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  • Testing loses its effectiveness if all programmers don't use them

    - by Jeff O
    Let's assume you are convinced that the extra time spent unit testing has merit and improves production. Does that still hold up when everyone working on the same code doesn't use them? This question makes me wonder if fixing tests that everyone doesn't use is a waste of time. If you correct a test so the new code will pass, you're assuming the new code is correct. The person updating the test better have a firm understanding of the reasoning behind the code change and decide if the test or the new code needs to be fixed. This much inconsistency in a team when it comes to testing is probably an indication of other problems as well. There is a certain amount of risk involved that someone else on the team will alter code that is covered by testing. Is this the point where testing becomes counter-productive?

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  • How can one unlock a fully encrypted Ubuntu 11.10 system over SSH at boot?

    - by Jeff
    In previous versions of Ubuntu, and current versions of Debian, you can unlock a fully encrypted system (using dmcrypt and LUKS) at boot time over SSH. It was as easy as: Installing the encrypted system using the Ubuntu alternate installer disk or normal Debian installer disk and choosing to encrypt the system. After the system is installed, adding the dropbear and busybox packages. Updating the initram-fs to authorize your ssh key. At boot time, you'd just ssh to the machine, and do: echo -ne "keyphrase" > /lib/cryptsetup/passfifo The machine would then unlock and boot the encrypted system. Using the exact same steps on Ubuntu 11.10, I can ssh to the machine, but /lib/cryptsetup/passfifo doesn't exist. There appears to be no way to unlock the system over ssh. I'm not sure where to look to see if this functionality changed or if it was removed.

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  • How to disable an ASP.NET linkbutton when clicked

    - by Jeff Widmer
    Scenario: User clicks a LinkButton in your ASP.NET page and you want to disable it immediately using javascript so that the user cannot accidentally click it again.  I wrote about disabling a regular submit button here: How to disable an ASP.NET button when clicked.  But the method described in the other blog post does not work for disabling a LinkButton.  This is because the Post Back Event Reference is called using a snippet of javascript from within the href of the anchor tag: <a id="MyContrl_MyButton" href="javascript:__doPostBack('MyContrl$MyButton','')">My Button</a> If you try to add an onclick event to disable the button, even though the button will become disabled, the href will still be allowed to be clicked multiple times (causing duplicate form submissions).  To get around this, in addition to disabling the button in the onclick javascript, you can set the href to “#” to prevent it from doing anything on the page.  You can add this to the LinkButton from your code behind like this: MyButton.Attributes.Add("onclick", "this.href='#';this.disabled=true;" + Page.ClientScript.GetPostBackEventReference(MyButton, "").ToString()); This code adds javascript to set the href to “#” and then disable the button in the onclick event of the LinkButton by appending to the Attributes collection of the ASP.NET LinkButton control.  Then the Post Back Event Reference for the button is called right after disabling the button.  Make sure you add the Post Back Event Reference to the onclick because now that you are changing the anchor href, the button still needs to perform the original postback. With the code above now the button onclick event will look something like this: onclick="this.href='#';this.disabled=true;__doPostBack('MyContrl$MyButton','');" The anchor href is set to “#”, the linkbutton is disabled, AND then the button post back method is called. Technorati Tags: ASP.NET LinkButton

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  • Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

    - by Jeff
    This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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  • When is meta description still relevant?

    - by Jeff Atwood
    I received this bit of advice about the meta description tag recently: Meta descriptions are used by Google probably 80% of the time for the snippet. They don’t help with rankings but you should probably use them. You could just auto generate them from the first part of the question. The description tag exists in the header, like so: <meta name="Description" content="A brief summary of the content on the page."> I'm not sure why we would need this field, as Google seems perfectly capable of showing the relevant search terms in context in the search result pages, like so (I searched for c# list performance): In other words, where would a meta description summary improve these results? We want the page to show context around the actual search hits, not a random summary we inserted! Google Webmaster Central has this advice: For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged -- just make sure that your descriptions are not "spammy." Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. I'm struggling to think of any scenario when I would want the Google-generated summary, that is, actual context from the page for the search terms, to be replaced by a hard-coded meta description summary of the question itself.

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  • Update Manager is in Launcher and Alt-Tab list, but I can't switch to it

    - by Jeff
    The Update Manager recently started itself and found two updates. I can tell by the icon in the launcher. The icon has a (2) on it and a little white arrow saying the application is running. I can also see the update-manager process in a 'ps -A' list. Alt-Tab also shows the Update Manager. The problem is I can't get Update Manager to show up. If I click on the icon or Alt-Tab to it, nothing happens. I've never had any issues starting it manually, but when it starts on it's own after finding an update, I can't switch to it. What can I try to make this work better?

