Search Results

Search found 89214 results on 3569 pages for 'code statistics'.

Page 739/3569 | < Previous Page | 735 736 737 738 739 740 741 742 743 744 745 746  | Next Page >

• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

  Read the article

• Web API, JavaScript, Chrome &amp; Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

  - by Brian Lanham

  The team spent much of the week working through this issues related to Chrome running on Windows 8 consuming cross-origin resources using Web API.  We thought it was resolved on day 2 but it resurfaced the next day.  We definitely resolved it today though.  I believe I do not fully understand the situation but I am going to explain what I know in an effort to help you avoid and/or resolve a similar issue. References We referenced many sources during our trial-and-error troubleshooting.  These are the links we reference in order of applicability to the solution: Zoiner Tejada JavaScript and other material from -> http://www.devproconnections.com/content1/topic/microsoft-azure-cors-141869/catpath/windows-azure-platform2/page/3 WebDAV Where I learned about “Accept” –>  http://www-jo.se/f.pfleger/cors-and-iis? IT Hit Tells about NOT using ‘*’ –> http://www.webdavsystem.com/ajax/programming/cross_origin_requests Carlos Figueira Sample back-end code (newer) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d (older version) –> http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CORS-support-in-ASPNET-Web-01e9980a   Background As a measure of protection, Web designers (W3C) and implementers (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla) made it so that a request, especially a JSON request (but really any URL), sent from one domain to another will only work if the requestee “knows” about the requester and allows requests from it. So, for example, if you write a ASP.NET MVC Web API service and try to consume it from multiple apps, the browsers used may (will?) indicate that you are not allowed by showing an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” error indicating the requester is not allowed to make requests. Internet Explorer (big surprise) is the odd-hair-colored step-child in this mix. It seems that running locally at least IE allows this for development purposes.  Chrome and Firefox do not.  In fact, Chrome is quite restrictive.  Notice the images below. IE shows data (a tabular view with one row for each day of a week) while Chrome does not (trust me, neither does Firefox).  Further, the Chrome developer console shows an XmlHttpRequest (XHR) error. Screen captures from IE (left) and Chrome (right). Note that Chrome does not display data and the console shows an XHR error. Why does this happen? The Web browser submits these requests and processes the responses and each browser is different. Okay, so, IE is probably the only one that’s truly different.  However, Chrome has a specific process of performing a “pre-flight” check to make sure the service can respond to an “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) request.  So basically, the sequence is, if I understand correctly:  1)Page Loads –> 2)JavaScript Request Processed by Browser –> 3)Browsers Prepares to Submit Request –> 4)[Chrome] Browser Submits Pre-Flight Request –> 5)Server Responds with HTTP 200 –> 6)Browser Submits Request –> 7)Server Responds with Data –> 8)Page Shows Data This situation occurs for both GET and POST methods.  Typically, GET methods are called with query string parameters so there is no data posted.  Instead, the requesting domain needs to be permitted to request data but generally nothing more is required.  POSTs on the other hand send form data.  Therefore, more configuration is required (you’ll see the configuration below).  AJAX requests are not friendly with this (POSTs) either because they don’t post in a form. How to fix it. The team went through many iterations of self-hair removal and we think we finally have a working solution.  The trial-and-error approach eventually worked and we referenced many sources for the information.  I indicate those references above.  There are basically three (3) tasks needed to make this work. Assumptions: You are using Visual Studio, Web API, JavaScript, and have Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, and several browsers. 1. Configure the client Joel Cochran centralized our “cors-oriented” JavaScript (from here). There are two calls including one for GET and one for POST function(url, data, callback) {             console.log(data);             $.support.cors = true;             var jqxhr = $.post(url, data, callback, "json")                 .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) {                     if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) {                         var xdr = new XDomainRequest();                         xdr.open("post", url);                         xdr.onload = function () {                             if (callback) {                                 callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success');                             }                         };                         xdr.send(data);                     } else {                         console.log(">" + jqXhHR.status);                         alert("corsAjax.post error: " + status + ", " + errorThrown);                     }                 });         }; The GET CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) function(url, callback) {             $.support.cors = true;             var jqxhr = $.get(url, null, callback, "json")                 .error(function(jqXhHR, status, errorThrown) {                     if ($.browser.msie && window.XDomainRequest) {                         var xdr = new XDomainRequest();                         xdr.open("get", url);                         xdr.onload = function () {                             if (callback) {                                 callback(JSON.parse(this.responseText), 'success');                             }                         };                         xdr.send();                     } else {                         alert("CORS is not supported in this browser or from this origin.");                     }                 });         }; The POST CORS JavaScript function (credit to Zoiner Tejada) Now you need to call these functions to get and post your data (instead of, say, using $.Ajax). Here is a GET example: corsAjax.get(url, function(data) { if (data !== null && data.length !== undefined) { // do something with data } }); And here is a POST example: corsAjax.post(url, item); Simple…except…you’re not done yet. 2. Change Web API Controllers to Allow CORS There are actually two steps here.  Do you remember above when we mentioned the “pre-flight” check?  Chrome actually asks the server if it is allowed to ask it for cross-origin resource sharing access.  So you need to let the server know it’s okay.  This is a two-part activity.  a) Add the appropriate response header Access-Control-Allow-Origin, and b) permit the API functions to respond to various methods including GET, POST, and OPTIONS.  OPTIONS is the method that Chrome and other browsers use to ask the server if it can ask about permissions.  Here is an example of a Web API controller thus decorated: NOTE: You’ll see a lot of references to using “*” in the header value.  For security reasons, Chrome does NOT recognize this is valid. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "http://localhost:51234")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Credentials", "true")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, COPY, MOVE, DELETE, MKCOL, LOCK, UNLOCK, PUT, GETLIB, VERSION-CONTROL, CHECKIN, CHECKOUT, UNCHECKOUT, REPORT, UPDATE, CANCELUPLOAD, HEAD, OPTIONS, GET, POST")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destination, Content-Type, Depth, User-Agent, X-File-Size, X-Requested-With, If-Modified-Since, X-File-Name, Cache-Control")] [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Max-Age", "3600")] public abstract class BaseApiController : ApiController {     [HttpGet]     [HttpOptions]     public IEnumerable<foo> GetFooItems(int id)     {         return foo.AsEnumerable();     }     [HttpPost]     [HttpOptions]     public void UpdateFooItem(FooItem fooItem)     {         // NOTE: The fooItem object may or may not         // (probably NOT) be set with actual data.         // If not, you need to extract the data from         // the posted form manually.         if (fooItem.Id == 0) // However you check for default...         {             // We use NewtonSoft.Json.             string jsonString = context.Request.Form.GetValues(0)[0].ToString();             Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer js = new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer();             fooItem = js.Deserialize<FooItem>(new Newtonsoft.Json.JsonTextReader(new System.IO.StringReader(jsonString)));         }         // Update the set fooItem object.     } } Please note a few specific additions here: * The header attributes at the class level are required.  Note all of those methods and headers need to be specified but we find it works this way so we aren’t touching it. * Web API will actually deserialize the posted data into the object parameter of the called method on occasion but so far we don’t know why it does and doesn’t. * [HttpOptions] is, again, required for the pre-flight check. * The “Access-Control-Allow-Origin” response header should NOT NOT NOT contain an ‘*’. 3. Headers and Methods and Such We had most of this code in place but found that Chrome and Firefox still did not render the data.  Interestingly enough, Fiddler showed that the GET calls succeeded and the JSON data is returned properly.  We learned that among the headers set at the class level, we needed to add “ACCEPT”.  Note that I accidentally added it to methods and to headers.  Adding it to methods worked but I don’t know why.  We added it to headers also for good measure. [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods", "ACCEPT, PROPFIND, PROPPA... [HttpHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Headers", "Accept, Overwrite, Destin... Next Steps That should do it.  If it doesn’t let us know.  What to do next?  * Don’t hardcode the allowed domains.  Note that port numbers and other domain name specifics will cause problems and must be specified.  If this changes do you really want to deploy updated software?  Consider Miguel Figueira’s approach in the following link to writing a custom HttpHeaderAttribute class that allows you to specify the domain names and then you can do it dynamically.  There are, of course, other ways to do it dynamically but this is a clean approach. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Implementing-CORS-support-a677ab5d

