation just another type of business logic? (I can say yes in some cases and no in others.) To me, the utopian implementation of the MVVM pattern (and I've heard others profess this) would be to have the ViewModel wired in such a way that the application can run headless (i.e. no Views). This provides the most surface area for code-based testing and makes the Views a true skin on the application. And my ViewModel shouldn't care if it displayed in the main window, a floating panel or a child window, should it? According to this apprach, it is up to some other mechanism at runtime to 'bind' what View should be displayed for each ViewModel. But what if we want to share a View with multiple ViewModels or vice versa? So given the need to manage the View-ViewModel relationship so we know what to display when along with the need to navigate between views, including displaying child windows / dialogs, how do we truly accomplish this in the MVVM pattern?

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• Am I deluding myself? Business analyst transition to programmer

  - by Ryan

  Current job: Working as the lead business analyst for a Big 4 firm, leading a team of developers and testers working on a large scale re-platforming project (4 onshore dev, 4 offshore devs, several onshore/offshore testers). Also work in a similar capacity on other smaller scale projects. Extent of my role: Gathering/writing out requirements, creating functional specifications, designing the UI (basically mapping out all front-end aspects of the system), working closely with devs to communicate/clarify requirements and come up with solutions when we hit roadblocks, writing test cases (and doing much of the testing), working with senior management and key stakeholders, managing beta testers, creating user guides and leading training sessions, providing key technical support. I also write quite a few macros in Excel using VBA (several of my macros are now used across the entire firm, so there are maybe around 1000 people using them) and use SQL on a daily basis, both on the SQL compact files the program relies on, our SQL Server data and any Access databases I create. The developers feel that I am quite good in this role because I understand a lot about programming, inherent system limitations, structure of the databases, etc so it's easier for me to communicate ideas and come up with suggestions when we face problems. What really interests me is developing software. I do a fair amount of programming in VBA and have been wanting to learn C# for awhile (the dev team uses C# - I review code occasionally for my own sake but have not had any practical experience using it). I'm interested in not just the business process but also the technical side of things, so the traditional BA role doesn't really whet my appetite for the kind of stuff I want to do. Right now I have a few small projects that managers have given me and I'm finding new ways to do them (like building custom Access applications), so there's a bit here and there to keep me interested. My question is this: what I would like to do is create custom Excel or Access applications for small businesses as a freelance business (working as a one-man shop; maybe having an occasional contractor depending on a project's complexity). This would obviously start out as a part-time venture while I have a day job, but eventually become a full-time job. Am I deluding myself to thinking I can go from BA/part-time VBA programmer to making a full-time go of a freelance business (where I would be starting out just writing custom Excel/Access apps in VBA)? Or is this type of thing not usually attempted until someone gains years of full-time programming experience? And is there even a market for these types of applications amongst small businesses (and maybe medium-sized) businesses?

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• How to suggest using an ORM instead of stored procedures?

  - by Wayne M

  I work at a company that only uses stored procedures for all data access, which makes it very annoying to keep our local databases in sync as every commit we have to run new procs. I have used some basic ORMs in the past and I find the experience much better and cleaner. I'd like to suggest to the development manager and rest of the team that we look into using an ORM Of some kind for future development (the rest of the team are only familiar with stored procedures and have never used anything else). The current architecture is .NET 3.5 written like .NET 1.1, with "god classes" that use a strange implementation of ActiveRecord and return untyped DataSets which are looped over in code-behind files - the classes work something like this: class Foo { public bool LoadFoo() { bool blnResult = false; if (this.FooID == 0) { throw new Exception("FooID must be set before calling this method."); } DataSet ds = // ... call to Sproc if (ds.Tables[0].Rows.Count > 0) { foo.FooName = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0]["FooName"].ToString(); // other properties set blnResult = true; } return blnResult; } } // Consumer Foo foo = new Foo(); foo.FooID = 1234; foo.LoadFoo(); // do stuff with foo... There is pretty much no application of any design patterns. There are no tests whatsoever (nobody else knows how to write unit tests, and testing is done through manually loading up the website and poking around). Looking through our database we have: 199 tables, 13 views, a whopping 926 stored procedures and 93 functions. About 30 or so tables are used for batch jobs or external things, the remainder are used in our core application. Is it even worth pursuing a different approach in this scenario? I'm talking about moving forward only since we aren't allowed to refactor the existing code since "it works" so we cannot change the existing classes to use an ORM, but I don't know how often we add brand new modules instead of adding to/fixing current modules so I'm not sure if an ORM is the right approach (too much invested in stored procedures and DataSets). If it is the right choice, how should I present the case for using one? Off the top of my head the only benefits I can think of is having cleaner code (although it might not be, since the current architecture isn't built with ORMs in mind so we would basically be jury-rigging ORMs on to future modules but the old ones would still be using the DataSets) and less hassle to have to remember what procedure scripts have been run and which need to be run, etc. but that's it, and I don't know how compelling an argument that would be. Maintainability is another concern but one that nobody except me seems to be concerned about.

