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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 29, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 29, 2013Popular ReleasesAscend 3D: Ascend 2.0.1: Moved model loading into SceneNode.Load static method Updated AscendViewer to use latest Ascend buildUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????SQL Server Data Compare: DB Compare 0.1 Beta 1: Some bugs fixed. Do not forget to add reviews. :)Hogeschool Rotterdam Windows Phone Maps project: HRO Maps Sourcecode VS2010: Initiele versieUniversal Visualnovel Engine Tools: ns2uve: NS2UVE ONS???????? ????：.Net Framework 4.0 ????：UVE for WP8 1.2?? ??：update 2????????！ ????1.?ONS???????????，???????nscript.dat?Icon.png??，???arc.nsa?default.ttf??。 2.??????，????bin??????exe?????dll???????????????。 3.??ns2uve.exe，??????，?????，????????? 4.?????????????.png??? ??：??????????nscript.dat??Icon.png?，??????。?????????????。 ????????????src???? CopyRight W-Otaku DEVAdjusting SharePoint Site Quota PowerShell: Adjusting.SharePoint.Site.Quota: Version 1.0 Features Display Database Size Display Quota Warning Threshold Display Quota Maximum Threshold Display Site Space Usage Change Quota Warning Threshold Change Quota Maximum ThresholdOutlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.95: update parser to allow for CSS3 calc( function to nest. add recognition of -pponly (Preprocess-Only) switch in AjaxMinManifestTask build task. Fix crashing bug in EXE when processing a manifest file using the -xml switch and an error message needs to be displayed (like a missing input file). Create separate Clean and Bundle build tasks for working with manifest files (AjaxMinManifestCleanTask and AjaxMinBundleTask). Removed the IsCleanOperation from AjaxMinManifestTask -- use AjaxMinMan...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.44: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImgChili.net" links FIXED: Auto UpdaterDocument.Editor: 2013.25: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.25: Improved Spell Check support Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWPF Composites: Version 4.3.0: In this Beta release, I broke my code out into two separate projects. There is a core FasterWPF.dll with the minimal required functionality. This can run with only the Aero.dll and the Rx .dll's. Then, I have a FasterWPFExtras .dll that requires and supports the Extended WPF Toolkit™ Community Edition V 1.9.0 (including Xceed DataGrid) and the Thriple .dll. This is for developers who want more . . . Finally, you may notice the other OPTIONAL .dll's available in the download such as the Dyn...Channel9's Absolute Beginner Series: Windows Phone 8: Entire source code for the Channel 9 series, Windows Phone 8 Development for Absolute Beginners.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v13: ImportantThis release does not support Visual Studio 2010. The latest stable release for VS 2010 is v12.1. Version History Changed in v13 Added page width guide lines Added guide highlighting options Fixed guides appearing over collapsed blocks Fixed guides not appearing in newly opened files Fixed some potential crashes Fixed lines going through pragma statements Various updates for VS 2012 and VS 2013 Removed VS 2010 support Changed in v12.1: Fixed crash when unable to start...Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 2.1.0 - Prerelease d: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 2.1.0 - Prerelease d(supports .NET 3.5, 4.0 and 4.5) Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) Showcase Application Samples (not for .NET 3.5) Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextual Tabs, Quick Access Toolbar, Backstage) Resizing (ribbon reducing & enlarging principles) Galleries (Gallery in ContextMenu, InRibbonGallery) MVVM (shows how to use this library with Model-View-ViewModel pattern) KeyTips ScreenTips Toolbars ColorGallery *Walkthrough (do...New ProjectsA sample web app for AppHarbor: Just a little project to test the amazing apphorbor offering!Android_Traffic_Tracker: Android traffic trackingEASTester: EASTester This application shows how encoding, decoding and submission of Exchange Server ActiveSync (EAS) calls might be done. Everynet_TFS_SVN: this is a everynet projectFluentRoute: Make the task of configure ASP.NET MVC Routes much more easier! This lib gives you the possibility of using Fluent Configurafion,style.Google Music for Jamcast: This