  Read the article

• Ogre3D, OGRE_NEW gives editor errors

  - by automaticoo

  Hello Game Developers, I am trying to get more experienced with OGRE3D and I am following the basic tutorials on the website. All the code samples compile just fine. The first time I encountered a "error" was in Basic Tutorurial 3. The code line where visual studio says something is not right is : mTerrainGroup = OGRE_NEW Ogre::TerrainGroup(mSceneMgr, Ogre::Terrain::ALIGN_X_Z, 513, 12000.0f); Visual studio compiles this line but it shows a ugly red line beneath it and on mouse hover it says "#define OGRE_NEW new (FILE, LINE, FUNCTION) Error: no instance of overloaded 'operator new' matches the argument list" or if I mouse hover over Ogre::TerrainGlobalOptions() it says "Error: expected a type specifier". I searched on google but couldn't find my answer. I got about a year c++ experience but that was mainly with the WinSock libarys. Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• farseer physics xbox samples not working

  - by Hugh

  I have downloaded a few of the sample projects from the official farseer physics website and i just cant get them to run on my xbox. -My connection to the xbox is fine, other xbox projects debug fine on my xbox -I have tried running both the xbox versions of the samples (for example the farseer hello world sample project) and the windows version by right-clicking the project and making a copy for xbox. I get a bunch of errors but what i always get is "unreachable code detected" referring to code in the farseer library, it seems to be a problem to do with referencing/linking the farseer library to the main game project. Help please!

  Read the article

• Silverlight Cream for April 18, 2010 -- #840

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: CrocusGirl, Giorgetti Alessandro(-2-), smartyP, Pete Brown, David Poll, David Anson, and Bill Reiss. Shoutouts: Yasser Makram has a post up discussing Human Centered ALM with Telerik TeamPulse and Team Foundation Server. I saw this demo'd at DevConnnections and it definitely deserves a look. Shawn Wildermuth posted his materials from DevConnections all on one post: Back from DevConnections with SourceCode Shawn Wildermuth also posted an Updated RIA Services + MVVM Example Laurent Bugnion announced a Small change in MVVM Light Toolkit templates for Blend 4 RC Laurent Bugnion also announced Crowdsourcing MVVM Light Toolkit support The Expression Blend and Design Blog announced Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate Available! Dan Wahlin posted Slides and Code from my Silverlight MVVM Talk at DevConnections From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone 7 Design Notes – Part#1: Metro Resources CrocusGirl has blogged about WP7 and the Metro design concept. She has a bunch of resources up and information about Metro and the design methodology. Stay tuned for Part 2. Silverlight, M-V-VM ... and IoC - part 1 Giorgetti Alessandro has part 1 of a multi-parter up on IoC and MVVM for LOB apps in Silverlight ... a pretty quick into to MVVM. Silverlight, M-V-VM … and IoC – part 2 Giorgetti Alessandro also posted part 2 of his series, and this one digs deeper into the code and discusses what goes into the view and the model. Using the Facebook Developer Toolkit With Windows Phone 7 smartyP has a post addressing using the Facebook Developer toolkit with WP7... it took some hacking, and he explains it, and provides it for download. Silverlight and WPF Tip: Fitting items in a ListBox Having trouble fitting items into a Listbox in Silverlight or WPF without getting horizontal scrollbars? Pete Brown has a solution for you in 4 steps. Making printing easier in Silverlight 4 David Poll has a great detailed post up about printing in SL4, taking it to building a higher-level API that allows printing of collections... all demos and source included. Detailed information about the Silverlight Toolkit's new stacked series support David Anson details the improvements to Data Visualization in the Toolkit release from last week. Space Rocks game step 9: the asteroid sprite Bill Reiss has his latest game episode up and this time he's putting asteroid sprites in play. No placement, movement, or collisions yet, but it's a beginning. And, he's updated all his code to Silverlight 4. 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