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• BIP 10.1.3.4.x June 2010 Update Available

  - by Tim Dexter

  A new patchset for 10.1.3.4.0 and 10.1.3.4.1 is available on Metalink. some notes: The patch number is 9791839. This patchset includes 28 new bug fixes since the last patchset release on March 31. This is a culmulative update that includes all the fixes and enhancements from previous updates. The patch will supercede the other two updates. Install instructions are in the readme inside the patch There is also a new BIP client patch available, 9821068. No new template building features to my knowledge but there is an update to the template viewer to allow you to test and debug you siny new Excel templates. Server 8529759XMLP_TEMPLATE_DESIGNER CANNOT SAVE / UPLOAD TEMPLATE 8566455 BI PUBLISHER SCHEDULER DOES NOT START WITH JNDI DATA SOURCE 9295667RESPONSE OF GETSCHEDULEDREPORTINFO RETURNS STATUS AS 'UNKNOWN' INSTEAD OF 'SCHED 9542413 UNABLE TO CREATE A NEW TEMPLATE FROM UI 9546137 EXCEL ANALYZER TEMPLATE FAILS FOR A STRUCTURED XML WHEN IT IS UPLOADED 9556338 SIEBEL - BIP PARAMETERS SORT ORDER 9560562 BI PUBLISHER CACHE DIRECTORY FILLING UP AND POINTING TO INVALID DIRECTORY 9646599 USER ROLE DEFINED AS PRIMARYGROUP IN ACTIVEDIRECTORY GROUP ARE NOT RECOGNIZED 9664768 ER: NEED TO BIND USER ATTRIBUTE VALUES DEFINED IN ACTIVEDIRECTORY IN DATA QUERY 9665075 BI PUBLISHER AFTER 9546699 NOTIFICATIONS FOR REPORTS FAIL 9669973 ER: NEED TO SUPPORT PRE-PROCESSING XML WITH XSL FOR EXCEL TEMPLATE 9704401 ER: NEED TO SUPPORT DEFAULT GROUP FOR ALL USERS IN LDAP/AD SECURITY 9711899 SEARCH PARAMETER IS NOT VISIBLE WHEN SCHEDULE A REPORT 9753736 SOME ROLES FROM ACTIVEDIRECTORY ARE NOT LISTED IN ADMIN ROLE-FOLDER MAPPING 9771354 MULTIPLE PARAMETERS IN 10.1.3.4.1 DATA TEMPLATE ACT ACT DIFFERENTLY FROM 10.1.3. 9772982 "REFRESH OTHER PARAMETERS ON CHANGE" DOESN'T WORK PROPERLY Core  8599646 ER:EXTRA SPACE ADDED BELOW IMAGE IN A TABLE CELL OF TEMPLATE IN FIREFOX 9377593 SOME ROWS HEIGHT IN HTML/EXCEL OUTPUT ARE TOO BIG IN BI PUBLISHER 9487030 NAVIGATION TREE REPEATING TWICE IN PDF DCCUMENT CREATED BY BI PUBLISHER 9509432 PERFORMANCE ISSUE WHEN USING PDF TEMPLATE 9534424 PS: DOCUMENT-REPEAT-FULLPATH-ELEMENTNAME SHOULDNT USE DOT "." AS PATH SEPARATOR 9553360 FORMPROCESSOR CANNOT PARSE SOME PDF TEMPLATES 9554959 TEXT IN AUTOSHAPE IS NOT PROPERLY CUT OFF FOR LINE WRAPPING 9569417 AFTER APPLYING PATCH 9509432 PDF TEMPLATES WITH DBDRV PRODUCE NO OUTPUT 9571670 ER: EXCEL TEMPLATE TO SUPPORT XSLT LOGIC AND XSL CUSTOM EXTENTIONS 9589809 XSL:CALL-TEMPLATE IS MISSING IN GENERATED XSL FILE 9605920 BOOKMARK TESTCASE FAILED DUE TO ER9283933 9689634 PRINT FLOW CHART USING ACROSS 3 DOWN 0 GIVES EXTRA BLANK PAGES You might have noticed some fixes and ehancements to the Excel templates so I can get back on those now. There is a part two to the Mapviewer BIP Mashup coming ... just need aanother 4 hours in the day to squeeze it in.