project adds Google Music browse and playback capabilities to Jamcast, a DLNA media server for Windows.GussanoExtension: My summaryHL7 SDK - Open Source CDA R2 Implemenation for .NET and COM: A set of open source libraries for creating, parsing, storing and converting HL7 Clinical Documents in .NET and COM environment.Hogeschool Rotterdam Windows Phone Maps project: Dit is een project gemaakt voor het vak INFPRJ07DT voor de Hogeschool Rotterdam. Hue For Both (Build 2013): A simple MVVM project for controlling Philips Hue lights on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.Key2Screen: This little helper will show all keystrokes on screen. This will be needed during a Kata to show the audience the uses keyboard shortcuts or to record them.MercerGOLD: A tool for managing information on worldwide employee benefits, compensation and human resource programs.Microsoft CRM 2011 True Unique Autonumber Creator: The Microsoft CRM 2011 True Unique Autonumber Creator provides functionality for generating unique numbers for any entity. Work for On-Premises and Online/CloudNewsAlerts: this is news ALERT PROJECTNTmdb: A wrapper for the TMDb API written in C# .Net 4.5.PowerShellCron: Windows Service to Schedule and Run PowerShell Scripts with Full Logging to Database of script output (all streams, including Write-Host).QlikView Extension - WebPageViewer2: QlikView Extension to display a web page in QlikView.Restafari - The REST Client Base: A REST Client base for your .Net projects. It is compatible with: - .Net 4.5 - .Net 4.0 - Windows Phone 8 - Windows Store applicationsRevolution Of SnowWhite: PC??????SharePoint Silverlight CSV Importer: Convert .csv data into SharePoint list items. A slick Silverlight control to map and import a .csv files to a sharepoint list. Includes transforms and keys.Silverlight AWS S3 Uploader: Silverlight 5 app to upload files to AWS S3SIM Card Manager: A Windows tool to read SIM card information and contentSoCafeShop: SoCafeShopTeam Foundation Server 2012 Sample Work Items for MSF Agile, CMMI, & SCRUM: This project provides sample work items that can be used in your MSF Agile, MSF CMMI, or SCRUM 2.0 Process Templaces in Team Foundation Server 2012.TidyVaca - an SF inspired restyle of the Tidy responsive Skin by Adammer: A San Francisco inspired restyling of Adammer's Tidy responsive skin.Tiny Forms Controls: The goal of this project is to create a library of Windows Forms and Web Forms controls and components.TMYS: Deneme projesi önemli bir sey degil

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 from Scratch &ndash; Part 1 Listing Data from Database

  - by Max

  Part 1 - Listing Data from Database: Let us now learn ASP.NET MVC 2 from Scratch by actually developing a front end website for the Chinook database, which is an alternative to the traditional Northwind database. You can get the Chinook database from here. As always the best way to learn something is by working on it and doing something. The Chinook database has the following schema, a quick look will help us implementing the application in a efficient way. Let us first implement a grid view table with the list of Employees with some details, this table also has the Details, Edit and Delete buttons on it to do some operations. This is series of post will concentrate on creating a simple CRUD front end for Chinook DB using ASP.NET MVC 2. In this post, we will look at listing all the possible Employees in the database in a tabular format, from which, we can then edit and delete them as required. In this post, we will concentrate on setting up our environment and then just designing a page to show a tabular information from the database. We need to first setup the SQL Server database, you can download the required version and then set it up in your localhost. Then we need to add the LINQ to SQL Classes required for us to enable interaction with our database. Now after you do the above step, just use your Server Explorer in VS 2010 to actually navigate to the database, expand the tables node and then drag drop all the tables onto the Object Relational Designer space and you go you will have the tables visualized as classes. As simple as that. Now for the purpose of displaying the data from Employee in a table, we will show only the EmployeeID, Firstname and lastname. So let us create a class to hold this information. So let us add a new class called EmployeeList to the ViewModels. We will send this data