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• Oracle Database In-Memory Launch Featuring Larry Ellison – June 10

  - by Roxana Babiciu

  For more than three-and-a-half decades, Oracle has defined database innovation. With our market-leading technologies, customers have been able to out-think and out-perform their competition. Soon they will be able to do that even faster. At a live launch event and simultaneous webcast, Larry Ellison will reveal the future of the database. Promote this strategic event to customers. Registration for the live event begins at 9am PT.

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• Oracle Database In-Memory Launch Featuring Larry Ellison – June 10

  - by Cinzia Mascanzoni

  For more than three-and-a-half decades, Oracle has defined database innovation. With our market-leading technologies, customers have been able to out-think and out-perform their competition. Soon they will be able to do that even faster. At a live launch event and simultaneous webcast, Larry Ellison will reveal the future of the database. Promote this strategic event to partners and customers. Registration for the live event begins at 5pm GMT, 6pm CET.

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• Exploring the Excel Services REST API

  - by jamiet

  Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible.  Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in.   The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet 

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• Good design cannot be over-design

  - by ??? Shengyuan Lu

  Many engineers intend to design software to build "flexible" system in which many design patterns and interfaces there. Eventually too many interfaces and complex inheritances mess up the system. In most cases I think the improper design caused the mess, rather than not over-design. If design is reasonable, it's hard to be over. Alternatively, If we don't have enough skill to achieve flexible design, we choose to plain and practical design. What's your opinion about my understanding?

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• How To Approach 360 Degree Snake

  - by Austin Brunkhorst

  I've recently gotten into XNA and must say I love it. As sort of a hello world game I decided to create the classic game "Snake". The 90 degree version was very simple and easy to implement. But as I try to make a version of it that allows 360 degree rotation using left and right arrows, I've come into sort of a problem. What i'm doing now stems from the 90 degree version: Iterating through each snake body part beginning at the tail, and ending right before the head. This works great when moving every 100 milliseconds. The problem with this is that it makes for a choppy style of gameplay as technically the game progresses at only 6 fps rather than it's potential 60. I would like to move the snake every game loop. But unfortunately because the snake moves at the rate of it's head's size it goes way too fast. This would mean that the head would need to move at a much smaller increment such as (2, 2) in it's direction rather than what I have now (32, 32). Because I've been working on this game off and on for a couple of weeks while managing school I think that I've been thinking too hard on how to accomplish this. It's probably a simple solution, i'm just not catching it. Here's some pseudo code for what I've tried based off of what makes sense to me. I can't really think of another way to do it. for(int i = SnakeLength - 1; i > 0; i--){ current = SnakePart[i], next = SnakePart[i - 1]; current.x = next.x - (current.width * cos(next.angle)); current.y = next.y - (current.height * sin(next.angle)); current.angle = next.angle; } SnakeHead.x += cos(SnakeAngle) * SnakeSpeed; SnakeHead.y += sin(SnakeAngle) * SnakeSpeed; This produces something like this: Code in Action. As you can see each part always stays behind the head and doesn't make a "Trail" effect. A perfect example of what i'm going for can be found here: Data Worm. Not the viewport rotation but the trailing effect of the triangles. Thanks for any help!

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• A list of game mechanics

  - by Iain

  I'm trying to compile a list of game mechanics, by which I mean high-level/meta game mechanics like Cooperation, Resource Management, Chance and Time Manipulation rather than low level mechanics like running, jumping climbing ladders, etc Does any one have any suggestions or can point me to good existing lists? My WIP list is already proving to be quite useful to me in the way I think about games.

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• Google adwords API - credit card safety question

  - by user5650

  Google is asking me to fax credit card xerox in order to activate adwords API in MCC. 1) Are there alternatives to this - is there a 3rd party provider who will give me this service without me sending them the credit card info? 2) How secure is it to send my credit card fax via some online fax service? 3) Do you think they will reject the application if I hide my CVV number in the fax? Any other thoughts appreciated.

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• Mathematics for Computer Science

  - by jiewmeng

  I am going into university next year. I think maths would be one of the more important aspects of computer science? I recently saw the MIT Intro to Algorithms video on YouTube and the maths required is quite hardcore. I wonder what parts of maths do i need, probability, calculus, trigo etc. Will the book Concrete Mathematics - it claims to be foundation for computer science - on Amazon cover most of whats required?

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• How to wire finite state machine into component-based architecture?