• Keep website and webservices warm with zero coding

  - by oazabir

  If you want to keep your websites or webservices warm and save user from seeing the long warm up time after an application pool recycle, or IIS restart or new code deployment or even windows restart, you can use the tinyget command line tool, that comes with IIS Resource Kit, to hit the site and services and keep them warm. Here’s how: First get tinyget from here. Download and install the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit on some PC. Then copy the tinyget.exe from “c:\program files…\IIS 6.0 ResourceKit\Tools'\tinyget” to the server where your IIS 6.0 or IIS 7 is running. Then create a batch file that will hit the pages and webservices. Something like this: SET TINYGET=C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Resources\TinyGet\tinyget.exe"%TINYGET%" -srv:dropthings.omaralzabir.com -uri:http://dropthings.omaralzabir.com/ -status:200"%TINYGET%" -srv:dropthings.omaralzabir.com -uri:http://dropthings.omaralzabir.com/WidgetService.asmx?WSDL - status:200 First I am hitting the homepage to keep the webpage warm. Then I am hitting the webservice URL with ?WSDL parameter, which allows ASP.NET to compile the service if not already compiled and walk through all the operations and reflect on them and thus loading all related DLLs into memory and reducing the warmup time when hit. Tinyget gets the servers name or IP in the –srv parameter and then the actual URI in the –uri. I have specified what’s the HTTP response code to expect in –status parameter. It ensures the site is alive and is returning http 200 code. Besides just warming up a site, you can do some load test on the site. Tinyget can run in multiple threads and run loops to hit some URL. You can literally blow up a site with commands like this: "%TINYGET%" -threads:30 -loop:100 -srv:google.com -uri:http://www.google.com/ -status:200 Tinyget is also pretty useful to run automated tests. You can record http posts in a text file and then use it to make http posts to some page. Then you can put matching clause to check for certain string in the output to ensure the correct response is given. Thus with some simple command line commands, you can warm up, do some transactions, validate the site is giving off correct response as well as run a load test to ensure the server performing well. Very cheap way to get a lot done.

  Read the article

• What real life bad habits has programming given you?

  - by Jacob T. Nielsen

  Programming has given me a lot of bad habits and it continues to give me more everyday. But I have also gotten some bad habits from the mindset that I have put myself in. There simply are some things that are deeply rooted in my nature, though some of them I wish I could get rid of. A few: Looking for polymorphism, inheritance and patterns in all of God's creations. Explaining the size of something in pixels and colors in hex code. Using code related abstract terms in everyday conversations. How have you been damaged?

  Read the article

• Model Driven Architecture Approach in programming / modelling

  - by yak

  I know the basics of the model driven architecture: it is all about model the system which I want to create and create the core code afterwards. I used CORBA a while ago. First thing that I needed to do was to create an abstract interface (some kind of model of the system I want to build) and generate core code later. But I have a different question: is model driven architecture a broad approach or not? I mean, let's say, that I have the language (modelling language) in which I want to model EXISTING system (opposite to the system I want to CREATE), and then analyze the model of the created system and different facts about that modeled abstraction. In this case, can the process I described above be considered the model driven architecture approach? I mean, I have the model, but this is the model of the existing system, not the system to be created.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this week I asked a question where I asked how to Swap Values of the column without using CASE Statement. Read here: A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement,there were more than 50 solutions proposed in the comment. There were many creative solutions. I have mentioned my personal favorite (different ones) here: Solution of Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement. However, I received lots of questions regarding one of the Solution by SIJIN KUMAR V P. He has used the function SOUNDEX in his solution. The request was to explain how SOUNDEX and DIFFERENCE works. Well, there are pretty decent documentations provided over here SOUNDEX function and DIFFERENCE over on MSDN and if I attempt to explain this function I will end up writing the same details which are available on MSDN. Instead of writing theory, we will try to learn this function by using a couple of simple puzzles. You try to solve the puzzles using the MSDN and see if you can learn something very quickly. In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. The first character of the code is the first character of character_expression and the second through fourth characters of the code are numbers that represent the letters in the expression. Vowels incharacter_expression are ignored unless they are the first letter of the string. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. The return value ranges from 0 through 4: 0 indicates weak or no similarity, and 4 indicates strong similarity or the same values. Learning Puzzle 1: Now let us run following four queries and observe its output. SELECT SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SLTR') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRa') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRaM') SdxValue When you look at the result set all the four values are same. The reason for all the values to be same is as for SQL Server SOUNDEX function all the four strings are similarly sounding string. Learning Puzzle 2: Now let us run following five queries and observe its output. SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('SLTR'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('TH'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SQLAuthority',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR','SQLAuthority') When you look at the result set you will get the result in the ranges from 1 to 4. Here is how it works if your result is 0 which means absolutely not relevant to each other and if your result is 1 which means the results are relevant to each other. Have you ever used above two functions in your business need or on production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with use cases. I believe it will be beneficial to everyone. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response – Part 2