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• Base Pages and Interfaces for ASP.NET Pages

  - by geekrutherford

  For quite a while I have been using the concept of base pages when developing pages in ASP.NET applications. It is a wonderful method for exposing common functions to all of your applications pages and also overriding certain events for various purposes (i.e. dynamic themes).  Recently I found out a new developer will be joining my team. This prompted me to review the applications code for readability and ease of maintenance. I began adding comments through out the code behind for all pages within the application. While doing so I noted that I had used common method names for such things as loading data, configuring controls, applying filters, etc.   Bringing a new developer on board, I wanted to make the transition as seamless as possible while also ensuring they follow existing coding practices we already have in place. While I could have created virtual methods for the common page methods allowing them to overridden, what I really needed was a way to ensure the new developer implemented the same methods for each and every page. Thus I created an interface to force the issue.   Now, every page not only inherits the base page class but also implements an interface. This provides every page not only common functions and overridden page events but also imposes rules for implementing certain common methods :-)   Interface   public interface BasePageInterface { /// Configures page based on users security permissions. void CheckPermissions(); /// Configures Filter Form control for current page.  /// Ensure you have set the FilteredGrid and PageAjaxManager properties of the FilterForm control in PageLoad!!!  void ConfigureFilters(); /// Sets event handlers and default settings for controls on the current page. void ConfigureControls(); /// Exports data bound to grid in selected format. void ExportGridData(ExportFormat fmt); /// Loads data and binds to grid. /// Columns are turned on/off in grid depending on tab selected and users permissions.  void LoadData(); }   Page code-behind class definition:   public partial class MyPage : BasePage, BasePageInterface Note, you could not use an abstract class to accomplish this considering C# does not allow for multiple inheritance.  Nor could the base page class be abstract since it needs to inherit from the System.Web.UI.Page class in order to override page events.

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• Windows 8 and the future of Silverlight

  - by Laila

  After Steve Ballmer's indiscrete 'MisSpeak' about Windows 8, there has been a lot of speculation about the new operating system. We've now had a few glimpses, such as the demonstration of 'Mosh' at the D9 2011 conference, and the Youtube video, which showed a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript. This has caused acute anxiety to the programmers who have followed the recommended route of WPF, Silverlight and .NET, but it need not have caused quite so much panic since it was, in fact, just a thin layer to make Windows into an apparently mobile-friendly OS. More worryingly, the press-release from Microsoft was at pains to say that 'Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML', as if all thought of Silverlight, dominant in WP7, had been jettisoned. Ironically, this brave new 'happening' platform can all be done now in Windows 7 and an iPad, using Adobe Air, so it is hardly cutting-edge; in fact the tile interface had a sort of Retro-Zune Metro UI feel first seen in Media Centre, followed by Windows Phone 7, with any originality leached out of it by the corporate decision-making process. It was kinda weird seeing old Excel running alongside stodgily away amongst all the extreme paragliding videos. The ability to snap and resize concurrent apps might be a novelty on a tablet, but it is hardly so on a PC. It was at that moment that it struck me that here was a spreadsheet application that hadn't even made the leap to the .NET platform. Windows was once again trying to be all things to all men, whereas Apple had carefully separated Mac OS X development from iOS. The acrobatic feat of straddling all mobile and desktop devices with one OS is looking increasingly implausible. There is a world of difference between an operating system that facilitates business procedures and a one that drives a device for playing pop videos and your holiday photos. So where does this leave Silverlight? Pretty much where it was. Windows 8 will support it, and it will continue to be developed, but if these press-releases reflect the thinking within Microsoft, it is no longer seen as the strategic direction. However, Silverlight is still there and there will be a whole new set of developer APIs for building touch-centric apps. Jupiter, for example, is rumoured to involve an App store that provides new, Silverlight based "immersive" applications that are deployed as AppX packages. When the smoke clears, one suspects that the Javascript/HTML5 is merely an alternative development environment for Windows 8 to attract the legions of independent developers outside the .NET culture who are unlikely to ever take a shine to a more serious development environment such as WPF or Silverlight. Cheers, Laila

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• Would someone please explain Octree Collisions to me?

