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• Can I use a genetic algorithm for balancing character builds?

  - by Renan Malke Stigliani

  I'm starting to build a online PVP (duel like, one-on-one) game, where there is leveling, skill points, special attacks and all the common stuff. Since I have never done anything like this, I'm still thinking about the math behind the levels/skills/specials balance. So I thought a good way of testing the best builds/combos, would be to implement a Genetic Algorithm. It'd be like this: Generate a big group of random characters Make them fight, level them up accordingly to their victories(more XP)/losses(less XP) Mate the winners, crossing their builds, to try and make even better characters Add some more random chars, emulating new players Repeat the process for some time, or util I find some chars who can beat everyone's butt I could then play with the math and try to find better balances to make sure that the top x% of chars would be a mix of various build types. So, is it a good idea, or is there some other, easier method to do the balancing?

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• Are technical books easy to read on the Kindle (or other small screens) [closed]

  - by Peter Recore

  Possible Duplicate: eBook editions of programming books I am considering getting a kindle or other e reader. (Kindle is my top choice for the eink vs lcd factor) I have been able to try reading fiction on a Kindle, and it seemed pretty nice, even with the small screen. However, most books I buy are actually technical books, which tend to have figures, code samples, and other odd things. How well do the various ereaders handle books like this? In particular, does the kindle render code samples or figures in an easy to read way?

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• Programming Language? - To create a application (eLearning course) that will work on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Touch etc?

  - by Josh

  Hi Currently at work I'm helping put together and create eLearning courses within Flash. Our senior programmers have knowledge of how to do this, Although - I would like to know how you could go from converting a eLearning course from Flash into a application for Mac and PC, looking similar to Garageband's music lessons? What programming language was used to create Garageband on Mac? What is the best way to create a application that will work on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Touch etc, Rather then using flash and Actionscript to create online based applications, that will only work in a browser on Mac and PC? Any further tips? Thanks Josh

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• Tip: Replacing Html.Encode Calls With New Html Encoding Syntax

  Like the well disciplined secure developer that you are, when you built your ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application, you remembered to call Html.Encode every time you output a value that came from user input. Didnt you? Well, in ASP.NET MVC 2 running on ASP.NET 4, those calls can be replaced with the new HTML encoding syntax (aka code nugget). Ive written a three part series on the topic. Html Encoding Code Blocks With ASP.NET 4 Html Encoding Nuggets With ASP.NET MVC 2 Using AntiXss as the default...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• What is meant by "Repeat Business" ?

  - by vinoth

  Repeat Business obviously happens because the company has a great product or a great service. In the software industry, do companies make the code base complex enough so that the maintenance comes back to them? I have heard of cases where companies say "ya this code base has minor errors, let's ship them anyway, and let the customers come back for another change request on these". Then they would sometimes charge the customer for that. This question is specific to the software services industry. Do these things happen in the real world? I am trying to understand the business process.

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• KISS and Tell - MVVM and the ViewModelLocator

  - by Bobby Diaz

  A popular topic that comes up when talking about MVVM is the use of a ViewModelLocator and the many different ways one can be implemented.  Rather than getting into the pros and cons on when or why you should use it, I decided I would just post my version of a simple ViewModelLocator and let those who like it use it, and those who don’t, well you know…  :) First, a disclaimer.  I have not used this code in a production application, it is just something I was tossing around while reading others’ posts on the subject. 1. MainView.xaml   2. MainViewModel.cs 3. ViewModelLocator.cs   I have a codepaste of the ViewModelLocator.cs file if you are interested but don’t feel like re-typing the 50 lines of code! Enjoy! Additional Resources Simple ViewModel Locator for MVVM: The Patients Have Left the Asylum - by John Papa ViewModel binding with the Managed Extensibility Framework - by Jeremy Likness MVVM Light Toolkit - by Laurent Bugnion

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• International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 2