  - by Michael Stephenson

  To follow up a previous article about timeouts and how they can affect your application I have extended the sample we were using to include WCF. I will execute some test scenarios and discuss the results. The sample We begin by consuming exactly the same web service which is sitting on a remote server. This time I have created a .net 3.5 application which will consume the web service using the basichttp binding. To show you the configuration for the consumption of this web service please refer to the below diagram. You can see like before we also have the connectionManagement element in the configuration file. I have added a WCF service reference (also using the asynchronous proxy methods) and have the below code sample in the application which will asynchronously make the web service calls and handle the responses on a call back method invoked by a delegate. If you have read the previous article you will notice that the code is almost the same.   Sample 1 – WCF with Default Timeouts In this test I set about recreating the same scenario as previous where we would run the test but this time using WCF as the messaging component. For the first test I would use the default configuration settings which WCF had setup when we added a reference to the web service. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client-side trace is as follows:   The server-side trace is as follows: Some observations on the results are as follows: The timeouts happened quicker than in the previous tests because some calls were timing out before they attempted to connect to the server The first few calls that timed out did actually connect to the server and did execute successfully on the server   Test 2 – Increase Open Connection Timeout & Send Timeout In this test I wanted to increase both the send and open timeout values to try and give everything a chance to go through. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The client side trace for this test was   The server-side trace for this test was: Some observations on this test are: This test proved if the timeouts are high enough everything will just go through   Test 3 – Increase just the Send Timeout In this test we wanted to increase just the send timeout. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The below is the client side trace The below is the server side trace Some observations on this test are: In this test from both the client and server perspective everything ran through fine The open connection timeout did not seem to have any effect   Test 4 – Increase Just the Open Connection Timeout In this test I wanted to validate the change to the open connection setting by increasing just this on its own. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: In this test you can see that the open connection which relates to opening the channel timeout increase was not the thing which stopped the calls timing out It's the send of data which is timing out On the server you can see that the successful few calls were fine but there were also a few calls which hit the server but timed out on the client You can see that not all calls hit the server which was one of the problems with the WSE and ASMX options   Test 5 – Smaller Increase in Send Timeout In this test I wanted to make a smaller increase to the send timeout than previous just to prove that it was the key setting which was controlling what was timing out. The timeout values for this test are: openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:02:30"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was   The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: You can see that most of the calls got through fine On the client you can see that call 20 timed out but still hit the server and executed fine.   Summary At this point between the two articles we have quite a lot of scenarios showing the different way the timeout setting have played into our original performance issue, and now we can see how WCF could offer an improved way to handle the problem. To summarise the differences in the timeout properties for the three technology stacks: ASMX The timeout value only applies to the execution time of your request on the server. The timeout does not consider how long your code might be waiting client side to get a connection. WSE The timeout value includes both the time to obtain a connection and also the time to execute the request. A timeout will not be thrown as an error until an attempt to connect to the server is made. This means a 40 second timeout setting may not throw the error until 60 seconds when the connection to the server is made. If the connection to the server is made you should be aware that your message will be processed and you should design for this. WCF The WCF send timeout is the setting most equivalent to the settings we were looking at previously. Like WSE this setting the counter includes the time to get a connection as well as the time to execute on a server. Unlike WSE and ASMX an error will be thrown as soon as the send timeout from making your call from user code has elapsed regardless of whether we are waiting for a connection or have an open connection to the server. This may to a user appear to have better latency in getting an error response compared to WSE or ASMX.

  Read the article

• No VB6 to VS2010 direct upgrade path

  - by Chris Williams

  From the "is this really news?" department... From looking at the currently available versions of 2010, there is no direct upgrade path from VB6 to VS2010. Anyone still using VB6 and wishing to upgrade to VS2010 has two options:  Use the upgrade tool from an earlier version of VS (like 2005 or 2008) and then run the upgrade in VS2010 to get the rest of the way... or rewrite your code. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which is the better option. I'd like to take a moment to point out the obvious: A) If you're still using VB6 at this point, you probably don't care about VS2010 compatibility. B) Running your code through 2 upgrade wizards isn't going to result in anything resembling best practices. C) Bemoaning the lack of support in 2010 for a 12 year old version of an extinct programming language helps nobody. This public service announcement is brought to you by the letter C. Thank you.

  Read the article

• Objective-C Moving UIView along a curved path

  - by PruitIgoe

  I'm not sure if I am approaching this the correct way. In my app, when a user touches the screen I capture the point and create an arc from a fixed point to that touch point. I then want to move a UIView along that arc. Here's my code: ViewController.m //method to "shoot" object - KIP_Projectile creates the arc, KIP_Character creates the object I want to move along the arc ... //get arc for trajectory KIP_Projectile* vThisProjectile = [[KIP_Projectile alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(51.0, fatElvisCenterPoint-30.0, touchPoint.x, 60.0)]; vThisProjectile.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; [self.view addSubview:vThisProjectile]; ... KIP_Character* thisChar = [[KIP_Character alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(51, objCenterPoint-5, imgThisChar.size.width, imgThisChar.size.height)]; thisChar.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; thisChar.charID = charID; thisChar.charType = 2; thisChar.strCharType = @"Projectile"; thisChar.imgMyImage = imgThisChar; thisChar.myArc = vThisProjectile; [thisChar buildImage]; [thisChar traceArc]; in KIP_Projectile I build the arc using this code: - (CGMutablePathRef) createArcPathFromBottomOfRect : (CGRect) rect : (CGFloat) arcHeight { CGRect arcRect = CGRectMake(rect.origin.x, rect.origin.y + rect.size.height - arcHeight, rect.size.width, arcHeight); CGFloat arcRadius = (arcRect.size.height/2) + (pow(arcRect.size.width, 2) / (8*arcRect.size.height)); CGPoint arcCenter = CGPointMake(arcRect.origin.x + arcRect.size.width/2, arcRect.origin.y + arcRadius); CGFloat angle = acos(arcRect.size.width / (2*arcRadius)); CGFloat startAngle = radians(180) + angle; CGFloat endAngle = radians(360) - angle; CGMutablePathRef path = CGPathCreateMutable(); CGPathAddArc(path, NULL, arcCenter.x, arcCenter.y, arcRadius, startAngle, endAngle, 0); return path; } - (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect { CGContextRef currentContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext(); _myArcPath = [self createArcPathFromBottomOfRect:self.bounds:30.0]; CGContextSetLineWidth(currentContext, 1); CGFloat red[4] = {1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f}; CGContextSetStrokeColor(currentContext, red); CGContextAddPath(currentContext, _myArcPath); CGContextStrokePath(currentContext); } Works fine. The arc is displayed with a red stroke on the screen. In KIP_Character, which has been passed it's relevant arc, I am using this code but getting no results. - (void) traceArc { CGMutablePathRef myArc = _myArc.myArcPath; // Set up path movement CAKeyframeAnimation *pathAnimation = [CAKeyframeAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"position"]; pathAnimation.calculationMode = kCAAnimationPaced; pathAnimation.fillMode = kCAFillModeForwards; pathAnimation.removedOnCompletion = NO; pathAnimation.path = myArc; CGPathRelease(myArc); [self.layer addAnimation:pathAnimation forKey:@"savingAnimation"]; } Any help here would be appreciated.