model to the View and this can be displayed in the page. public class EmployeeList { public int EmployeeID { get; set; } public string Firstname { get; set; } public string Lastname { get; set; } public EmployeeList(int empID, string fname, string lname) { this.EmployeeID = empID; this.Firstname = fname; this.Lastname = lname; } } Ok now we have got the backend ready. Let us now look at the front end view now. We will first create a master called Site.Master and reuse it across the site. The Site.Master content will be <%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Site.Master.cs" Inherits="ChinookMvcSample.Views.Shared.Site" %>   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title></title> <style type="text/css"> html { background-color: gray; } .content { width: 880px; position: relative; background-color: #ffffff; min-width: 880px; min-height: 800px; float: inherit; text-align: justify; } </style> <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="head" runat="server"> </asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </head> <body> <center> <h1> My Website</h1> <div class="content"> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="body" runat="server"> </asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </div> </center> </body> </html> The backend Site.Master.cs does not contain anything. In the actual Index.aspx view, we add the code to simply iterate through the collection of EmployeeList that was sent to the View via the Controller. So in the top of the Index.aspx view, we have this inherits which says Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<IEnumerable<ChinookMvcSample.ViewModels.EmployeeList>>" In this above line, we dictate that the page is consuming a IEnumerable collection of EmployeeList. So once we specify this and compile the project. Then in our Index.aspx page, we can consume the EmployeeList object and access all its methods and properties. <table class="styled" cellpadding="3" border="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <th colspan="3"> </th> <th> First Name </th> <th> Last Name </th> </tr> <% foreach (var item in Model) { %> <tr> <td align="center"> <%: Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { id = item.EmployeeID }, new { id = "links" })%> </td> <td align="center"> <%: Html.ActionLink("Details", "Details", new { id = item.EmployeeID }, new { id = "links" })%> </td> <td align="center"> <%: Html.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.EmployeeID }, new { id = "links" })%> </td> <td> <%: item.Firstname %> </td> <td> <%: item.Lastname %> </td> </tr> <% } %> <tr> <td colspan="5"> <%: Html.ActionLink("Create New", "Create") %> </td> </tr> </table> The Html.ActionLink is a Html Helper to a create a hyperlink in the page, in the one we have used, the first parameter is the text that is to be used for the hyperlink, second one is the action name, third one is the parameter to be passed, last one is the attributes to be added while the hyperlink is rendered in the page. Here we are adding the id=”links” to the hyperlinks that is created in the page. In the index.aspx page, we add some jQuery stuff add alternate row colours and highlight colours for rows on mouse over. Now the Controller that handles the requests and directs the request to the right view. For the index view, the controller would be public ActionResult Index() { //var Employees = from e in data.Employees select new EmployeeList(e.EmployeeId,e.FirstName,e.LastName); //return View(Employees.ToList()); return View(_data.Employees.Select(p => new EmployeeList(p.EmployeeId, p.FirstName, p.LastName))); } Let us also write a unit test using NUnit for the above, just testing EmployeeController’s Index. DataClasses1DataContext _data; public EmployeeControllerTest() { _data = new DataClasses1DataContext("Data Source=(local);Initial Catalog=Chinook;Integrated Security=True"); }   [Test] public void TestEmployeeIndex() { var e = new EmployeeController(_data); var result = e.Index() as ViewResult; var employeeList = result.ViewData.Model; Assert.IsNotNull(employeeList, "Result is null."); } In the first EmployeeControllerTest constructor, we set the data context to be used while running the tests. And then in the actual test, We just ensure that the View results returned by Index is not null. Here is the zip of the entire solution files until this point. Let me know if you have any doubts or clarifications. Cheers! Have a nice day.