  - by A-Type

  I've been reading everything I can find on the subject and I feel like the pieces are just about to fall into place, but I just can't quite get it. I'm making a space game, where collisions will occur between planets, ships, asteroids, and the sun. Each of these objects can be subdivided into 'chunks', which I have implemented to speed up rendering (the vertices can and will change often at runtime, so I've separated the buffers). These subdivisions also have bounding primitives to test for collision. All of these objects are made of blocks (yeah, it's that kind of game). Blocks can also be tested for rough collisions, though they do not have individual bounding primitives for memory reasons. I think the rough testing seems to be sufficient, though. So, collision needs to be fairly precise; at block resolution. Some functions rely on two blocks colliding. And, of course, attacking specific blocks is important. Now what I am struggling with is filtering my collision pairs. As I said, I've read a lot about Octrees, but I'm having trouble applying it to my situation as many tutorials are vague with very little code. My main issues are: Are Octrees recalculated each frame, or are they stored in memory and objects are shuffled into different divisions as they move? Despite all my reading I still am not clear on this... the vagueness of it all has been frustrating. How far do Octrees subdivide? Planets in my game are quite large, while asteroids are smaller. Do I subdivide to the size of the planet, or asteroid (where planet is in multiple divisions)? Or is the limit something else entirely, like number of elements in the division? Should I load objects into the octrees as 'chunks' or in the whole, then break into chunks later? This could be specific to my implementation, I suppose. I was going to ask about how big my root needed to be, but I did manage to find this question, and the second answer seems sufficient for me. I'm afraid I don't really get what he means by adding new nodes and doing subdivisions upon adding new objects, probably because I'm confused about whether the tree is maintained in memory or recalculated per-frame.

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• Question about BoundingSpheres and Ray intersections

  - by NDraskovic

  I'm working on a XNA project (not really a game) and I'm having some trouble with picking algorithm. I have a few types of 3D models that I draw to the screen, and one of them is a switch. So I'm trying to make a picking algorithm that would enable the user to click on the switch and that would trigger some other function. The problem is that the BoundingSphere.Intersect() method always returns null as result. This is the code I'm using: In the declaration section: ` //Basic matrices private Matrix world = Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(0, 0, 0)); private Matrix view = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(10, 10, 10), new Vector3(0, 0, 0), Vector3.UnitY); private Matrix projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(MathHelper.ToRadians(45), 800f / 600f, 0.01f, 100f); //Collision detection variables Viewport mainViewport; List<BoundingSphere> spheres = new List<BoundingSphere>(); Ray ControlRay; Vector3 nearPoint, farPoint, nearPlane, farPlane, direction; ` And then in the Update method: ` nearPlane = new Vector3((float)Mouse.GetState().X, (float)Mouse.GetState().Y, 0.0f); farPlane = new Vector3((float)Mouse.GetState().X, (float)Mouse.GetState().Y, 10.0f); nearPoint = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(nearPlane, projection, view, world); farPoint = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(farPlane, projection, view, world); direction = farPoint - nearPoint; direction.Normalize(); ControlRay = new Ray(nearPoint, direction); if (spheres.Count != 0) { for (int i = 0; i < spheres.Count; i++) { if (spheres[i].Intersects(ControlRay) != null) { Window.Title = spheres[i].Center.ToString(); } else { Window.Title = "Empty"; } } ` The "spheres" list gets filled when the 3D object data gets loaded (I read it from a .txt file). For every object marked as switch (I use simple numbers to determine which object is to be drawn), a BoundingSphere is created (center is on the coordinates of the 3D object, and the diameter is always the same), and added to the list. The objects are drawn normally (and spheres.Count is not 0), I can see them on the screen, but the Window title always says "Empty" (of course this is just for testing purposes, I will add the real function when I get positive results) meaning that there is no intersection between the ControlRay and any of the bounding spheres. I think that my basic matrices (world, view and projection) are making some problems, but I cant figure out what. Please help.