  Read the article

• What is the definition of Out-Of-Box?

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved What does Out-Of-Box really mean? We do not expect an administrator to be a developer, but the reverse is not true. It is taken for granted that the developer must be a competent admin. Any sensible person will tell you that s/he prefers an OOB solution. Development is a course of last resort. It behooves us to know where OOB ends and where development starts. I offer two definitions: It is OOB when There is no need to deploy server code It is OOB when the user does not need to do any coding at all There is an in-between status, where users may use a CEWP or a CQWP and enter JScript and CAML code. This requires user coding, but no server side deployment. My personal feeling is that the in-between requires coding and thus belongs in the development side. What do you think?  That’s all folks?!

  Read the article

• [MINI HOW-TO] Redeem Pre-paid Zune Card Points for Zune Marketplace Media

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you don’t want to pay the monthly fee for a Zune Pass, one option is buying a pre-paid Zune card. Here we take a look at how to redeem the Zune card points so you can get music for your Zune or Zune HD. Of course the first thing you will need to do is buy a Zune card. You can find them for different amounts at most retail locations that sell Zune’s like Walmart, Best Buy…etc. When you purchase the card make sure the cashier activates it.   Now open up your Zune desktop software and sign in if you aren’t already. Go into Settings \ Account and under Microsoft Points click on Redeem Code. Now enter the code from the back of the card that you scratch off and hit Next. After entering in your code successfully it asks for your contact information, which seems odd considering you’re using a prepaid card. You may want to enter in a fictitious address and phone number if concerned about privacy…then click Next. The only thing you might want to enter in legitimately is your email address to get a confirmation email. You’re given a Thank you message… And back in your Account Settings you’ll see the points have been added. Now you can go shopping for music, videos, TV shows, and more at the Zune Marketplace. If you don’t want to give up your credit card info and pay the monthly fee for the Zune Pass, using prepaid card to purchase music as you go is a good alternative. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Update Your Zune Player SoftwareUnofficial Windows XP Themes Created by MicrosoftSweet Black Theme for Windows XPMake Windows XP Use a Custom Theme for the Classic Logon ScreenListen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media Center TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more Download Microsoft Office Help tab The Growth of Citibank

  Read the article

• Turbo C++ to Visual Studio 2010 migration [closed]

  - by BigGenius

  OK, based on my previous questions and your help., I have gone to install Visual Studio Express. But now problem is, the programs which I successfully code at home on Visual Studio don't run on Turbo C++ compiler at school (assuming I type the program instead of exporting code). Is there anything I can do? Also I am just learning basic syntax and data handling, loops, structures, arrays and all. But Visual Studio has auto completion and pretty typing (which may be advantageous) but crap for a beginner getting hold on to language. Sorry, if I have been unclear. But what should I do? This will make me lazy programmer and will reflect in my grades. Is there any other IDE, which I can use, very similar to Turbo C++ and able to run in Windows 7 in fullsreen mode.

  Read the article

• Fastest way to document software architecture and design

  - by Karsten

  We are a small team of 5 developers and I'm looking for some great advices about how to document the software architecture and design. I'm going for the sweet spot, where the time invested pays off. I don't want to use more time documenting than necessary. I'll quickly give you my thoughts. What are the diagrams I should made? I'm thinking an overall diagram showing the various applications and services. And then some sequence diagrams showing the most important or complicated processes. About the code it self, I really don't see much value in describing or making diagrams for the code outside the .cs files them self. About text documents, I'm a bit uncertain about when to put down on paper. Most developers don't like to either write or read long documents.

  Read the article

• Issues when upgrading gnome-session

  - by Gabriel A. Zorrilla

  I'm having issues since yesterday after an upgrade. GNOME session got messed up somehow and now i cannot install further upgrades nor new apps. Here is what i got from terminal after doing the recommended apt-get install -f; (Reading database ... 166876 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace gnome-session 3.0.1-0ubuntu1~build2 (using .../gnome-session_3.0.2-0ubuntu3~natty1_all.deb) ... Unpacking replacement gnome-session ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/gnome-session_3.0.2-0ubuntu3~natty1_all.deb (--unpack): trying to overwrite '/usr/share/xsessions/gnome-shell.desktop', which is also in package gnome-shell 3.0.1-0ubuntu1~build1 Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/gnome-session_3.0.2-0ubuntu3~natty1_all.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) In var/log/apt/history.log, it says: Start-Date: 2011-05-29 17:56:16 Commandline: apt-get -f install Upgrade: gnome-session:amd64 (3.0.1-0ubuntu1~build2, 3.0.2-0ubuntu3~natty1) Error: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) End-Date: 2011-05-29 17:56:21 No idea what all this means.

  Read the article

• How to use SharePoint modal dialog box to display Custom Page Part3

  - by ybbest

  In the second part of the series, I showed you how to display and close a custom page in a SharePoint modal dialog using JavaScript and display a message after the modal dialog is closed. In this post, I’d like to show you how to use SPLongOperation with the Modal dialog box. You can download the source code here. 1. Firstly, modify the element file as follow   2. In your code behind, you can implement a close dialog function as below. This will close your modal dialog box once the button is clicked and display a status bar. Note that you need to use window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose instead of window.frameElement.commonModalDialogClose References: How to: Display a Page as a Modal Dialog Box