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  • Agile Like Jazz

    - by Jeff Certain
    (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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  • Use virtual pageviews for all goal tracking

    - by Jeff Wu
    Hi Pro Webmasters, I'm new to Google Analytics and I'm wondering if it would be cleaner to user virtual pageviews for all the goal tracking on my website instead of using a mix of regular page views and virtual pageviews. I know in most cases this is just semantics but there are multiple pages where the same goal can be achieved and I think it would be cleaner just to fire the same virtual pageview instead of having two different goal pages. Will this model also give developers more flexibility when they do development? I know we are moving to a CMS and urls can get hairy, so I think this might be a good way to make analytics portion of the site "future proof". Any thoughts are appreciated! Thanks.

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  • Configuration Manager Setting Causing Error PRJ0019

    - by Jeff Paterno
    Recently I ran into an issue with a project failing to build on an automated build server using CruiseControl. When I looked into the build log I saw that the Post-Build project was failing with the error message: "error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Post-Build Event..." This was most frustrating especially since the solution was building without issue on my local development environment. The Post-Build project was a C++ project that basically called several batch files to unregister/register assemblies, copy resources and supporting files, and place other dependencies in the GAC. I decided to run each of the batch files manually to see if that would provide more information as to why this project was failing. This lead me to determine that the batch file that was placing assemblies in the GAC was the culprit and that it was failing to find a particular assembly. The missing assembly was the output of another project. The project that was not producing the expected output was another C++ project that called a batch file. This batch process was actually embedding resource files into an assembly and then copying the assembly to the expected location. The real confusion started when I looked back into my Subversion log and noted that nothing had changed in this project in more than 2 months! It was almost as if the project had stopped building altogether. But what would cause that?! The Configuration Manager, obviously! Checking the solution's Configuration Manager settings, I found that the project that was not producing any output was in fact not selected to be part of the build process when the "Any CPU" platform was selected. This was the problem! I had recently updated the CruiseControl configurations to force the solution to be built targeting the platform "Any CPU". As a result, the project that was at the root of the problem was not configured to be built and the post-build process was failing when it couldn't find what it needed.

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  • SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 and the Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called error message

    - by Jeff Widmer
    When trying to install SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 to a SQL Server 2008 instance that is running on a virtual machine, the installer will start:   But then after about 20 seconds I receive the following error message: TITLE: SQL Server Setup failure. ----------------------------- SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error: Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created. ------------------------------ BUTTONS: OK ------------------------------ Searching for this issue I found that several people have the same problem and there is no clear solution.  Some had success with closing windows or Internet Explorer but that didn’t work for me; what did work is to make sure the SQL Server 2008 “Please wait while SQL Server 2008 Setup processes the current operation.” dialog is selected and has the focus when it first shows up.  Selected (with the current focus) it looks like this:   Without focus the dialog looks like this: Add a comment if you find out any information about how to consistently get around this issue or why it is happening in the first place.

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  • AJI Report #15&ndash;Zac Harlan Talks About Iowa Code Camp

    - by Jeff Julian
    We sit down with Zac Harlen and talk about Iowa Code Camp, what makes up a Code Camp, and how to start your own Code Camp. Zac has been a part of the leadership team for a few years for Iowa Code Camp and is the Development Manager for JP Cycles. We also get into what it takes to speak at a Code Camp if you are interested in growing beyond the user group as a speaker. Listen to the Show Site: LinkedIn Profile Blog: Zac Harlan Twitter: @ZacHarlan

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  • Watch the Dec. 8 Webcast: Oracle CFO Discusses Planning and Forecasting

    - by Theresa Hickman
    Watch CFO,com's webcast featuring Oracle's CFO, Jeff Epstein, discuss how CFOs and CIOs lead their organizations to better planning, forecasting and performance. Date: Weds. December 8, 2010 Time: 2:00 PM E.S.T Duration: 30 mins In this webcast, Celina Rogers, director of research with CFO Research Services, summarizes the latest findings from a fall 2010 survey surrounding the issues regarding timely, accurate and relevant forecasting and planning. Included in this webcast, you will hear firsthand from Jeff Epstein, CFO of Oracle, on how a senior finance leader can partner successfully with IT to support growth during the course of the economic recovery. Click here, to register for this webcast