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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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• TechEd 2012: Windows 8 And Metro

  - by Tim Murphy

  Windows 8 is here (or at least very close) and that was the main feature of this morning’s key note.  Antoine LeBlond started off by apologizing to the IT professionals since he planned on showing code.  I’m not sure if IT Pros are that easily confused or why you would need such a disclaimer.  Developers do real work, IT Pros just play with toys (just kidding). The highlights of the Windows 8 keynote for me started with some of the UI design elements that I had not seen when I was shown one of the Build tablets.  Specifically I liked the AppBar features that we have become used to with Windows Phone and some of the gesture features.  Even though they have been available on other platforms before I think Microsoft really got them right. Two other great features of Windows 8 that they demonstrated were the Hyper-V capabilities and the ability to run Windows 8 anywhere from a USB key.  My jaw dropped through the floor seeing a feature rich OS boot off of a thumb drive. WOW!  I also can’t wait to get rid of dual booting just to run Hyper-V images when developing. The morning continued with a session on Metro XAML development with Tim Heuer.  While included a lot of great XAML Metro demos, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things I found out about Visual Studio 2012.  Finding out that Blend is now integrated with VS2012 was a nice addition after working with them as separate applications was an encouraging start. Moving on to Metro he introduced the nugget that WinRT is Async everywhere.  How deep this model goes will be an interesting thing to find out as I learn more about developing for the platform.  Thankfully he followed that up with a couple of new keywords, await and async, that eliminates a lot of plumbing that has been required in the past for asynchronous transactions. Tim also related that since the Metro framework is relatively small and most apps will use a significant amount of it the entire surface is referenced by default.  This is a contrast to adding namespace and assemblies one after another as we normally do. This was such a power packed session that I can’t detail it all here so here is the teaser list. New icons in VS2012 for extension methods Emulator/simulator testing features for gestures Portable class libraries XAML no longer managed code And so much more …   del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Metro,Tim Heuer,XAML,Widows Phone,Hyper-V,Antoine LeBlond,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012,Visual Studio

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• Java Embedded Releases

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Oracle today announced a new product in its Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) product portfolio, Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2, a complete client Java runtime Optimized for resource-constrained, connected, embedded systems.  Also, Oracle is releasing Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2, Oracle Java ME Software Development Kit (SDK) 3.2. Oracle also announced Oracle Java Embedded Suite 7.0 for larger embedded devices, providing a middleware stack for embedded systems. Small is the new big! Introducing Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2  Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 is designed and optimized to meet the unique requirements of small embedded, low power devices such as micro-controllers and other resource-constrained hardware without screens or user interfaces. These include: On-the-fly application downloads and updates Remote operation, often in challenging environments Ability to add new capabilities without impacting the existing functions Support for hardware with as little as 130 kB RAM and 350 kB ROM Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2 Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2 is built around an optimized Java ME implementation that delivers a feature-rich application environment for mass-market mobile devices. This new release: Leverages standard JSRs, Oracle optimizations/APIs and a flexible porting layer for device specific customizations, which are tuned to device/chipset requirements Supports advanced tooling functions, such as memory and network monitoring and on-device tooling Offers new support for dual SIM functionality, which is highly useful for mass-market devices supported by multiple carriers with multiple phone connections Oracle Java ME SDK 3.2 Oracle Java ME SDK 3.2 provides a complete development environment for both Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 and Oracle Java Wireless Client 3.2. Available for download from OTN, The latest version includes: Small embedded device support In-field and remote administration and debugging Java ME SDK plug-ins for Eclipse and the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE), enabling more application development environments for Java ME developers. A new device skin creator that developers can use to generate their custom device skins for testing their applications. Oracle Embedded Suite 7.0 The Oracle Java Embedded Suite is a new packaged solution from Oracle (including Java DB, GlassFish for Embedded Suite, Jersey Web Services Framework, and Oracle Java SE Embedded 7 platform), created to provide value added services for collecting, managing, and transmitting data to and from other embedded devices.The Oracle Java Embedded Suite is a complete device-to-data center solution subset for embedded systems.  See Java Me and Java Embedded in Action Java ME and Java Embedded technologies will be showcased for developers at JavaOne 2012 in over 60 conference sessions and BOFs, as well as in the JavaOne Exhibition Hall. For business decision makers, the new event Java Embedded @ JavaOne you learn more about Java Embedded technologies and solutions.