  - by Pup

  State machines seem to cause harmful dependencies in component-based architectures. How, specifically, is communication handled between a state machine and the components that carry out state-related behavior? Where I'm at: I'm new to component-based architectures. I'm making a fighting game, although I don't think that should matter. I envision my state machine being used to toggle states like "crouching", "dashing", "blocking", etc. I've found this state-management technique to be the most natural system for a component-based architecture, but it conflicts with techniques I've read about: Dynamic Game Object Component System for Mutable Behavior Characters It suggests that all components activate/deactivate themselves by continually checking a condition for activation. I think that actions like "running" or "walking" make sense as states, which is in disagreement with the accepted response here: finite state machine used in mario like platform game I've found this useful, but ambiguous: How to implement behavior in a component-based game architecture? It suggests having a separate component that contains nothing but a state machine. But, this necessitates some kind of coupling between the state machine component and nearly all the other components. I don't understand how this coupling should be handled. These are some guesses: A. Components depend on state machine: Components receive reference to state machine component's getState(), which returns an enumeration constant. Components update themselves regularly and check this as needed. B. State machine depends on components: The state machine component receives references to all the components it's monitoring. It queries their getState() methods to see where they're at. C. Some abstraction between them Use an event hub? Command pattern? D. Separate state objects that reference components State Pattern is used. Separate state objects are created, which activate/deactivate a set of components. State machine switches between state objects. I'm looking at components as implementations of aspects. They do everything that's needed internally to make that aspect happen. It seems like components should function on their own, without relying on other components. I know some dependencies are necessary, but state machines seem to want to control all of my components.

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• Set up grub2 on cloned Ubuntu installation

  - by ptikobj

  With an Ubuntu Live Disc, I have copied my Ubuntu 10.04 installation to a new harddisk (with the same hardware). However, it doesn't boot, since I think I still need to set up grub for this new installation. How do I set up grub2 for a copied Ubuntu installation? All the tutorials for grub2 didn't really help me... running update-grub on the "original" Ubuntu installation doesn't find the copied Ubuntu installation.

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• Introducing Glimpse – Firebug for your server

  - by Neil Davidson

  Here at Red Gate, we spend every waking hour trying to wow .NET and SQL developers with great products.  Every so often, though, we find something out in the wild which knocks our socks off by taking “ingeniously simple” to a whole new level.  That’s what a little community led by developers Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn has done with the open source tool Glimpse. Glimpse describes itself as ‘Firebug for the server.’  You drop the NuGet package into your ASP.NET project, and then — like magic* — your web pages will bare every detail of their execution.  Even by our high standards, it was trivial to get running: if you can use NuGet, you’re already there. You get all that lovely detail without changing any code. Our feelings go beyond respect for the developers who designed and wrote Glimpse; we’re thrilled that Nik and Anthony have come to work for Red Gate full-time. They’re going to stay in control of the project and keep doing open source development work on Glimpse.  In the medium term, we’re hoping to make paid-for products which plug into the free open source framework, especially in areas like performance profiling where we already have some deep technology.  First, though, Glimpse needs to get from beta to a v1. Given the breakneck pace of new development, this should only be a month or so away. Supporting an open source project is a first for Red Gate, so we’re going to be working with Nik and Anthony, with the Glimpse community and even with other vendors to figure out what ‘great’ looks like from the a user perspective.  Only one thing is certain: this technology deserves a wider audience than the 40,000 people who have already downloaded it, so please have a look and tell us what you think. You can hear more about what the Glimpse developers think on the Glimpse blog, and there are plenty more technical facts over at our product manager’s blog. If you have any questions or queries, please tweet with the #glimpse hashtag or contact the Glimpse team directly on [email protected]. [*That’s ”magic” in the Arthur C. Clarke “sufficiently advanced technology” sense, of course] Neil Davidson co-founder and Joint CEO Red Gate Software http://twitter.com/neildavidson    

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• Why are invariants important in Computer Science

  - by Antony Thomas

  I understand 'invariant' in its literal sense. I also recognize them when I type code. But I don't think I understand the importance of this term in the context of computer science. Whenever I read conversations\white papers about language design from famous programmers\computer scientists, the term 'invariant' keeps popping up as a jargon; and that is the part I don't understand. What is so special about it?

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• optimizing graphics for iOS flash game

  - by 1GR3

  Friend of mine and me are working on a flash developed iOS (and later Android) puzzle board game. He's a programmer and I'm a designer/developer so (no surprise) we have a different points of view. anyway, he's method: make small tiles (100x100px) in photoshop join them into the board and then in flash apply effects to the board to avoid repetition (80's not in the good way) my method: precompose the whole board (960x640px+bleed) in photoshop and than mask active and inactive areas in flash what do you think? thank you in advance!

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• Is Oberon really "a better Pascal"?