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• Key ATG architecture principles

  - by Glen Borkowski

  Overview The purpose of this article is to describe some of the important foundational concepts of ATG.  This is not intended to cover all areas of the ATG platform, just the most important subset - the ones that allow ATG to be extremely flexible, configurable, high performance, etc.  For more information on these topics, please see the online product manuals. Modules The first concept is called the 'ATG Module'.  Simply put, you can think of modules as the building blocks for ATG applications.  The ATG development team builds the out of the box product using modules (these are the 'out of the box' modules).  Then, when a customer is implementing their site, they build their own modules that sit 'on top' of the out of the box ATG modules.  Modules can be very simple - containing minimal definition, and perhaps a small amount of configuration.  Alternatively, a module can be rather complex - containing custom logic, database schema definitions, configuration, one or more web applications, etc.  Modules generally will have dependencies on other modules (the modules beneath it).  For example, the Commerce Reference Store module (CRS) requires the DCS (out of the box commerce) module. Modules have a ton of value because they provide a way to decouple a customers implementation from the out of the box ATG modules.  This allows for a much easier job when it comes time to upgrade the ATG platform.  Modules are also a very useful way to group functionality into a single package which can be leveraged across multiple ATG applications. One very important thing to understand about modules, or more accurately, ATG as a whole, is that when you start ATG, you tell it what module(s) you want to start.  One of the first things ATG does is to look through all the modules you specified, and for each one, determine a list of modules that are also required to start (based on each modules dependencies).  Once this final, ordered list is determined, ATG continues to boot up.  One of the outputs from the ordered list of modules is that each module can contain it's own classes and configuration.  During boot, the ordered list of modules drives the unified classpath and configpath.  This is what determines which classes override others, and which configuration overrides other configuration.  Think of it as a layered approach. The structure of a module is well defined.  It simply looks like a folder in a filesystem that has certain other folders and files within it.  Here is a list of items that can appear in a module: MyModule: META-INF - this is required, along with a file called MANIFEST.MF which describes certain properties of the module.  One important property is what other modules this module depends on. config - this is typically present in most modules.  It defines a tree structure (folders containing properties files, XML, etc) that maps to ATG components (these are described below). lib - this contains the classes (typically in jarred format) for any code defined in this module j2ee - this is where any web-apps would be stored. src - in case you want to include the source code for this module, it's standard practice to put it here sql - if your module requires any additions to the database schema, you should place that schema here Here's a screenshots of a module: Modules can also contain sub-modules.  A dot-notation is used when referring to these sub-modules (i.e. MyModule.Versioned, where Versioned is a sub-module of MyModule). Finally, it is important to completely understand how modules work if you are going to be able to leverage them effectively.  There are many different ways to design modules you want to create, some approaches are better than others, especially if you plan to share functionality between multiple different ATG applications. Components A component in ATG can be thought of as a single item that performs a certain set of related tasks.  An example could be a ProductViews component - used to store information about what products the current customer has viewed.  Components have properties (also called attributes).  The ProductViews component could have properties like lastProductViewed (stores the ID of the last product viewed) or productViewList (stores the ID's of products viewed in order of their being viewed).  The previous examples of component properties would typically also offer get and set methods used to retrieve and store the property values.  Components typically will also offer other types of useful methods aside from get and set.  In the ProductViewed component, we might want to offer a hasViewed method which will tell you if the customer has viewed a certain product or not. Components are organized in a tree like hierarchy called 'nucleus'.  Nucleus is used to locate and instantiate ATG Components.  So, when you create a new ATG component, it will be able to be found 'within' nucleus.  Nucleus allows ATG components to reference one another - this is how components are strung together to perform meaningful work.  It's also a mechanism to prevent redundant configuration - define it once and refer to it from everywhere. Here is a screenshot of a component in nucleus:  Components can be extremely simple (i.e. a single property with a get method), or can be rather complex offering many properties and methods.  