  - by MarkPearl

  So the brunt of my my very complex F# code has been done. Now it’s just putting the Silverlight stuff in. The first thing I did was add a new project to my solution. I gave it a name and VS2010 did the rest of the magic in creating the .Web project etc. In this instance because I want to take the MVVM approach and make use of commanding I have decided to make the frontend a Silverlight4 project. I now need move my F# code into a proper Silverlight Library. Warning – when you create the Silverlight Library VS2010 will ask you whether you want it to be based on Silverlight3 or Silverlight4. I originally went for Silverlight4 only to discover when I tried to compile my solution that I was given an error… Error 12 F# runtime for Silverlight version v4.0 is not installed. Please go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177463 to download and install matching.. After asking around I discovered that the Silverlight4 F# runtime is not available yet. No problem, the suggestion was to change the F# Silverlight Library to a Silverlight3 project however when going to the properties of the project file – even though I changed it to Silverlight3, VS2010 did not like it and kept reverting it to a Silverlight4 project. After a few minutes of scratching my head I simply deleted Silverlight4 F# Library project and created a new F# Silverlight Library project in Silverlight3 and VS2010 was happy. Now that the project structure is set up, rest is fairly simple. You need to add the Silverlight Library as a reference to the C# Silverlight Front End. Then setup your views, since I was following the MVVM pattern I made a Views & ViewModel folder and set up the relevant View and ViewModels. The MainPageViewModel file looks as follows using System; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Ink; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using System.Collections.ObjectModel; namespace IROAFrontEnd.ViewModels { public class MainPageViewModel : ViewModelBase { private string _iroaString; private string _inputCharacters; public string InputCharacters { get { return _inputCharacters; } set { if (_inputCharacters != value) { _inputCharacters = value; OnPropertyChanged("InputCharacters"); } } } public string IROAString { get { return _iroaString; } set { if (_iroaString != value) { _iroaString = value; OnPropertyChanged("IROAString"); } } } public ICommand MySpecialCommand { get { return new MyCommand(this); } } public class MyCommand : ICommand { readonly MainPageViewModel _myViewModel; public MyCommand(MainPageViewModel myViewModel) { _myViewModel = myViewModel; } public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; public bool CanExecute(object parameter) { return true; } public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } } } } One of the features I like in Silverlight4 is the new commanding. You will notice in my I have put the code under the command execute to reference to my F# module. At the moment this could be cleaned up even more, but will suffice for now.. public void Execute(object parameter) { var result = ModuleMain.ConvertCharsToStrings(_myViewModel.InputCharacters); var newString = ""; foreach (var Item in result) { newString += Item + " "; } _myViewModel.IROAString = newString.Trim(); } I then needed to set the view up. If we have a look at the MainPageView.xaml the xaml code will look like the following…. Nothing to fancy, but battleship grey for now… take careful note of the binding of the command in the button to MySpecialCommand which was created in the ViewModel. <UserControl x:Class="IROAFrontEnd.Views.MainPageView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="300" d:DesignWidth="400"> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> <RowDefinition/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Text="{Binding InputCharacters, Mode=TwoWay}"/> <Button Grid.Row="1" Command="{Binding MySpecialCommand}"> <TextBlock Text="Generate"/> </Button> <TextBlock Grid.Row="2" Text="{Binding IROAString}"/> </Grid> </UserControl> Finally in the App.xaml.cs file we need to set the View and link it to the ViewModel. private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { var myView = new MainPageView(); var myViewModel = new MainPageViewModel(); myView.DataContext = myViewModel; this.RootVisual = myView; }   Once this is done – hey presto – it worked. I typed in some “Test Input” and clicked the generate button and the correct Radio Operators Alphabet was generated. And that’s the end of my first very basic F# Silverlight application.

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• Visual Programming paradigms

  - by Rego

  As the number of "visual" OS's such as Android, iOS and the promised Windows 8 are becoming more popular, it does not seem to me that we programmers have new ways to code using these new technologies, due to a possible lack in new visual programming languages paradigms. I've seen several discussions about incompatibilities between the current coding development environment, and the new OS approaches from Windows 8, Android and other tablets OS's. I mean, today if we have a new tablet, it's almost a requirement for coding, to have, for instance, an external keyboard (due it seems to me it's very difficult to program using the touch screen), exactly because the coding assistance is not conceived to "write" thousands of lines of code. So, how advanced should be the "new" visual programming languages paradigms? Which characteristics these new paradigms would be required?

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• Implementing Silverlight Coverflow with ADO.NET/WCF Data Services in SharePoint 2010

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). WOOHOO!! My next video is online. In this video, I show how you can implement Silverlight Coverflow like UI using the Telerik silverlight toolset. In this demo, I talk to a picture library running in SharePoint 2010, and use ADO.NET Data Services to load up the various images loaded in the picture library. I then use the Telerik Silverlight toolset  integrated with the ADO.NET Data Services/WCF Data Services, and show a fancy coverflow like UI. As always, very few slides, completely hands-on, all code written in front of your eyes! Enjoy – the video.   And yes, there are a couple of more exciting videos coming! Stay tuned! Comment on the article ....