  - by Maksee

  Reading Niklaus Wirth, one can notice that despite some popularity of Pascal, he is not glad that Oberon (as a "polished" successor of Pascal and Modula) didn't get much popularity. I never did anything in Oberon, but reading the page Oberon For Pascal Developers I really did not like many of the changes as a Delphi/pascal developer, for example forcing the reserved words to be always uppercase making the language case-sensitive getting rid of enumeration types What do you think about Oberon, is it really "a better Pascal" from your point of view?

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• Installing IIS 8 on Windows 8

  - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site

  In case you haven’t heard Windows 8 is now available. As a web developer I think one of the best reasons to upgrade to Windows 8 is that you can start testing IIS 8 right from your PC. This way if you don’t have a budget for a new server you can start to familiarize yourself with some of the new features. IIS 8 has some great new features such as Dynamic IP Restrictions an Application Initialization . However one of the best new features of IIS 8 enables you to throttle the CPU utilization for any...(read more)

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• Looking for best practice for version numbering of dependent software components

  - by bit-pirate

  We are trying to decide on a good way to do version numbering for software components, which are depending on each other. Let's be more specific: Software component A is a firmware running on an embedded device and component B is its respective driver for a normal PC (Linux/Windows machine). They are communicating with each other using a custom protocol. Since, our product is also targeted at developers, we will offer stable and unstable (experimental) versions of both components (the firmware is closed-source, while the driver is open-source). Our biggest difficulty is how to handle API changes in the communication protocol. While we were implementing a compatibility check in the driver - it checks if the firmware version is compatible to the driver's version - we started to discuss multiple ways of version numbering. We came up with one solution, but we also felt like reinventing the wheel. That is why I'd like to get some feedback from the programmer/software developer community, since we think this is a common problem. So here is our solution: We plan to follow the widely used major.minor.patch version numbering and to use even/odd minor numbers for the stable/unstable versions. If we introduce changes in the API, we will increase the minor number. This convention will lead to the following example situation: Current stable branch is 1.2.1 and unstable is 1.3.7. Now, a new patch for unstable changes the API, what will cause the new unstable version number to become 1.5.0. Once, the unstable branch is considered stable, let's say in 1.5.3, we will release it as 1.4.0. I would be happy about an answer to any of the related questions below: Can you suggest a best practice for handling the issues described above? Do you think our "custom" convention is good? What changes would you apply to the described convention? Thanks a lot for your feedback! PS: Since I'm new here, I can't create new tags (e.g. best-practice). So, I'm wondering if best-pactice is just misspelled or I don't get its meaning.

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• 30 days and its ginger–help me get to £400

  - by simonsabin

  Its taken 30 days and I have managed, to my surprise, to grow a ginger Mo in support of Movember. http://uk.movember.com/mospace/6154809 I didn’t quite reach my supposed lookaliki but I don’t think it was a bad effort. Next time I’ll leave my hair for a few months before. If you fancy donating then you can do so here https://www.movember.com/uk/donate/payment/member_id/6154809/ I only need £3 to reach £400 which would be great. The team have just passed £2000 which is awesome....(read more)

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• Breaking down CS courses for freshmen

  - by Avinash

  I'm a student putting together a slide geared towards freshmen level students who are trying to understand what the importance of various classes in the CS curriculum are. Would it be safe to say that this list is fairly accurate? Data structures: how to store stuff in programs Discrete math: how to think logically Bits & bytes: how to ‘speak’ the machine’s language Advanced data structures: how to store stuff in more ways Algorithms: how to compute things efficiently Operating systems: how to do manage different processes/threads Thanks!

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• Visio drawing in SharePoint 2007

  - by MartinIsti

  Yesterday I decided to improve a SharePoint site a bit by replacing the very basic navigation web part ( content editor web part with a 5x4 table that contains only text with hyperlinks and very far from being pretty) with something fancier. I decided to use Visio for that. I created a quite simple chart: Simple I admit, but much better than this one: Do you agree? ;o) I think I will make the visio drawing a bit fancier but the main point of this blog is how to publish it into a SharePoint site?...(read more)

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• How does Minecraft compute lighting for it's non-block objects?

  - by Darestium

  I was wondering how the creator of Minecraft went about lighting the objects (player and pickaxe) based on the lighting level around the player. I have implemented the ability to light the blocks around the player but I can't really think of anyway to implement with objects. Also, when I the player moves and the lighting values change will I have to rebuild it's vertexbuffers? Or is there some other way? Any ideas?