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  • Joy! | Important Information About Your iPad 3G

    - by Jeff Julian
    Looks like I was one of the lucky 114,000 who AT&T lost their email to “hackers”.  Why is “hackers” in “double quotes”.  I can just imagine some executive at AT&T in their “Oh No, We Messed Up Meeting” saying, what happened?  Then someone replied, well we have had a breach and “hackers” broke in (using the quote in the air gesture) and stole our iPad 3G customers emails. Oh well, I am sure my email has been sold and sold again by many different vendors, why not AT&T now.  At least Dorothy Attwood could have gave us her email to give to someone else instead of blinking it through a newsletter system. June 13, 2010 Dear Valued AT&T Customer, Recently there was an issue that affected some of our customers with AT&T 3G service for iPad resulting in the release of their customer email addresses. I am writing to let you know that no other information was exposed and the matter has been resolved.  We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused. Rest assured, you can continue to use your AT&T 3G service on your iPad with confidence. Here’s some additional detail: On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service.  The self-described hackers wrote software code to randomly generate numbers that mimicked serial numbers of the AT&T SIM card for iPad – called the integrated circuit card identification (ICC-ID) – and repeatedly queried an AT&T web address.   When a number generated by the hackers matched an actual ICC-ID, the authentication page log-in screen was returned to the hackers with the email address associated with the ICC-ID already populated on the log-in screen. The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses.  They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity. As soon as we became aware of this situation, we took swift action to prevent any further unauthorized exposure of customer email addresses.  Within hours, AT&T disabled the mechanism that automatically populated the email address. Now, the authentication page log-in screen requires the user to enter both their email address and their password. I want to assure you that the email address and ICC-ID were the only information that was accessible. Your password, account information, the contents of your email, and any other personal information were never at risk.  The hackers never had access to AT&T communications or data networks, or your iPad.  AT&T 3G service for other mobile devices was not affected. While the attack was limited to email address and ICC-ID data, we encourage you to be alert to scams that could attempt to use this information to obtain other data or send you unwanted email. You can learn more about phishing by visiting the AT&T website. AT&T takes your privacy seriously and does not tolerate unauthorized access to its customers’ information or company websites.   We will cooperate with law enforcement in any investigation of unauthorized system access and to prosecute violators to the fullest extent of the law. AT&T acted quickly to protect your information – and we promise to keep working around the clock to keep your information safe.  Thank you very much for your understanding, and for being an AT&T customer. Sincerely, Dorothy Attwood Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer for AT&T Technorati Tags: AT&T,iPad 3G,Email

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  • Literature for Inverse Kinematics: Joint Limits and beyond

    - by Jeff
    Recently I've been playing around with Inverse Kinematics and have been pretty impressed with the results. Naturally I want to take it further, but have no clue where to start. In particular, I would like to introduce joint limits (ie for a prismatic joint how far it can move, hinge joint what angles it has to be between, etc etc). Currently I understand how to produce the Jacobian matrix for the various joint types. I am particularly looking for literature (preferably free, and preferably easy to understand) on various ways to implement joint limits. Also I would like to find out different ideas on how inverse kinematics can be used.

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  • Find vertices of a convex hull

    - by Jeff Bullard
    I am attempting to do this within CGAL. From a 3D point cloud, find the convex hull, then loop over the finite facets of the convex hull and print each facet's vertices. It seems like there should be a straightforward way to do this; I would have expected that 3D polyhedra would own a vector of facet objects, each of which in turn would own a vector of its edges, each of which in turn would own a vector of its vertices, and that their would be some access through this hierarchy using iterators. But so far I have been unable to find a simple way to navigate through this hierarchy (if it exists).

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  • Problems with brother printer drivers on 64bit 12.04

    - by Jeff Klein
    I'm running 12.04 64bit on a toshiba satellite laptop. I have a Brotrher MFC-J825dw printer. I've installed brothers driver for it and the cupswrapper but it won't print. I says it is receiving data but it never shows up in the queue. I've also tried the text only generic driver and the same thing happens. I think some dependencies are missing for the cups wrapper and when I try to find it it says it can't be installed. Nopt sure if that's the problem because it doesn't explain the generic driver failure. In any case, any ideas?