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• Executable Resumes

  - by Liam McLennan

  Over the past twelve months I have been thinking a lot about executable specifications. Long considered the holy grail of agile software development, executable specifications means expressing a program’s functionality in a way that is both readable by the customer and computer verifiable in an automatic, repeatable way. With the current generation of BDD and ATDD tools executable specifications seem finally within the reach of a significant percentage of the development community. Lately, and partly as a result of my craftsmanship tour, I have decided that soon I am going to have to get a job (gasp!). As Dave Hoover describes in Apprenticeship Patters, “you … have mentors and kindred spirits that you meet with periodically, [but] when it comes to developing software, you work alone.” The time may have come where the only way for me to feel satisfied and enriched by my work is to seek out a work environment where I can work with people smarter and more knowledgeable than myself. Having been on both sides of the interview desk many times I know how difficult and unreliable the process can be. Therefore, I am proposing the idea of executable resumes. As a journeyman programmer looking for a fruitful work environment I plan to write an application that demonstrates my understanding of the state of the art. Potential employers can download, view and execute my executable resume and judge wether my aesthetic sensibility matches their own. The concept of the executable resume is based upon the following assertion: A line of code answers a thousand interview questions Asking people about their experiences and skills is not a direct way of assessing their value to your organisation. Often it simple assesses their ability to mislead an interviewer. An executable resume demonstrates: The highest quality code that the person is able to produce. That the person is sufficiently motivated to produce something of value in their own time. That the person loves their craft. The idea of publishing a program to demonstrate a developer’s skills comes from Rob Conery, who suggested that each developer should build their own blog engine since it is the public representation of their level of mastery. Rob said: Luke had to build his own lightsaber – geeks should have to build their own blogs. And that should be their resume. In honour of Rob’s inspiration I plan to build a blog engine as my executable resume. While it is true that the world does not need another blog engine it is as good a project as any, it is a well understood domain, and I have not found an existing blog engine that I like. Executable resumes fit well with the software craftsmanship metaphor. It is not difficult to imagine that under the guild system master craftsmen may have accepted journeymen based on the quality of the work they had produced in the past. We now understand that when it comes to the functionality of an application that code is the final arbiter. Why not apply the same rule to hiring?

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• The Case of the Extra Page: Rendering Reporting Services as PDF

  - by smisner

  I had to troubleshoot a problem with a mysterious extra page appearing in a PDF this week. My first thought was that it was likely to caused by one of the most common problems that people encounter when developing reports that eventually get rendered as PDF is getting blank pages inserted into the PDF document. The cause of the blank pages is usually related to sizing. You can learn more at Understanding Pagination in Reporting Services in Books Online. When designing a report, you have to be really careful with the layout of items in the body. As you move items around, the body will expand to accommodate the space you're using and you might eventually tighten everything back up again, but the body doesn't automatically collapse. One of my favorite things to do in Reporting Services 2005 - which I dubbed the "vacu-pack" method - was to just erase the size property of the Body and let it auto-calculate the new size, squeezing out all the extra space. Alas, that method no longer works beginning with Reporting Services 2008. Even when you make sure the body size is as small as possible (with no unnecessary extra space along the top, bottom, left, or right side of the body), it's important to calculate the body size plus header plus footer plus the margins and ensure that the calculated height and width do not exceed the report's height and width (shown as the page in the illustration above). This won't matter if users always render reports online, but they'll get extra pages in a PDF document if the report's height and width are smaller than the calculate space. Beginning the Investigation In the situation that I was troubleshooting, I checked the properties: Item Property Value Body Height 6.25in   Width 10.5in Page Header Height 1in Page Footer Height 0.25in Report Left Margin 0.1in   Right Margin 0.1in   Top Margin 0.05in   Bottom Margin 0.05in   Page Size - Height 8.5in   Page Size - Width 11in So I calculated the total width using Body Width + Left Margin + Right Margin and came up with a value of 10.7 inches. And then I calculated the total height using Body Height + Page Header Height + Page Footer Height + Top Margin + Bottom Margin and got 7.6 inches. Well, page sizing couldn't be the reason for the extra page in my report because 10.7 inches is smaller than the report's width of 11 inches and 7.6 inches is smaller than the report's height of 8.5 inches. I had to look elsewhere to find the culprit. Conducting the Third Degree My next thought was to focus on the rendering size of the items in the report. I've adapted my problem to use the Adventure Works database. At the top of the report are two charts, and then below each chart is a rectangle that contains a table. In the real-life scenario, there were some graphics present as a background for the tables which fit within the rectangles that were about 3 inches high so the visual space of the rectangles matched the visual space of the charts - also about 3 inches high. But there was also a huge amount of white space at the bottom of the page, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a second page which was blank except for the footer that appeared at the bottom. Placing a textbox beneath the rectangles to see if they would appear on the first page resulted the textbox's appearance on the second page. For some reason, the rectangles wanted a buffer zone beneath them. What's going on? Taking the Suspect into Custody My next step was to see what was really going on with the rectangle. The graphic appeared to be correctly sized, but the behavior in the report indicated the rectangle was growing. So I added a border to the rectangle to see what it was doing. When I added borders, I could see that the size of each rectangle was growing to accommodate the table it contains. The rectangle on the right is slightly larger than the one on the left because the table on the right contains an extra row. The rectangle is trying to preserve the whitespace that appears in the layout, as shown below. Closing the Case Now that I knew what the problem was, what could I do about it? Because of the graphic in the rectangle (not shown), I couldn't eliminate the use of the rectangles and just show the tables. But fortunately, there is a report property that comes to the rescue: ConsumeContainerWhitespace (accessible only in the Properties window). I set the value of this property to True. Problem solved. Now the rectangles remain fixed at the configured size and don't grow vertically to preserve the whitespace. Case closed.