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• Keyboard Shortcuts in Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  The CTRL key, which stands for ConTRoL…aw, the good ole days What keyboard shortcuts should EVERY Oracle SQL Developer user know? How do you find new shortcuts to master, and how do you change them to match ones you’ve already learned in other tools? These are the driving questions for today’s post. While some of us may be keyboard ninjas, and others are more driven to use the mouse – everyone has probably picked up a few strategic keyboard shortcuts over the years. For example, I’ve personally JUST memorized the Cmd-Shift-4 ‘trick’ in Mac OS X. And of course we all know what F1 does, right? Right?!? Here are a few more keyboard shortcuts to commit to memory. My Favorite SQL Developer Shortcuts ctrl-enter : executes the current statement(s) F5 : executes the current code as a script (think SQL*Plus) ctrl-space : invokes code insight on demand Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) ctrl-Up/Dn : replaces worksheet with previous/next SQL from SQL History ctrl-shift+Up/Dn : same as above but appends instead of replaces shift+F4 : opens a Describe window for current object at cursor ctrl+F7 : format SQL ctrl+/ : toggles line commenting ctrl+e : incremental search Configuring Keyboard Shortcuts in SQL Developer Tools Preferences Shortcut Keys Search by command name OR the keystroke itself Some tips… Sort by category Pay special attention to the ‘Code Editor’ and ‘Other’ categories Mind the conflicts when you change the defaults Be nice – share! You can save your new mappings with your co-workers using the Export and Import buttons Click on ‘More Actions’ to expose the Import and Export buttons When I get ‘bored’ or if I think I might be missing something, I peruse the Code Editor and Other categories, again! I’ve picked up quite a few cool editor tricks here. Then I blog about them, like they’re ‘magic.’ #EvilLaugh But the main tip is this – don’t let your previously memorized keyboard shortcuts SHORTCUT your usage of SQL Developer. If your fingers have already memorized some keystrokes, just re-program SQL Developer to match! What’s your favorite shortcut? I’ll use the most popular shortcut mentioned in the comments to round out my Top 10 list above!

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• Simple Netduino Go Tutorial Flashing RGB LEDs with a potentiometer

  - by Chris Hammond

  In case you missed the announcement on 4/4, the guys and Secret Labs, along with other members of the Netduino Community have come out with a new platform called Netduino Go . Head on over www.netduino.com for the introduction forum post . This post is how to quickly get up and running with your Netduino Go, based on Chris Walker’s getting started forum post , with some enhancements that I think will make it easier to get up and running, as Chris’ post unfortunately leaves a few things out. Hardware...(read more)

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• Is it bad to join open-source projects as an amateur?

  - by esqew

  I've thought for about six months now that I should join an open-source iPhone or iPad project to hone my skills in Objective-C, but every time I go to do it I see thousands of lines of code on huge projects that I end up convincing myself I would never understand. I always think that my commits would just end up being a hassle for project admins and more senior contributors, so I always back out at the last second. My question essentially is, is it a hassle when an intermediately-experienced programmer joins an open-source project?