  Read the article

• quick look at: dm_db_index_physical_stats

  - by fatherjack

  A quick look at the key data from this dmv that can help a DBA keep databases performing well and systems online as the users need them. When the dynamic management views relating to index statistics became available in SQL Server 2005 there was much hype about how they can help a DBA keep their servers running in better health than ever before. This particular view gives an insight into the physical health of the indexes present in a database. Whether they are use or unused, complete or missing some columns is irrelevant, this is simply the physical stats of all indexes; disabled indexes are ignored however. In it’s simplest form this dmv can be executed as:   The results from executing this contain a record for every index in every database but some of the columns will be NULL. The first parameter is there so that you can specify which database you want to gather index details on, rather than scan every database. Simply specifying DB_ID() in place of the first NULL achieves this. In order to avoid the NULLS, or more accurately, in order to choose when to have the NULLS you need to specify a value for the last parameter. It takes one of 4 values – DEFAULT, ‘SAMPLED’, ‘LIMITED’ or ‘DETAILED’. If you execute the dmv with each of these values you can see some interesting details in the times taken to complete each step. DECLARE @Start DATETIME DECLARE @First DATETIME DECLARE @Second DATETIME DECLARE @Third DATETIME DECLARE @Finish DATETIME SET @Start = GETDATE() SELECT * FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats](DB_ID(), NULL, NULL, NULL, DEFAULT) AS ddips SET @First = GETDATE() SELECT * FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats](DB_ID(), NULL, NULL, NULL, 'SAMPLED') AS ddips SET @Second = GETDATE() SELECT * FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats](DB_ID(), NULL, NULL, NULL, 'LIMITED') AS ddips SET @Third = GETDATE() SELECT * FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats](DB_ID(), NULL, NULL, NULL, 'DETAILED') AS ddips SET @Finish = GETDATE() SELECT DATEDIFF(ms, @Start, @First) AS [DEFAULT] , DATEDIFF(ms, @First, @Second) AS [SAMPLED] , DATEDIFF(ms, @Second, @Third) AS [LIMITED] , DATEDIFF(ms, @Third, @Finish) AS [DETAILED] Running this code will give you 4 result sets; DEFAULT will have 12 columns full of data and then NULLS in the remainder. SAMPLED will have 21 columns full of data. LIMITED will have 12 columns of data and the NULLS in the remainder. DETAILED will have 21 columns full of data. So, from this we can deduce that the DEFAULT value (the same one that is also applied when you query the view using a NULL parameter) is the same as using LIMITED. Viewing the final result set has some details that are worth noting: Running queries against this view takes significantly longer when using the SAMPLED and DETAILED values in the last parameter. The duration of the query is directly related to the size of the database you are working in so be careful running this on big databases unless you have tried it on a test server first. Let’s look at the data we get back with the DEFAULT value first of all and then progress to the extra information later. We know that the first parameter that we supply has to be a database id and for the purposes of this blog we will be providing that value with the DB_ID function. We could just as easily put a fixed value in there or a function such as DB_ID (‘AnyDatabaseName’). The first columns we get back are database_id and object_id. These are pretty explanatory and we can wrap those in some code to make things a little easier to read: SELECT DB_NAME([ddips].[database_id]) AS [DatabaseName] , OBJECT_NAME([ddips].[object_id]) AS [TableName] … FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats](DB_ID(), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) AS ddips  gives us   SELECT DB_NAME([ddips].[database_id]) AS [DatabaseName] , OBJECT_NAME([ddips].[object_id]) AS [TableName], [i].[name] AS [IndexName] , ….. FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats](DB_ID(), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL) AS ddips INNER JOIN [sys].[indexes] AS i ON [ddips].[index_id] = [i].[index_id] AND [ddips].[object_id] = [i].[object_id]     These handily tie in with the next parameters in the query on the dmv. If you specify an object_id and an index_id in these then you get results limited to either the table or the specific index. Once again we can place a  function in here to make it easier to work with a specific table. eg. SELECT * FROM [sys].[dm_db_index_physical_stats] (DB_ID(), OBJECT_ID(‘AdventureWorks2008.Person.Address’) , 1, NULL, NULL) AS ddips   Note: Despite me showing that functions can be placed directly in the parameters for this dmv, best practice recommends that functions are not used directly in the function as it is possible that they will fail to return a valid object ID. To be certain of not passing invalid values to this function, and therefore setting an automated process off on the wrong path, declare variables for the OBJECT_IDs and once they have been validated, use them in the function: DECLARE @db_id SMALLINT; DECLARE @object_id INT; SET @db_id = DB_ID(N’AdventureWorks_2008′); SET @object_id = OBJECT_ID(N’AdventureWorks_2008.Person.Address’); IF @db_id IS NULL BEGINPRINT N’Invalid database’; ENDELSE IF @object_id IS NULL BEGINPRINT N’Invalid object’; ENDELSE BEGINSELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (@db_id, @object_id, NULL, NULL , ‘LIMITED’); END; GO In cases where the results of querying this dmv don’t have any effect on other processes (i.e. simply viewing the results in the SSMS results area)  then it will be noticed when the results are not consistent with the expected results and in the case of this blog this is the method I have used. So, now we can relate the values in these columns to something that we recognise in the database lets see what those other values in the dmv are all about. The next columns are: We’ll skip partition_number, index_type_desc, alloc_unit_type_desc, index_depth and index_level  as this is a quick look at the dmv and they are pretty self explanatory. The final columns revealed by querying this view in the DEFAULT mode are avg_fragmentation_in_percent. This is the amount that the index is logically fragmented. It will show NULL when the dmv is queried in SAMPLED mode. fragment_count. The number of pieces that the index is broken into. It will show NULL when the dmv is queried in SAMPLED mode. avg_fragment_size_in_pages. The average size, in pages, of a single fragment in the leaf level of the IN_ROW_DATA allocation unit. It will show NULL when the dmv is queried in SAMPLED mode. page_count. Total number of index or data pages in use. OK, so what does this give us? Well, there is an obvious correlation between fragment_count, page_count and avg_fragment_size-in_pages. We see that an index that takes up 27 pages and is in 3 fragments has an average fragment size of 9 pages (27/3=9). This means that for this index there are 3 separate places on the hard disk that SQL Server needs to locate and access to gather the data when it is requested by a DML query. If this index was bigger than 72KB then having it’s data in 3 pieces might not be too big an issue as each piece would have a significant piece of data to read and the speed of access would not be too poor. If the number of fragments increases then obviously the amount of data in each piece decreases and that means the amount of work for the disks to do in order to retrieve the data to satisfy the query increases and this would start to decrease performance. This information can be useful to keep in mind when considering the value in the avg_fragmentation_in_percent column. This is arrived at by an internal algorithm that gives a value to the logical fragmentation of the index taking into account the multiple files, type of allocation unit and the previously mentioned characteristics if index size (page_count) and fragment_count. Seeing an index with a high avg_fragmentation_in_percent value will be a call to action for a DBA that is investigating performance issues. It is possible that tables will have indexes that suffer from rapid increases in fragmentation as part of normal daily business and that regular defragmentation work will be needed to keep it in good order. In other cases indexes will rarely become fragmented and therefore not need rebuilding from one end of the year to another. Keeping this in mind DBAs need to use an ‘intelligent’ process that assesses key characteristics of an index and decides on the best, if any, defragmentation method to apply should be used. There is a simple example of this in the sample code found in the Books OnLine content for this dmv, in example D. There are also a couple of very popular solutions created by SQL Server MVPs Michelle Ufford and Ola Hallengren which I would wholly recommend that you review for much further detail on how to care for your SQL Server indexes. Right, let’s get back on track then. Querying the dmv with the fifth parameter value as ‘DETAILED’ takes longer because it goes through the index and refreshes all data from every level of the index. As this blog is only a quick look a we are going to skate right past ghost_record_count and version_ghost_record_count and discuss avg_page_space_used_in_percent, record_count, min_record_size_in_bytes, max_record_size_in_bytes and avg_record_size_in_bytes. We can see from the details below that there is a correlation between the columns marked. Column 1 (Page_Count) is the number of 8KB pages used by the index, column 2 is how full each page is (how much of the 8KB has actual data written on it), column 3 is how many records are recorded in the index and column 4 is the average size of each record. This approximates to: ((Col1*8) * 1024*(Col2/100))/Col3 = Col4*. avg_page_space_used_in_percent is an important column to review as this indicates how much of the disk that has been given over to the storage of the index actually has data on it. This value is affected by the value given for the FILL_FACTOR parameter when creating an index. avg_record_size_in_bytes is important as you can use it to get an idea of how many records are in each page and therefore in each fragment, thus reinforcing how important it is to keep fragmentation under control. min_record_size_in_bytes and max_record_size_in_bytes are exactly as their names set them out to be. A detail of the smallest and largest records in the index. Purely offered as a guide to the DBA to better understand the storage practices taking place. So, keeping an eye on avg_fragmentation_in_percent will ensure that your indexes are helping data access processes take place as efficiently as possible. Where fragmentation recurs frequently then potentially the DBA should consider; the fill_factor of the index in order to leave space at the leaf level so that new records can be inserted without causing fragmentation so rapidly. the columns used in the index should be analysed to avoid new records needing to be inserted in the middle of the index but rather always be added to the end. * – it’s approximate as there are many factors associated with things like the type of data and other database settings that affect this slightly.  Another great resource for working with SQL Server DMVs is Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management Views by Louis Davidson and Tim Ford – a free ebook or paperback from Simple Talk. Disclaimer – Jonathan is a Friend of Red Gate and as such, whenever they are discussed, will have a generally positive disposition towards Red Gate tools. Other tools are often available and you should always try others before you come back and buy the Red Gate ones. All code in this blog is provided “as is” and no guarantee, warranty or accuracy is applicable or inferred, run the code on a test server and be sure to understand it before you run it on a server that means a lot to you or your manager.