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• Convert DVD to MKV (et al) without transcoding/recompression

  - by Oli

  Like a lot of people, I have a lot of DVDs. But we also have a stupid amount of disk space and a media centre (Boxee) so the DVDs are getting less and less use. It would be nice to convert our DVDs into something more relevant to our needs. I've dabbled with DVD ripping before but whereas I'd usually transcode down to a smaller picture size with a better video compression algorithm, this takes a silly amount of time. I don't have a couple of hours available for each disk. (Sidebar: is there dedicated, Linux-friendly hardware to improve h264 encoding performance?) So I was wondering if there's anything that take the DVD filesystem, De-CSS it, and then stitch together any the VOBs that make up the main part of the film and package that up in a wrapping format like MKV. A bonus would be if it could grab the subtitles and stick them in too but that's not a requirement as Boxee can grab the subtitles online if it needs to.

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• Using TPL and PLINQ to raise performance of feed aggregator

  - by DigiMortal

  In this posting I will show you how to use Task Parallel Library (TPL) and PLINQ features to boost performance of simple RSS-feed aggregator. I will use here only very basic .NET classes that almost every developer starts from when learning parallel programming. Of course, we will also measure how every optimization affects performance of feed aggregator. Feed aggregator Our feed aggregator works as follows: Load list of blogs Download RSS-feed Parse feed XML Add new posts to database Our feed aggregator is run by task scheduler after every 15 minutes by example. We will start our journey with serial implementation of feed aggregator. Second step is to use task parallelism and parallelize feeds downloading and parsing. And our last step is to use data parallelism to parallelize database operations. We will use Stopwatch class to measure how much time it takes for aggregator to download and insert all posts from all registered blogs. After every run we empty posts table in database. Serial aggregation Before doing parallel stuff let’s take a look at serial implementation of feed aggregator. All tasks happen one after other. internal class FeedClient {     private readonly INewsService _newsService;     private const int FeedItemContentMaxLength = 255;       public FeedClient()     {          ObjectFactory.Initialize(container =>          {              container.PullConfigurationFromAppConfig = true;          });           _newsService = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<INewsService>();     }       public void Execute()     {         var blogs = _newsService.ListPublishedBlogs();           for (var index = 0; index <blogs.Count; index++)         {              ImportFeed(blogs[index]);         }     }       private void ImportFeed(BlogDto blog)     {         if(blog == null)             return;         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(blog.RssUrl))             return;           var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         SyndicationContentFormat feedFormat;           feedFormat = SyndicationDiscoveryUtility.SyndicationContentFormatGet(uri);           if (feedFormat == SyndicationContentFormat.Rss)             ImportRssFeed(blog);         if (feedFormat == SyndicationContentFormat.Atom)             ImportAtomFeed(blog);                 }       private void ImportRssFeed(BlogDto blog)     {         var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         var feed = RssFeed.Create(uri);           foreach (var item in feed.Channel.Items)         {             SaveRssFeedItem(item, blog.Id, blog.CreatedById);         }     }       private void ImportAtomFeed(BlogDto blog)     {         var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         var feed = AtomFeed.Create(uri);           foreach (var item in feed.Entries)         {             SaveAtomFeedEntry(item, blog.Id, blog.CreatedById);         }     } } Serial implementation of feed aggregator downloads and inserts all posts with 25.46 seconds. Task parallelism Task parallelism means that separate tasks are run in parallel. You can find out more about task parallelism from MSDN page Task Parallelism (Task Parallel Library) and Wikipedia page Task parallelism. Although finding parts of code that can run safely in parallel without synchronization issues is not easy task we are lucky this time. Feeds import and parsing is perfect candidate for parallel tasks. We can safely parallelize feeds import because importing tasks doesn’t share any resources and therefore they don’t also need any synchronization. After getting the list of blogs we iterate through the collection and start new TPL task for each blog feed aggregation. internal class FeedClient {     private readonly INewsService _newsService;     private const int FeedItemContentMaxLength = 255;       public FeedClient()     {          ObjectFactory.Initialize(container =>          {              container.PullConfigurationFromAppConfig = true;          });           _newsService = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<INewsService>();     }       public void Execute()     {         var blogs = _newsService.ListPublishedBlogs();                var tasks = new Task[blogs.Count];           for (var index = 0; index <blogs.Count; index++)         {             tasks[index] = new Task(ImportFeed, blogs[index]);             tasks[index].Start();         }           Task.WaitAll(tasks);     }       private void ImportFeed(object blogObject)     {         if(blogObject == null)             return;         var blog = (BlogDto)blogObject;         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(blog.RssUrl))             return;           var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         