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• Charms and the App Bar

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I admit. I made a mistake in the last post about our planespotter app. I have dedicated a full part of the hub to Social. I also had a section called Friends but that made sense since I said that “Friends” is a special group of people that connect to each other through our app and only our app. Social however is sharing our spots with Twitter, Facebook and so on. Now, we could write that functionality in our app in a different section but there is one small problem with that: users don’t expect that. Ok, I admit. The mistake was quite deliberate to give me an excuse to write this part. But still: the mistake is one I see a lot. People are trying to do stuff in their application that they shouldn’t be doing. This always strike me as slightly odd: why do some work when others have already done it for you and you can just use it? After all: good developers are lazy (lazy people will always try to find the easiest way to do something and in development land this usually means the cleanest and best to support way…) So. What is that part that Microsoft has done for us and we don’t have to do ourselves? The answer lies on the right hand of your Win8 screen: This is a screenshot of my tablet (as you can see I am writing this right now….) When I swipe my finger from out of the screen on the right inside the screen (or move the mouse to the upper right corner) this menu will appear. Next to settings and the start menu button we’ll find the Search and the Share charms. These are two ways that your app can share the information it contains with the rest of the world, or at least: the rest of your system. So don’t write a Search feature in your app. Don’t write a Share feature in your app. It’s here already. Users, once they are used to Windows 8, will use that feature and expect it to work. If it doesn’t, they won’t like your app and you can kiss you dreams of everlasting fame goodbye. So use these two. What are they? Well, simply they are parts of a contract. In your app you say somewhere in code that you are supporting Search and Share. So when the user selects Share the system will interrogate the current app in the foreground if it supports this feature. Your app will say “But why, yes, I do!” Then the system will ask the app “Ok then, wisecrack, then share!” and you will have to provide the system with some information about the format. Other applications have subscribed to be at the receiving end of the Share contract. They have told the system that they support Sharing (receiving) and which formats they understand. If one or more of them support the formats you specify, the user will see them. The user clicks / taps on the app of their choice and data is moved from your app to the new one. So if you say you support Facebook and Twitter users can post data from your app to these networks by selecting Share. The same applies to Search. Don’t make a “search” button in your app but use the contract to tell the system that you support search and use that instead. Users will be grateful (remember that bar with men/women/creatures that are waiting for you?) The more and more people get to know Windows 8, the more they will use this. And if you are one of the people who wrote an app that helped them learn the system, well, that’s even better. So. We don’t have a Share or a Search button. We do have other buttons. Most important: we probably need a “New Spot” button. And a “Filter” might be useful. Or someway to open the camera so you can add a picture to the spot. Where will be put those? The answer is the “Appbar” . This is a application / context aware menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen when you move your finger / mouse from below the screen into it. From above downwards works just as well. Here you see an example of the appbar from the People app. (click on it for a larger version). This appears whenever you slide your finger up from below of down from above. This is where you put your commands. Remember, this is context aware so this menu will change when you are in different parts of your app or when you have selected different items. There are a few conventions when you create this appbar. First, the items on the right are “General” items, meaning they have little to do with what is on the screen right now. I think this would be a great place to add our “New Spot” icon. On the far left are items associated with the current selected item or screen. So if you have a spot selected, the button for Add Photo should be visible here and on the left hand side. Not everything is as clear as this, but this is what you should strive for. Group items together. And please note: this is the only place in Metro design where we are allowed to use lines as separators. So when you want to separate a group of icons from another group, add a line. Also note the simplicity of the buttons. No colors, no lights or shadows, no 3D. After a couple of years of fancy almost realistic looking icons people have finally decided that hey, this is a virtual world: it’s ok to look virtual as well. So make things as readable and clear as possible and don’t try to duplicate nature. It’s all about the information, remember? (If you don’t remember I’d like to point you to a older blog post of mine about the what and why of Metro). So.. think about the buttons a bit and think about Share and Search. What will you put there? Remember: this is the way the users interact with your apps and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its covers when it comes to people, this isn’t entirely so when it comes to apps. People DO judge an app by its looks and the way it feels. Take advantage of that. History has learned that a crappy app with a GREAT user interface gets better reviews than a GREAT app with a lousy UI… I know: developers will find this extremely unfair but that’s the world we live in (No, I am not saying you should deliver rubbish apps). Next time: we’ll start by building the darn thing!

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• JavaScript Sucks.

  - by Matt Watson

  JavaScript Sucks. Yes, I said it. Microsoft's announcement of TypeScript got me thinking today. Is this a step in the right direction? It sounds like it fixes a lot of problems with JavaScript development. But is it really just duct tape and super glue for a programming model that needs to be replaced?I have had a love hate relationship with JavaScript, like most developers who would prefer avoiding client side code. I started doing web development over 10 years ago and I have done some pretty cool stuff with JavaScript. It has came a long ways and is the universal standard these days for client side scripting in the web browser. Over the years the browsers have become much faster at processing JavaScript. Now people are even trying to use it on the server side via node.js. OK, so why do I think JavaScript sucks?Well first off, as an enterprise web application developer, I don't like any scripting or dynamic languages. I like code that compiles for lots of obvious reasons. It is messy to code with and lacks all kinds of modern programming features. We spend a lot of time trying to hack it to do things it was never really designed for.Ever try to use different jQuery based plugins that require conflicting jQuery versions? Yeah, that sucks.How about trying to figure out how to make 20 javascript include files load quicker as one request? Yeah that sucks too.Performance? Let me just point to the old Facebook mobile app made with JS & HTML5. It sucked. Enough said.How about unit testing JavaScript? I've never tried it, but it sure sounds like fun.My biggest problem with JavaScript is code security. If I make some awesome product, there is no way to protect my code. How can we expect game makers to write apps in 100% JavaScript and HTML5 if they can't protect their intellectual property?There are compiling tools like Closure, unit test frameworks, minify, coffee script, TypeScript and a bunch of other tools. But to me, they all try to make up for the weaknesses and problems with JavaScript. JavaScript is a mess and we spend a lot of time trying to work around all of it's problems. It is possible to program in Silverlight, Java or Flash and run that in the browser instead of JavaScript, but they all have their own problems and lack universal mobile support. I believe Microsoft's new TypeScript is a step forward for JavaScript, but I think we need to start planning to go a whole different direction. We need a new universal client side programming model, because JavaScript sucks.

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