To be an ATG component, a few things are required: a class - you can reference an existing out of the box class or you could write your own a properties file - this is used to define your component the above items must be located 'within' nucleus by placing them in the correct spot in your module's config folder Within the properties file, you will need to point to the class you want to use: $class=com.mycompany.myclass You may also want to define the scope of the class (request, session, or global): $scope=session In summary, ATG Components live in nucleus, generally have links to other components, and provide some meaningful type of work.  You can configure components as well as extend their functionality by writing code. Repositories Repositories (a.k.a. Data Anywhere Architecture) is the mechanism that ATG uses to access data primarily stored in relational databases, but also LDAP or other backend systems.  ATG applications are required to be very high performance, and data access is critical in that if not handled properly, it could create a bottleneck.  ATG's repository functionality has been around for a long time - it's proven to be extremely scalable.  Developers new to ATG need to understand how repositories work as this is a critical aspect of the ATG architecture.   Repositories essentially map relational tables to objects in ATG, as well as handle caching.  ATG defines many repositories out of the box (i.e. user profile, catalog, orders, etc), and this is comprised of both the underlying database schema along with the associated repository definition files (XML).  It is fully expected that implementations will extend / change the out of the box repository definitions, so there is a prescribed approach to doing this.  The first thing to be sure of is to encapsulate your repository definition additions / changes within your own module (as described above).  The other important best practice is to never modify the out of the box schema - in other words, don't add columns to existing ATG tables, just create your own new tables.  These will help ensure you can easily upgrade your application at a later date. xml-combination As mentioned earlier, when you start ATG, the order of the modules will determine the final configpath.  Files within this configpath are 'layered' such that modules on top can override configuration of modules below it.  This is the same concept for repository definition files.  If you want to add a few properties to the out of the box user profile, you simply need to create an XML file containing only your additions, and place it in the correct location in your module.  At boot time, your definition will be combined (hence the term xml-combination) with the lower, out of the box modules, with the result being a user profile that contains everything (out of the box, plus your additions).  Aside from just adding properties, there are also ways to remove and change properties. types of properties Aside from the normal 'database backed' properties, there are a few other interesting types: transient properties - these are properties that are in memory, but not backed by any database column.  These are useful for temporary storage. java-backed properties - by nature, these are transient, but in addition, when you access this property (by called the get method) instead of looking up a piece of data, it performs some logic and returns the results.  'Age' is a good example - if you're storing a birth date on the profile, but your business rules are defined in terms of someones age, you could create a simple java-backed property to look at the birth date and compare it to the current date, and return the persons age. derived properties - this is what allows for inheritance within the repository structure.  You could define a property at the category level, and have the product inherit it's value as well as override it.  This is useful for setting defaults, with the ability to override. caching There are a number of different caching modes which are useful at different times depending on the nature of the data being cached.  For example, the simple cache mode is useful for things like user profiles.  This is because the user profile will typically only be used on a single instance of ATG at one time.  Simple cache mode is also useful for read-only types of data such as the product catalog.  Locked cache mode is useful when you need to ensure that only one ATG instance writes to a particular item at a time - an example would be a customers order.  There are many options in terms of configuring caching which are outside the scope of this article - please refer to the product manuals for more details. Other important concepts - out of scope for this article There are a whole host of concepts that are very important pieces to the ATG platform, but are out of scope for this article.  Here's a brief description of some of them: formhandlers - these are ATG components that handle form submissions by users. pipelines - these are configurable chains of logic that are used for things like handling a request (request pipeline) or checking out an order. special kinds of repositories (versioned, files, secure, ...) - there are a couple different types of repositories that are used in various situations.  See the manuals for more information. web development - JSP/ DSP tag library - ATG provides a traditional approach to developing web applications by providing a tag library called the DSP library.  This library is used throughout your JSP pages to interact with all the ATG components. messaging - a message sub-system used as another way for components to interact. personalization - ability for business users to define a personalized user experience for customers.  See the other blog posts related to personalization.