SyndicationContentFormat feedFormat;           feedFormat = SyndicationDiscoveryUtility.SyndicationContentFormatGet(uri);           if (feedFormat == SyndicationContentFormat.Rss)             ImportRssFeed(blog);         if (feedFormat == SyndicationContentFormat.Atom)             ImportAtomFeed(blog);                }       private void ImportRssFeed(BlogDto blog)     {          var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);          var feed = RssFeed.Create(uri);           foreach (var item in feed.Channel.Items)          {              SaveRssFeedItem(item, blog.Id, blog.CreatedById);          }     }     private void ImportAtomFeed(BlogDto blog)     {         var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         var feed = AtomFeed.Create(uri);           foreach (var item in feed.Entries)         {             SaveAtomFeedEntry(item, blog.Id, blog.CreatedById);         }     } } You should notice first signs of the power of TPL. We made only minor changes to our code to parallelize blog feeds aggregating. On my machine this modification gives some performance boost – time is now 17.57 seconds. Data parallelism There is one more way how to parallelize activities. Previous section introduced task or operation based parallelism, this section introduces data based parallelism. By MSDN page Data Parallelism (Task Parallel Library) data parallelism refers to scenario in which the same operation is performed concurrently on elements in a source collection or array. In our code we have independent collections we can process in parallel – imported feed entries. As checking for feed entry existence and inserting it if it is missing from database doesn’t affect other entries the imported feed entries collection is ideal candidate for parallelization. internal class FeedClient {     private readonly INewsService _newsService;     private const int FeedItemContentMaxLength = 255;       public FeedClient()     {          ObjectFactory.Initialize(container =>          {              container.PullConfigurationFromAppConfig = true;          });           _newsService = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<INewsService>();     }       public void Execute()     {         var blogs = _newsService.ListPublishedBlogs();                var tasks = new Task[blogs.Count];           for (var index = 0; index <blogs.Count; index++)         {             tasks[index] = new Task(ImportFeed, blogs[index]);             tasks[index].Start();         }           Task.WaitAll(tasks);     }       private void ImportFeed(object blogObject)     {         if(blogObject == null)             return;         var blog = (BlogDto)blogObject;         if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(blog.RssUrl))             return;           var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         SyndicationContentFormat feedFormat;           feedFormat = SyndicationDiscoveryUtility.SyndicationContentFormatGet(uri);           if (feedFormat == SyndicationContentFormat.Rss)             ImportRssFeed(blog);         if (feedFormat == SyndicationContentFormat.Atom)             ImportAtomFeed(blog);                }       private void ImportRssFeed(BlogDto blog)     {         var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         var feed = RssFeed.Create(uri);           feed.Channel.Items.AsParallel().ForAll(a =>         {             SaveRssFeedItem(a, blog.Id, blog.CreatedById);         });      }        private void ImportAtomFeed(BlogDto blog)      {         var uri = new Uri(blog.RssUrl);         var feed = AtomFeed.Create(uri);           feed.Entries.AsParallel().ForAll(a =>         {              SaveAtomFeedEntry(a, blog.Id, blog.CreatedById);         });      } } We did small change again and as the result we parallelized checking and saving of feed items. This change was data centric as we applied same operation to all elements in collection. On my machine I got better performance again. Time is now 11.22 seconds. Results Let’s visualize our measurement results (numbers are given in seconds). As we can see then with task parallelism feed aggregation takes about 25% less time than in original case. When adding data parallelism to task parallelism our aggregation takes about 2.3 times less time than in original case. More about TPL and PLINQ Adding parallelism to your application can be very challenging task. You have to carefully find out parts of your code where you can safely go to parallel processing and even then you have to measure the effects of parallel processing to find out if parallel code performs better. If you are not careful then troubles you will face later are worse than ones you have seen before (imagine error that occurs by average only once per 10000 code runs). Parallel programming is something that is hard to ignore. Effective programs are able to use multiple cores of processors. Using TPL you can also set degree of parallelism so your application doesn’t use all computing cores and leaves one or more of them free for host system and other processes. And there are many more things in TPL that make it easier for you to start and go on with parallel programming. In next major version all .NET languages will have built-in support for parallel programming. There will be also new language constructs that support parallel programming. Currently you can download Visual Studio Async to get some idea about what is coming. Conclusion Parallel programming is very challenging but good tools offered by Visual Studio and .NET Framework make it way easier for us. In this posting we started with feed aggregator that imports feed items on serial mode. With two steps we parallelized feed importing and entries inserting gaining 2.3 times raise in performance. Although this number is specific to my test environment it shows clearly that parallel programming may raise the performance of your application significantly.