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• Black screen on latest Nvidia Cards when starting LightDM/Ubuntu

  - by Luis Alvarado

  Today I installed an Nvidia GT440 on my computer, changing the one that existed there, an Nvidia 9500GT. After changing it I started getting a problem where the screen just went black when loading the lightdm login screen (Where I punt my user and password). The thing is, if I disconnect the VGA cable and connect it again I get to see the lightdm greeter and everything works perfect. The problem is that I have to connect/disconnect every time I reboot the PC. I tried installing the 285.xx drivers. Same problem. I removed the Nvidia drivers installed with Jockey, rebooted, same problem. I install the current 280.xx again, same problem. After all that I installed a fresh install of Ubuntu, selected to install the Nvidia drivers while installing it from the livecd. After booting the same problem appeared. Dmesg does not say anything wrong about it. Same goes for the log from Jockey. What else should I check or what to do to solve it. Just to clarify, this does not happen BEFORE the lightdm greeter appears. Am guessing before the actual use of the video card with X starts with all the 2D/3D stuff that is used in ligthdm and unity. I can use any tty and even see the Ubuntu logo when starting. UPDATE: When I open a game in fullscreen the problem appears again. I have to unplug the monitor cable and plug it back in to see the game. Then when I quit the game I have to do it again to see the desktop. UPDATE 2: Today I bought a HDMI cable, connected the video card to the TV am testing it with and it actually did log in correctly without any black screen but it shows the resolution a little over the actual size of the screen. So I see only half of the launcher since the left side of it is hidden outside of the real resolution and the top bar is beyond the resolution. So the black screen is related to the VGA connection.

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• Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook book review

  - by Chris Muir

  I recently received a free copy of Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook published by Packt Publishing for review. Readers of technical cookbooks would know this genre of text includes problems that developers will hit and the prescribed solutions, in this case for Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF).  Books like this excel themselves on excellent coverage, a logical progress of solutions through out the book, and providing a readable narrative around the numerous steps and code. This book progresses well through ADF application assembly, ADF Business Components, the view layer, security, deployment and tuning.  Each recipe had a clear introduction and I especially enjoyed the "There's more" follow up sections for some recipes that leads the reader onto related ideas and issues the reader really needs to be aware of. Also worthy of comment having worked with ADF for over 5 years, there certainly was recipes and solutions I hadn't encountered before, this book gets bonus points for that. As a reviewer what negatives can I give this text? The book has cast it's net too wide by trying to cover "everything from design and construction, to deployment, testing, debugging and optimization."  ADF is such a large and sophistication technology, this book with 100 recipes barely scrapes the surface.  Don't expect all your ADF problems to be solved here. In turn there is inconsistency in the level of problems and solutions.  I felt at the beginning the book was pitching itself at advanced problems to solve (that's great for me), but then it introduces topics like building a static View Object or train.  These topics in my opinion are fairly simple and are covered by the Oracle documentation just as well, they shouldn't have been included here.  In conclusion, ADF beginners will find this book worthwhile as it will open your eyes to the wider problems and solutions required for ADF, and experts for just the fact they can point junior programmers at the book for certain problems and say "get on with it". Is there scope for more ADF tombs like this?  Yes!  I'd love to see a cookbook specializing on ADF Business Components (hint hint to budding authors).

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• Are there any concerns with using a static read-only unit of work so that it behaves like a cache?

  - by Rowan Freeman

  Related question: How do I cache data that rarely changes? I'm making an ASP.NET MVC4 application. On every request the security details about the user will need to be checked with the area/controller/action that they are accessing to see if they are allowed to view it. The security information is stored in the database. For example: User Permission UserPermission Action ActionPermission A "Permission" is a token that is applied to an MVC action to indicate that the token is required in order to access the action. Once a user is given the permission (via the UserPermission table) then they have the token and can therefore access the action. I've been looking in to how to cache this data (since it rarely changes) so that I'm only querying in-memory data and not hitting a database (which is a considerable performance hit at the moment). I've tried storing things in lists, using a caching provider but I either run in to problems or performance doesn't improve. One problem that I constantly run in to is that I'm using lazy loading and dynamic proxies with EntityFramework. This means that even if I ToList() everything and store them somewhere static, the relationships are never populated. For example, User.Permissions is an ICollection but it's always null. I don't want to Include() everything because I'm trying to keep things simple and generic (and easy to modify). One thing I know is that an EntityFramework DbContext is a unit of work that acts with 1st-level caching. That is, for the duration of the unit of work, everything that is accessed is cached in memory. I want to create a read-only DbContext that will exist indefinitely and will only be used to read about permission data. Upon testing this it worked perfectly; my page load times went from 200ms+ to 20ms. I can easily force the data to refresh at certain intervals or simply leave it to refresh when the application pool is recycled. Basically it will behave like a cache. Note that the rest of the application will interact with other contexts that exist per request as normal. Is there any disadvantage to this approach? Could I be doing something different?

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