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• Applications: The mathematics of movement, Part 1

  - by TechTwaddle

  Before you continue reading this post, a suggestion; if you haven’t read “Programming Windows Phone 7 Series” by Charles Petzold, go read it. Now. If you find 150+ pages a little too long, at least go through Chapter 5, Principles of Movement, especially the section “A Brief Review of Vectors”. This post is largely inspired from this chapter. At this point I assume you know what vectors are, how they are represented using the pair (x, y), what a unit vector is, and given a vector how you would normalize the vector to get a unit vector. Our task in this post is simple, a marble is drawn at a point on the screen, the user clicks at a random point on the device, say (destX, destY), and our program makes the marble move towards that point and stop when it is reached. The tricky part of this task is the word “towards”, it adds a direction to our problem. Making a marble bounce around the screen is simple, all you have to do is keep incrementing the X and Y co-ordinates by a certain amount and handle the boundary conditions. Here, however, we need to find out exactly how to increment the X and Y values, so that the marble appears to move towards the point where the user clicked. And this is where vectors can be so helpful. The code I’ll show you here is not ideal, we’ll be working with C# on Windows Mobile 6.x, so there is no built-in vector class that I can use, though I could have written one and done all the math inside the class. I think it is trivial to the actual problem that we are trying to solve and can be done pretty easily once you know what’s going on behind the scenes. In other words, this is an excuse for me being lazy. The first approach, uses the function Atan2() to solve the “towards” part of the problem. Atan2() takes a point (x, y) as input, Atan2(y, x), note that y goes first, and then it returns an angle in radians. What angle you ask. Imagine a line from the origin (0, 0), to the point (x, y). The angle which Atan2 returns is the angle the positive X-axis makes with that line, measured clockwise. The figure below makes it clear, wiki has good details about Atan2(), give it a read. The pair (x, y) also denotes a vector. A vector whose magnitude is the length of that line, which is Sqrt(x*x + y*y), and a direction ?, as measured from positive X axis clockwise. If you’ve read that chapter from Charles Petzold’s book, this much should be clear. Now Sine and Cosine of the angle ? are special. Cosine(?) divides x by the vectors length (adjacent by hypotenuse), thus giving us a unit vector along the X direction. And Sine(?) divides y by the vectors length (opposite by hypotenuse), thus giving us a unit vector along the Y direction. Therefore the vector represented by the pair (cos(?), sin(?)), is the unit vector (or normalization) of the vector (x, y). This unit vector has a length of 1 (remember sin2(?) + cos2(?) = 1 ?), and a direction which is the same as vector (x, y). Now if I multiply this unit vector by some amount, then I will always get a point which is a certain distance away from the origin, but, more importantly, the point will always be on that line. For example, if I multiply the unit vector with the length of the line, I get the point (x, y). Thus, all we have to do to move the marble towards our destination point, is to multiply the unit vector by a certain amount each time and draw the marble, and the marble will magically move towards the click point. Now time for some code. The application, uses a timer based frame draw method to draw the marble on the screen. The timer is disabled initially and whenever the user clicks on the screen, the timer is enabled. The callback function for the timer follows the standard Update and Draw cycle. private double totLenToTravelSqrd = 0; private double startPosX = 0, startPosY = 0; private double destX = 0, destY = 0; private void Form1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {     destX = e.X;     destY = e.Y;     double x = marble1.x - destX;     double y = marble1.y - destY;     //calculate the total length to be travelled     totLenToTravelSqrd = x * x + y * y;     //store the start position of the marble     startPosX = marble1.x;     startPosY = marble1.y;     timer1.Enabled = true; } private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {     UpdatePosition();     DrawMarble(); } Form1_MouseUp() method is called when ever the user touches and releases the screen. In this function we save the click point in destX and destY, this is the destination point for the marble and we also enable the timer. We store a few more values which we will use in the UpdatePosition() method to detect when the marble has reached the destination and stop the timer. So we store the start position of the marble and the square of the total length to be travelled. I’ll leave out the term ‘sqrd’ when speaking of lengths from now on. The time out interval of the timer is set to 40ms, thus giving us a frame rate of about ~25fps. In the timer callback, we update the marble position and draw the marble. We know what DrawMarble() does, so here, we’ll only look at how UpdatePosition() is implemented; private void UpdatePosition() {     //the vector (x, y)     double x = destX - marble1.x;     double y = destY - marble1.y;     double incrX=0, incrY=0;     double distanceSqrd=0;     double speed = 6;     //distance between destination and current position, before updating marble position     distanceSqrd = x * x + y * y;     double angle = Math.Atan2(y, x);     //Cos and Sin give us the unit vector, 6 is the value we use to magnify the unit vector