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• How do I pause and resume apt-fast package download?

  - by jasoncruz98

  I know that in order to speed up apt-get downloads, I can use apt-fast (which uses the aria2c or axel engine - it depends on which one I install during the configuration). But even though it says it can pause and resume downloads, I don't know how to do it, and I can't find any answer online that tells me how to do it. I have no intention of pausing apt-fast update function, I just want the ability to pause the sudo apt-fast install package_name function and resume the downloading of a package in Ubuntu at will using apt-fast (with axel or aria2c) I have seen in some forums that sudo apt-fast update cannot be paused because it requires starting the entire process. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• Working with FusionCharts using ASP.NET

  Nowadays, users are constantly looking for more intuitive user interfaces. Because of this, it is vital to develop ASP.NET applications with diagrams such as Charts. FusionCharts enables you to plug-in several charts from a wide range of sources easily with a small amount of code. In this article, Anand examines the usage of FusionCharts in a step-by-step manner using three different scenarios. He initially examines the plotting of charts using the data from an XML file and also demonstrates the same using the values entered by users. Finally, Anand delves deep into the database connectivity aspects using an Access 2010 database with the help of relevant source code examples and screenshots.

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• Returning a mock object from a mock object

  - by Songo

  I'm trying to return an object when mocking a parser class. This is the test code using PHPUnit 3.7 //set up the result object that I want to be returned from the call to parse method $parserResult= new ParserResult(); $parserResult->setSegment('some string'); //set up the stub Parser object $stubParser=$this->getMock('Parser'); $stubParser->expects($this->any()) ->method('parse') ->will($this->returnValue($parserResult)); //injecting the stub to my client class $fileHeaderParser= new FileWriter($stubParser); $output=$fileParser->writeStringToFile(); Inside my writeStringToFile() method I'm using $parserResult like this: writeStringToFile(){ //Some code... $parserResult=$parser->parse(); $segment=$parserResult->getSegment();//that's why I set the segment in the test. } Should I mock ParserResult in the first place, so that the mock returns a mock? Is it good design for mocks to return mocks? Is there a better approach to do this all?!

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• Welcome to www.badapi.net, a REST API with badly-behaved endpoints

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/08/14/welcome-to-www.badapi.net-a-rest-api-with-badly-behaved-endpoints.aspxI've had a need in a few projects for a REST API that doesn't behave well - takes a long time to respond, or never responds, returns unexpected status codes etc.That can be very useful for testing that clients cope gracefully with unexpected responses.Till now I've always coded a stub API in the project and run it locally, but I've put a few 'misbehaved' endpoints together and published them at www.badapi.net, and the source is on GitHub here: sixeyed/badapi.net.You can browse to the home page and see the available endpoints. I'll be adding more as I think of them, and I may give the styling of the help pages a bit more thought...As of today's release, the misbehaving endpoints available to you are:GET longrunning?between={between}&and={and} - Waits for a (short) random period before returningGET verylongrunning?between={between}&and={and} -Waits for a (long) random period before returningGET internalservererror    - Returns 500: Internal Server ErrorGET badrequest - Returns 400: BadRequestGET notfound - Returns 404: Not FoundGET unauthorized - Returns 401: UnauthorizedGET forbidden - Returns 403: ForbiddenGET conflict -Returns 409: ConflictGET status/{code}?reason={reason} - Returns the provided status code Go bad.

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• Book Review: Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett

  - by Sam Abraham

  In the next few lines, I will be providing a brief review of Wrox’s Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett. Design patterns have been a hot topic for many years as developers looked to do more with less, re-use as much code as possible by creating common libraries, as well as make their code easier to understand, extend and collaborate on. Scott Millett’s book covered classic and emerging patterns in a practical presentation that demonstrated with thorough examples how to put each pattern to use in the context of multi-tiered ASP.NET applications. The author’s unique approach and content earned him much kudos in the foreword by Scott Hanselman as well as online reviews. The book has 14 chapters of which 5 are dedicated to a comprehensive case study. Patterns covered therein include S.O.L.I.D, Gang of Four (GoF) as well as Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Applications. Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group. Best regards, --Sam You can access my reviews of books I recently read: Professional WCF 4.0 Inside Windows Communication Foundation Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 series

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• What does your Python development workbench look like?

  - by Fabian Fagerholm

  First, a scene-setter to this question: Several questions on this site have to do with selection and comparison of Python IDEs. (The top one currently is What IDE to use for Python). In the answers you can see that many Python programmers use simple text editors, many use sophisticated text editors, and many use a variety of what I would call "actual" integrated development environments – a single program in which all development is done: managing project files, interfacing with a version control system, writing code, refactoring code, making build configurations, writing and executing tests, "drawing" GUIs, and so on. Through its GUI, an IDE supports different kinds of workflows to accomplish different tasks during the journey of writing a program or making changes to an existing one. The exact features vary, but a good IDE has sensible workflows and automates things to let the programmer concentrate on the creative parts of writing software. The non-IDE way of writing large programs relies on a collection of tools that are typically single-purpose; they do "one thing well" as per the Unix philosophy. This "non-integrated development environment" can be thought of as a workbench, supported by the OS and generic interaction through a text or graphical shell. The programmer creates workflows in their mind (or in a wiki?), automates parts and builds a personal workbench, often gradually and as experience accumulates. The learning curve is often steeper than with an IDE, but those who have taken the time to do this can often claim deeper understanding of their tools. (Whether they are better programmers is not part of this question.) With advanced editor-platforms like Emacs, the pieces can be integrated into a whole, while with simpler editors like gedit or TextMate, the shell/terminal is typically the "command center" to drive the workbench. Sometimes people extend an existing IDE to suit their needs. What does your Python development workbench look like? What workflows have you developed and how do they work? For the first question, please give the main "driving" program – the one that you use to control the rest (Emacs, shell, etc.) the "small tools" -- the programs you reach for when doing different tasks For the second question, please describe what the goal of the workflow is (eg. "set up a new project" or "doing initial code design" or "adding a feature" or "executing tests") what steps are in the workflow and what commands you run for each step (eg. in the shell or in Emacs) Also, please describe the context of your work: do you write small one-off scripts, do you do web development (with what framework?), do you write data-munching applications (what kind of data and for what purpose), do you do scientific computing, desktop apps, or something else? Note: A good answer addresses the perspectives above – it doesn't just list a bunch of tools. It will typically be a long answer, not a short one, and will take some thinking to produce; maybe even observing yourself working.