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  • Real-world SignalR example, ditching ghetto long polling

    - by Jeff
    One of the highlights of BUILD last week was the announcement that SignalR, a framework for real-time client to server (or cloud, if you will) communication, would be a real supported thing now with the weight of Microsoft behind it. Love the open source flava! If you aren’t familiar with SignalR, watch this BUILD session with PM Damian Edwards and dev David Fowler. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll be in a happy place within the first ten minutes. If you skip to the end, you’ll see that they plan to ship this as a real first version by the end of the year. Insert slow clap here. Writing a few lines of code to move around a box from one browser to the next is a way cool demo, but how about something real-world? When learning new things, I find it difficult to be abstract, and I like real stuff. So I thought about what was in my tool box and the decided to port my crappy long-polling “there are new posts” feature of POP Forums to use SignalR. A few versions back, I added a feature where a button would light up while you were pecking out a reply if someone else made a post in the interim. It kind of saves you from that awkward moment where someone else posts some snark before you. While I was proud of the feature, I hated the implementation. When you clicked the reply button, it started polling an MVC URL asking if the last post you had matched the last one the server, and it did it every second and a half until you either replied or the server told you there was a new post, at which point it would display that button. The code was not glam: // in the reply setup PopForums.replyInterval = setInterval("PopForums.pollForNewPosts(" + topicID + ")", 1500); // called from the reply setup and the handler that fetches more posts PopForums.pollForNewPosts = function (topicID) { $.ajax({ url: PopForums.areaPath + "/Forum/IsLastPostInTopic/" + topicID, type: "GET", dataType: "text", data: "lastPostID=" + PopForums.currentTopicState.lastVisiblePost, success: function (result) { var lastPostLoaded = result.toLowerCase() == "true"; if (lastPostLoaded) { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "hidden"); } else { $("#MorePostsBeforeReplyButton").css("visibility", "visible"); clearInterval(PopForums.replyInterval); } }, error: function () { } }); }; What’s going on here is the creation of an interval timer to keep calling the server and bugging it about new posts, and setting the visibility of a button appropriately. It looks like this if you’re monitoring requests in FireBug: Gross. The SignalR approach was to call a message broker when a reply was made, and have that broker call back to the listening clients, via a SingalR hub, to let them know about the new post. It seemed weird at first, but the server-side hub’s only method is to add the caller to a group, so new post notifications only go to callers viewing the topic where a new post was made. Beyond that, it’s important to remember that the hub is also the means to calling methods at the client end. Starting at the server side, here’s the hub: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Hubs; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public class Topics : Hub { public void ListenTo(int topicID) { Groups.Add(Context.ConnectionId, topicID.ToString()); } } } Have I mentioned how awesomely not complicated this is? The hub acts as the channel between the server and the client, and you’ll see how JavaScript calls the above method in a moment. Next, the broker class and its associated interface: using Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR; using Topic = PopForums.Models.Topic; namespace PopForums.Messaging { public interface IBroker { void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID); } public class Broker : IBroker { public void NotifyNewPosts(Topic topic, int lasPostID) { var context = GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>(); context.Clients.Group(topic.TopicID.ToString()).notifyNewPosts(lasPostID); } } } The NotifyNewPosts method uses the static GlobalHost.ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<Topics>() method to get a reference to the hub, and then makes a call to clients in the group matched by the topic ID. It’s calling the notifyNewPosts method on the client. The TopicService class, which handles the reply data from the MVC controller, has an instance of the broker new’d up by dependency injection, so it took literally one line of code in the reply action method to get things moving. _broker.NotifyNewPosts(topic, post.PostID); The JavaScript side of things wasn’t much harder. When you click the reply button (or quote button), the reply window opens up and fires up a connection to the hub: var hub = $.connection.topics; hub.client.notifyNewPosts = function (lastPostID) { PopForums.setReplyMorePosts(lastPostID); }; $.connection.hub.start().done(function () { hub.server.listenTo(topicID); }); The important part to look at here is the creation of the notifyNewPosts function. That’s the method that is called from the server in the Broker class above. Conversely, once the connection is done, the script calls the listenTo method on the server, letting it know that this particular connection is listening for new posts on this specific topic ID. This whole experiment enables a lot of ideas that would make the forum more Facebook-like, letting you know when stuff is going on around you.

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  • Clint Edmonson Talks Season of Launch | AJI Report #11

    - by Jeff Julian
    We are back in the office for another installment of AJI Report where we talk with Clint Edmonson of Microsoft about their Season of Launch events. We get into Windows Azure, Windows 8, and Visual Studio 2012 and how developers and decision makers can learn more about the new products. Clint is an amazing resource for the Central Region and is very responsive if you have questions about products or integration. Clint makes a great offer to help you with your applications during the Hackathon events coming up. Listen to the Show Site: Not So Trivial Twitter: @ClintEd

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  • Recovering a lost website with no backup?