  Read the article

• Small projects using the cathedral model: does open-source lower security?

  - by Anto

  We know of Linus' law: With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow In general, people seem to say that open-source software is more secure because of that very thing, but... There are many small OSS projects with just 1 or 2 developers (the cathedral model, as described by ESR). For these projects, does releasing the source-code actually lower the security? For projects like the Linux kernel there are thousands of developers and security vulnerabilities are quite likely going to be found, but when just some few people look through the source code, while allowing crackers (black hat hackers) to see the source as well, is the security lowered instead of increased? I know that the security advantage closed-source software has over OSS is security through obscurity, which isn't good (at all), but it could help to some degree, at least by giving those few devs some more time (security through obscurity doesn't help with the if but with the when). EDIT: The question isn't whether OSS is more secure than non-OSS software but if the advantages for crackers are greater than the advantages for the developers who want to prevent security vulnerabilities from being exploited.

  Read the article

• Why would GLCapabilities.setHardwareAccelerated(true/false) have no effect on performance?

  - by Luke

  I've got a JOGL application in which I am rendering 1 million textures (all the same texture) and 1 million lines between those textures. Basically it's a ball-and-stick graph. I am storing the vertices in a vertex array on the card and referencing them via index arrays, which are also stored on the card. Each pass through the draw loop I am basically doing this: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_POINTS, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_LINES, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); I noticed that the JOGL library is pegging one of my CPU cores. Every frame, the run method internal to the library is taking quite long. I'm not sure why this is happening since I have called setHardwareAccelerated(true) on the GLCapabilities used to create my canvas. What's more interesting is that I changed it to setHardwareAccelerated(false) and there was no impact on the performance at all. Is it possible that my code is not using hardware rendering even when it is set to true? Is there any way to check? EDIT: As suggested, I have tested breaking my calls up into smaller chunks. I have tried using glDrawRangeElements and respecting the limits that it requests. All of these simply resulted in the same pegged CPU usage and worse framerates. I have also narrowed the problem down to a simpler example where I just render 4 million textures (no lines). The draw loop then just doing this: gl.glEnableClientState(GL.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL.GL_INDEX_ARRAY); gl.glClear(GL.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glMatrixMode(GL.GL_MODELVIEW); gl.glLoadIdentity(); <... Camera and transform related code ...> gl.glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glAlphaFunc(GL.GL_GREATER, ALPHA_TEST_LIMIT); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_ALPHA_TEST); <... Bind texture ...> gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glDrawElements(GL.GL_POINTS, <size>, GL.GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); gl.glDisable(GL.GL_TEXTURE_2D); gl.glDisable(GL.GL_ALPHA_TEST); gl.glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); gl.glFlush(); Where the first buffer contains 12 million floats (the x,y,z coords of the 4 million textures) and the second (element) buffer contains 4 million integers. In this simple example it is simply the integers 0 through 3999999. I really want to know what is being done in software that is pegging my CPU, and how I can make it stop (if I can). My buffers are generated by the following code: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBufferData(GL.GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, <size> * BufferUtil.SIZEOF_FLOAT, <buffer>, GL.GL_STATIC_DRAW); gl.glVertexAttribPointer(0, 3, GL.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, 0); and: gl.glBindBuffer(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <buffer id>); gl.glBufferData(GL.GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, <size> * BufferUtil.SIZEOF_INT, <buffer>, GL.GL_STATIC_DRAW); ADDITIONAL INFO: Here is my initialization code: gl.setSwapInterval(1); //Also tried 0 gl.glShadeModel(GL.GL_SMOOTH); gl.glClearDepth(1.0f); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_DEPTH_TEST); gl.glDepthFunc(GL.GL_LESS); gl.glHint(GL.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL.GL_FASTEST); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_DISTANCE_ATTENUATION, POINT_DISTANCE_ATTENUATION, 0); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_SIZE_MIN, MIN_POINT_SIZE, 0); gl.glPointParameterfv(GL.GL_POINT_SIZE_MAX, MAX_POINT_SIZE, 0); gl.glPointSize(POINT_SIZE); gl.glTexEnvf(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE, GL.GL_COORD_REPLACE, GL.GL_TRUE); gl.glEnable(GL.GL_POINT_SPRITE); gl.glClearColor(clearColor.getX(), clearColor.getY(), clearColor.getZ(), 0.0f); Also, I'm not sure if this helps or not, but when I drag the entire graph off the screen, the FPS shoots back up and the CPU usage falls to 0%. This seems obvious and intuitive to me, but I thought that might give a hint to someone else.