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• Yet another ADF book - Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide

  - by Chris Muir

  I'm happy to report that the number of ADF published books is expanding yet again, with this time Oracle's own Jobinesh Purushothaman publishing the Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide.  I can remember the dim dark days when there was but just 1 Oracle book besides the documentation, so today it's great to have what I think might be the 7 or 8th ADF book publicly available, and not to forgot all our other technical docs too. Jobinesh has even published some extra chapters online that will give you a good taste of what to expect.  If you're interested in positive reviews, the ADF EMG already has it's first happy customer. Now to see if I can get Oracle to expense me a copy.

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• Rapid prototyping and refactoring

  - by Puckl

  Sometimes when I start a small project (like an android app), I don´t know which approach will work out at the end, and I just go for one approach and give it a try. But if I never used this approach before (for a sort of application I´ve never programmed before) it is like stepping into unknown terrain. I don´t know which libraries to use (maybe I have to try out several libraries) and there are so many unkonwns (like: how to get raw audio data in android) So then my development process goes like this: Write a piece of code to see if the approach has a chance. (The more uncertain the approach is, the uglier the code gets) If it works, refactor a lot until it is beautiful I think it could be a waste of time if I planned my software design in detail at this point, it would be like planning a trip without a map. Is this part of aglie development? How do you deal with unknown terrain in software development?

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• Windows Azure Evolution - Web Sites (aka Antares) Part 1