    - by Jeff Atwood
    Unfortunately, our hosting provider experienced 100% data loss, so I've lost all content for two hosted blog websites: http://blog.stackoverflow.com http://www.codinghorror.com (Yes, yes, I absolutely should have done complete offsite backups. Unfortunately, all my backups were on the server itself. So save the lecture; you're 100% absolutely right, but that doesn't help me at the moment. Let's stay focused on the question here!) I am beginning the slow, painful process of recovering the website from web crawler caches. There are a few automated tools for recovering a website from internet web spider (Yahoo, Bing, Google, etc.) caches, like Warrick, but I had some bad results using this: My IP address was quickly banned from Google for using it I get lots of 500 and 503 errors and "waiting 5 minutes…" Ultimately, I can recover the text content faster by hand I've had much better luck by using a list of all blog posts, clicking through to the Google cache and saving each individual file as HTML. While there are a lot of blog posts, there aren't that many, and I figure I deserve some self-flagellation for not having a better backup strategy. Anyway, the important thing is that I've had good luck getting the blog post text this way, and I am definitely able to get the text of the web pages out of the Internet caches. Based on what I've done so far, I am confident I can recover all the lost blog post text and comments. However, the images that go with each blog post are proving…more difficult. Any general tips for recovering website pages from Internet caches, and in particular, places to recover archived images from website pages? (And, again, please, no backup lectures. You're totally, completely, utterly right! But being right isn't solving my immediate problem… Unless you have a time machine…)

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  • .NET development on Macs

    - by Jeff
    I posted the “exciting” conclusion of my laptop trade-ins and issues on my personal blog. The links, in chronological order, are posted below. While those posts have all of the details about performance and software used, I wanted to comment on why I like using Macs in the first place. It started in 2006 when Apple released the first Intel-based Mac. As someone with a professional video past, I had been using Macs on and off since college (1995 graduate), so I was never terribly religious about any particular platform. I’m still not, but until recently, it was staggering how crappy PC’s were. They were all plastic, disposable, commodity crap. I could never justify buying a PowerBook because I was a Microsoft stack guy. When Apple went Intel, they removed that barrier. They also didn’t screw around with selling to the low end (though the plastic MacBooks bordered on that), so even the base machines were pretty well equipped. Every Mac I’ve had, I’ve used for three years. Other than that first one, I’ve also sold each one, for quite a bit of money. Things have changed quite a bit, mostly within the last year. I’m actually relieved, because Apple needs competition at the high end. Other manufacturers are finally understanding the importance of industrial design. For me, I’ll stick with Macs for now, because I’m invested in OS X apps like Aperture and the Mac versions of Adobe products. As a Microsoft developer, it doesn’t even matter though… with Parallels, I Cmd-Tab and I’m in Windows. So after three and a half years with a wonderful 17” MBP and upgraded SSD, it was time to get something lighter and smaller (traveling light is critical with a toddler), and I eventually ended up with a 13” MacBook Air, with the i7 and 8 gig upgrades, and I love it. At home I “dock” it to a Thunderbolt Display. A new laptop .NET development on a Retina MacBook Pro with Windows 8 Returning my MacBook Pro with Retina display .NET development on a MacBook Air with Windows 8

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  • AJI Report #20 | Devin Rader On Usability and REST

    - by Jeff Julian
    Devin is one of our great friends from days of ole'. Devin was a great community leader in St. Louis .NET space. The then moved to New Jersey to work at Infragistics where he was a huge asset for the .NET and Usability communities. He is now at Twilio as an evangelist and you will see him pretty much at every cool conference promoting Twilio and educating the masses. In this show, we talk about what Usability is and how developers can understanding what the how to solve problems with usability and some of the patterns we can use. Devin really wants to bring the focus back to the beginning of knowing who your users are and we talk about how to produce personas of the users of our products. We dive into REST for the second piece of this podcast. Devin helps us understand more about REST and what goes into a RESTful application or service. Listen to the Show Twilio Site: http://www.twilio.com Twitter: @DevinRader LinkedIn: Profile Link

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  • Does concurrency inherently introduce "randomness" into a game?