  Read the article

• Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

  Read the article

• Textures do not render on ATI graphics cards?

  - by Mathias Lykkegaard Lorenzen

  I'm rendering textured quads to an orthographic view in XNA through hardware instancing. On Nvidia graphics cards, this all works, tested on 3 machines. On ATI cards, it doesn't work at all, tested on 2 machines. How come? Culling perhaps? My orthographic view is set up like this: Matrix projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographicOffCenter(0, graphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, -graphicsDevice.Viewport.Height, 0, 0, 1); And my elements are rendered with the Z-coordinate 0. Edit: I just figured out something weird. If I do not call this spritebatch code above doing my textured quad rendering code, then it won't work on Nvidia cards either. Could that be due to culling information or something like that? Batch.Instance.SpriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Immediate, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.LinearClamp, DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone); ... spriteBatch.End(); Edit 2: Here's the full code for my instancing call. public void DrawTextures() { Batch.Instance.SpriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Texture, BlendState.AlphaBlend, SamplerState.LinearClamp, DepthStencilState.Default, RasterizerState.CullNone, textureEffect); while (texturesToDraw.Count > 0) { TextureJob texture = texturesToDraw.Dequeue(); spriteBatch.Draw(texture.Texture, texture.DestinationRectangle, texture.TintingColor); } spriteBatch.End(); #if !NOTEXTUREINSTANCING // no work to do if (positionInBufferTextured > 0) { device.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; textureEffect.CurrentTechnique = textureEffect.Techniques["Technique1"]; textureEffect.Parameters["Texture"].SetValue(darkTexture); textureEffect.CurrentTechnique.Passes[0].Apply(); if ((textureInstanceBuffer == null) || (positionInBufferTextured > textureInstanceBuffer.VertexCount)) { if (textureInstanceBuffer != null) textureInstanceBuffer.Dispose(); textureInstanceBuffer = new DynamicVertexBuffer(device, texturedInstanceVertexDeclaration, positionInBufferTextured, BufferUsage.WriteOnly); } if (positionInBufferTextured > 0) { textureInstanceBuffer.SetData(texturedInstances, 0, positionInBufferTextured, SetDataOptions.Discard); } device.Indices = textureIndexBuffer; device.SetVertexBuffers(textureGeometryBuffer, new VertexBufferBinding(textureInstanceBuffer, 0, 1)); device.DrawInstancedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleStrip, 0, 0, textureGeometryBuffer.VertexCount, 0, 2, positionInBufferTextured); // now that we've drawn, it's ok to reset positionInBuffer back to zero, // and write over any vertices that may have been set previously. positionInBufferTextured = 0; } #endif }

  Read the article

• Twitte API for Java - Hello Twitter Servlet (TOTD #178)

  - by arungupta

  There are a few Twitter APIs for Java that allow you to integrate Twitter functionality in a Java application. This is yet another API, built using JAX-RS and Jersey stack. I started this effort earlier this year and kept delaying to share because wanted to provide a more comprehensive API. But I've delayed enough and releasing it as a work-in-progress. I'm happy to take contributions in order to evolve this API and make it complete, useful, and robust. Drop a comment on the blog if you are interested or ping me at @arungupta. How do you get started ? Just add the following to your "pom.xml": <dependency> <groupId>org.glassfish.samples</groupId> <artifactId>twitter-api</artifactId> <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version></dependency> The implementation of this API uses Jersey OAuth Filters for authentication with Twitter and so the following dependencies are required if any API that requires authentication, which is pretty much all the APIs ;-) <dependency> <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs.jersey-oauth</groupId>     <artifactId>oauth-client</artifactId>     <version>${jersey.version}</version> </dependency> <dependency>     <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs.jersey-oauth</groupId>     <artifactId>oauth-signature</artifactId>     <version>${jersey.version}</version> </dependency> Once the dependencies are added to your project, inject Twitter  API in your Servlet (or any other Java EE component) as: @Inject Twitter twitter; Here is a simple non-secure invocation of the API to get you started: SearchResults result = twitter.search("glassfish", SearchResults.class);for (SearchResultsTweet t : result.getResults()) { out.println(t.getText() + "<br/>");} This code returns the tweets that matches the query "glassfish". The source code for the complete project can be downloaded here. Download it, unzip, and mvn package will build the .war file. And then deploy it on GlassFish or any other Java EE 6 compliant application server! The source code for the API also acts as the javadocs and can be checked out from here. A more detailed sample using security and several other API from this library is coming soon!

  Read the article

• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 735 736 737 738 739 740 741 742 743 744 745 746  | Next Page >