  - by Shaun

  This is the 3rd post of my Windows Azure Evolution series, focus on the new features and enhancement which was alone with the Windows Azure Platform Upgrade June 2012, announced at the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June. In the first post I introduced the new preview developer portal and how to works for the existing features such as cloud services, storages and SQL databases. In the second one I talked about the Windows Azure .NET SDK 1.7 on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC on Windows 8. From this one I will begin to introduce some new features. Now let’s have a look on the first one of them, Windows Azure Web Sites.   Overview Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS), as known as Antares, was a new feature still in preview stage in this upgrade. It allows people to quickly and easily deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment, uses the languages and open source apps of the choice then deploy such as FTP, Git and TFS. It also can be integrated with Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage easily. After read its introduction we may have a question: since we can deploy a website from both cloud service web role and web site, what’s the different between them? So, let’s have a quick compare.   CLOUD SERVICE WEB SITE OS Windows Server Windows Server Virtualization Windows Azure Virtual Machine Windows Azure Virtual Machine Host IIS IIS Platform ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, WCF ASP.NET WebForm, ASP.NET MVC, PHP Language C#, VB.NET C#, VB.NET, PHP Database SQL Database SQL Database, MySQL Architecture Multi layered, background worker, message queuing, etc.. Simple website with backend database. VS Project Windows Azure Cloud Service ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC, etc.. Out-of-box Gallery (none) Drupal, DotNetNuke, WordPress, etc.. Deployment Package upload, Visual Studio publish FTP, Git, TFS, WebMatrix Compute Mode Dedicate VM Shared Across VMs, Dedicate VM Scale Scale up, scale out Scale up, scale out As you can see, there are many difference between the cloud service and web site, but the main point is that, the cloud service focus on those complex architecture web application. For example, if you want to build a website with frontend layer, middle business layer and data access layer, with some background worker process connected through the message queue, then you should better use cloud service, since it provides full control of your code and application. But if you just want to build a personal blog or a  business portal, then you can use the web site. Since the web site have many galleries, you can create them even without any coding and configuration. David Pallmann have an awesome figure explains the benefits between the could service, web site and virtual machine.   Create a Personal Blog in Web Site from Gallery As I mentioned above, one of the big feature in WAWS is to build a website from an existing gallery, which means we don’t need to coding and configure. What we need to do is open the windows azure developer portal and click the NEW button, select WEB SITE and FROM GALLERY. In the popping up windows there are many websites we can choose to use. For example, for personal blog there are Orchard CMS, WordPress; for CMS there are DotNetNuke, Drupal 7, mojoPortal. Let’s select WordPress and click the next button. The next step is to configure the web site. We will need to specify the DNS name and select the subscription and region. Since the WordPress uses MySQL as its backend database, we also need to create a MySQL database as well. Windows Azure Web Sites utilize ClearDB to host the MySQL databases. You cannot create a MySQL database directly from SQL Databases section. Finally, since we selected to create a new MySQL database we need to specify the database name and region in the last step. Also we need to accept the ClearDB’s terms as well. Then windows azure platform will download the WordPress codes and deploy the MySQL database and website. Then it will be ready to use. Select the website and click the BROWSE button, the WordPress administration page will be shown. After configured the WordPress here is my personal web blog on the cloud. It took me no more than 10 minutes to establish without any coding.   Monitor, Configure, Scale and Linked Resources Let’s click into the website I had just created in the portal and have a look on what we can do. In the website details page where are five sections. - Dashboard The overall information about this website, such as the basic usage status, public URL, compute mode, FTP address, subscription and links that we can specify the deployment credentials, TFS and Git publish setting, etc.. - Monitor Some status information such as the CPU usage, memory usage etc., errors, etc.. We can add more metrics by clicking the ADD METRICS button and the bottom as well. - Configure Here we can set the configurations of our website such as the .NET and PHP runtime version, diagnostics settings, application settings and the IIS default documents. - Scale This is something interesting. In WAWS there are two compute mode or called web site mode. One is “shared”, which means our website will be shared with other web sites in a group of windows azure virtual machines. Each web site have its own process (w3wp.exe) with some sandbox technology to isolate from others. When we need to scaling-out our web site in shared mode, we actually increased the working process count. Hence in shared mode we cannot specify the virtual machine size since they are shared across all web sites. This is a little bit different than the scaling mode of the cloud service (hosted service web role and worker role). The other mode called “dedicate”, which means our web site will use the whole windows azure virtual machine. This is the same hosting behavior as cloud service web role. In web role it will be deployed on the virtual machines we specified and all of them are only used by us. In web sites dedicate mode, it’s the same. In this mode when we scaling-out our web site we will use more virtual machines, and each of them will only host our own website. And we can specify the virtual machine size in this mode. In the developer portal we can select which mode we are using from the scale section. In shared mode we can only specify the instance count, but in dedicate mode we can specify the instance size as well as the instance count. - Linked Resource The MySQL database created alone with the creation of our WordPress web site is a linked resource. We can add more linked resources in this section.   Pricing For the web site itself, since this feature is in preview period if you are using shared mode, then you will get free up to 10 web sites. But if you are using dedicate mode, the price would be the virtual machines you are using. For example, if you are using dedicate and configured two middle size virtual machines then you will pay $230.40 per month. If there is SQL Database linked to your web site then they will be charged separately based on the Pay-As-You-Go price. For example a 1GB web edition database costs $9.99 per month. And the bandwidth will be charged as well. For example 10GB outbound data transfer costs $1.20 per month. For more information about the pricing please have a look at the windows azure pricing page.   Summary Windows Azure Web Sites gives us easier and quicker way to create, develop and deploy website to window azure platform. Comparing with the cloud service web role, the WAWS have many out-of-box gallery we can use directly. So if you just want to build a blog, CMS or business portal you don’t need to learn ASP.NET, you don’t need to learn how to configure DotNetNuke, you don’t need to learn how to prepare PHP and MySQL. By using WAWS gallery you can establish a website within 10 minutes without any lines of code. But in some cases we do need to code by ourselves. We may need to tweak the layout of our pages, or we may have a traditional ASP.NET or PHP web application which needed to migrated to the cloud. Besides the gallery WAWS also provides many features to download, upload code. It also provides the feature to integrate with some version control services such as TFS and Git. And it also provides the deploy approaches through FTP and Web Deploy. In the next post I will demonstrate how to use WebMatrix to download and modify the website, and how to use TFS and Git to deploy automatically one our code changes committed.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• what are the benefits of closure, primarily for PHP?

  - by Patrick

  I am beginning the process of moving code over to PHP 5.3 and one of the most highly touted features of PHP 5.3 is the ability to use closures. My understanding of closures is that they allow anonymous functions, can be assigned to variable names, and have interesting scoping abilities. From my point of view the only seeming benefits in real world applications is the reduction of clutter in the namespace because closures are anonymous. Am I wrong in this? Should I be trying to put closures wherever I code? EDIT: I have already read this post on Javascript closures.

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• How to become a more organized programmer?

  - by Ted Wong

  I am a programmer that can code. But I find that I can get thing done, but not get thing do well or like most of the open source communities do. Well, I use some of the library from git hub. I find most of the programme is well structure. Also, a read me. My question are: Is that any common file structure or naming convention in the community or this is just a matter of personal taste? How to become a more organized programmer, instead of writing code just work. But more organized that let other easy to get in your project?

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• 'Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial' book is now available

  - by Julien Testut

  We are pleased to announce the availability of the first book on Oracle Data Integrator published by Packt Publishing:  Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g – A Hands-On Tutorial Authors: Peter C. Boyd-Bowman, Christophe Dupupet, Denis Gray, David Hecksel,  Julien Testut, Bernard Wheeler. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this book! You can get more information about 'Getting Started with Oracle Data Integrator 11g – A Hands-On Tutorial' including the table of contents and a sample chapter at http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-data-integrator-11g-getting-started/book. The book is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble and Safari Books Online.

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