    - by Jeff
    When a game is implemented with concurrency (as most games are), does this necessarily, by its very nature, introduce an element of randomness into the game that is outside of the players' control? Note that when I use the word "random", I'm not meaning to launch into a philosophical debate about the deterministic nature of the system. I understand that concurrency is deterministic in the sense that the operating system decides which processes to allow time on the CPU and in what order (or the JVM controls which Thread's turn it is to execute, etc). But my understanding of this is that there is no way to control or predict whether one thread's next command will execute before or after another. The reason I'm asking is because this seems like a fundamental difficulty for game development where a game is supposedly designed around a player's skill. Consider a game like League of Legends. Assume that two players are battling it out. It's a very close contest between the two and it's coming down to the wire -- so much so that whoever gets their last attack off will be the one to kill the other and win the game for their team. If the players are implemented using concurrency and the situation really was like this, is it essentially out of the players' hands at this point? Is the outcome of this match all up to whatever system is arbitrarily deciding which player's thread/process will execute next? If not, what am I misunderstanding about concurrency? If so, is there any way around this problem so that a game of skill can always be a game of skill, especially in those most crucial moments?

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  • Unknown CSS font-family oddity with IE7-10 on Windows Vista, 7, 8

    - by Jeff
    I am seeing the following "oddity" with IE7-10 on Windows Vista, 7, 8: When declaring font-family: serif; I am seeing an old bitmapped serif font that I can't identify (see screenshot below) instead of the expected font Times New Roman. I know it's an old bitmapped font because it displays aliased, without any font smoothing, with IE7-10 on Win Vista-8 (just like Courier on every version of Win). Screenshot: I would like to know (1) can anyone else confirm my research and (2) BONUS: which font is IE displaying? Notes: IE6 and IE7 on Win XP displays Times New Roman, as they should. It doesn't matter if font-family: serif; is declared in an external stylesheet or inline on the element. Quoting the CSS attribute makes no difference. Adding "Unkown Font" to the stack also makes no difference. New Screenshot: The answer from Jukka below is correct. Here is a new screenshot with Batang (not BatangChe) to illustrate. Hope this helps someone.

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  • Impressions on jQuery Mobile

    - by Jeff
    For the uninitiated, jQuery Mobile is a sweet little client framework that turns regular HTML into something more touch and mobile friendly. It results in a user interface that has bigger targets, rounded corners and simple skinning capability. When it was announced that ASP.NET MVC 4 would include support for a mobile-sensitive view engine, offering up alternate views for clients that fit the mobile profile, I was all over that. Combined with jQuery Mobile, it brought a chance to do some experimentation. I blitzed through the views in POP Forums and converted them all to mobile views. (For the curious, this first pass can be found here on CodePlex, while a more recent update that uses RC 2 of jQuery Mobile v1.1.0 is running on the demo site.) Initially, it was kind of a mixed bag. The jQuery demo site also acts as documentation, and it’s reasonably complete. I had no problem getting up a lot of basic views quickly, splitting out portions of some pages as subpages that they quickly load in. The default behavior in the older version was to slide the pages in, which looked a little weird when you were using a back button. They’ve since changed it so the default transition is a fade in/out. Because you’re dealing with Web pages, I don’t think anyone is really under the illusion that you’re not using a native app, so I don’t know that this matters. I’ve tested extensively on iPad and Windows Phone, and to be honest, I’ve encountered a lot of issues. On Windows Phone, there is some kind of inconsistency that prevents the proper respect for the viewport settings. The text background on text fields (for labeling) doesn’t work, either. On both platforms, certain in-DOM page navigation links work only half of the time. Is this an issue of user error? Probably, but that’s what’s frustrating about it. Most of what you accomplish with this framework involves decorating various elements with CSS classes. There isn’t any design-time safety to speak of to make sure that you’re doing it right. I think the issues can be overcome, but there are some trade-offs to consider. The first is download size. Yes, the scripts and CSS do get cached, but that first hit will cost nearly 40k for the mobile parts. That’s still a lot when you’re on some crappy AT&T EDGE network, or hotel Wi-Fi. Then you have to ask yourself, do you really want your app to look like it’s native to iOS? I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because consistent UI is good, but you will end up feeling a whole lot of sameness, and maybe you don’t want that. I did some experimentation to try and Metro-ize the jQuery Mobile theme, and it’s kind of a mixed bag. It mostly works, but you get some weirdness on badges and with buttons that I’m not crazy about. It probably just means you need to keep tweaking. At this point, I’m a little torn about whether or not I’ll use it for POP Forums or one of the sites I’m working on. The benefits are pretty strong, but figuring out where I’m doing it wrong is proving a little time consuming.

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