along the same direction     incrX = speed * Math.Cos(angle);     incrY = speed * Math.Sin(angle);     marble1.x += incrX;     marble1.y += incrY;     //check for bounds     if ((int)marble1.x < MinX + marbleWidth / 2)     {         marble1.x = MinX + marbleWidth / 2;     }     else if ((int)marble1.x > (MaxX - marbleWidth / 2))     {         marble1.x = MaxX - marbleWidth / 2;     }     if ((int)marble1.y < MinY + marbleHeight / 2)     {         marble1.y = MinY + marbleHeight / 2;     }     else if ((int)marble1.y > (MaxY - marbleHeight / 2))     {         marble1.y = MaxY - marbleHeight / 2;     }     //distance between destination and current point, after updating marble position     x = destX - marble1.x;     y = destY - marble1.y;     double newDistanceSqrd = x * x + y * y;     //length from start point to current marble position     x = startPosX - (marble1.x);     y = startPosY - (marble1.y);     double lenTraveledSqrd = x * x + y * y;     //check for end conditions     if ((int)lenTraveledSqrd >= (int)totLenToTravelSqrd)     {         System.Console.WriteLine("Stopping because destination reached");         timer1.Enabled = false;     }     else if (Math.Abs((int)distanceSqrd - (int)newDistanceSqrd) < 4)     {         System.Console.WriteLine("Stopping because no change in Old and New position");         timer1.Enabled = false;     } } Ok, so in this function, first we subtract the current marble position from the destination point to give us a vector. The first three lines of the function construct this vector (x, y). The vector (x, y) has the same length as the line from (marble1.x, marble1.y) to (destX, destY) and is in the direction pointing from (marble1.x, marble1.y) to (destX, destY). Note that marble1.x and marble1.y denote the center point of the marble. Then we use Atan2() to get the angle which this vector makes with the positive X axis and use Cosine() and Sine() of that angle to get the unit vector along that same direction. We multiply this unit vector with 6, to get the values which the position of the marble should be incremented by. This variable, speed, can be experimented with and determines how fast the marble moves towards the destination. After this, we check for bounds to make sure that the marble stays within the screen limits and finally we check for the end condition and stop the timer. The end condition has two parts to it. The first case is the normal case, where the user clicks well inside the screen. Here, we stop when the total length travelled by the marble is greater than or equal to the total length to be travelled. Simple enough. The second case is when the user clicks on the very corners of the screen. Like I said before, the values marble1.x and marble1.y denote the center point of the marble. When the user clicks on the corner, the marble moves towards the point, and after some time tries to go outside of the screen, this is when the bounds checking comes into play and corrects the marble position so that the marble stays inside the screen. In this case the marble will never travel a distance of totLenToTravelSqrd, because of the correction is its position. So here we detect the end condition when there is not much change in marbles position. I use the value 4 in the second condition above. After experimenting with a few values, 4 seemed to work okay. There is a small thing missing in the code above. In the normal case, case 1, when the update method runs for the last time, marble position over shoots the destination point. This happens because the position is incremented in steps (which are not small enough), so in this case too, we should have corrected the marble position, so that the center point of the marble sits exactly on top of the destination point. I’ll add this later and update the post. This has been a pretty long post already, so I’ll leave you with a video of how this program looks while running. Notice in the video that the marble moves like a bot, without any grace what so ever. And that is because the speed of the marble is fixed at 6. In the next post we will see how to make the marble move a little more elegantly. And also, if Atan2(), Sine() and Cosine() are a little too much to digest, we’ll see how to achieve the same effect without using them, in the next to next post maybe. Ciao!

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• Passing Strings by Ref

  - by SGWellens

  Humbled yet again…DOH! No matter how much experience you acquire, no matter how smart you may be, no matter how hard you study, it is impossible to keep fully up to date on all the nuances of the technology we are exposed to. There will always be gaps in our knowledge: Little 'dead zones' of uncertainty. For me, this time, it was about passing string parameters to functions. I thought I knew this stuff cold. First, a little review... Value Types and Ref Integers and structs are value types (as opposed to reference types). When declared locally, their memory storage is on the stack; not on the heap. When passed to a function, the function gets a copy of the data and works on the copy. If a function needs to change a value type, you need to use the ref keyword.  Here's an example:     // ---- declaration -----------------     public struct MyStruct    {        public string StrTag;    }     // ---- functions -----------------------     void SetMyStruct(MyStruct myStruct)     // pass by value    {        myStruct.StrTag = "BBB";    }     void SetMyStruct(ref MyStruct myStruct)  // pass by ref    {        myStruct.StrTag = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage -----------------------     protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyStruct Data;        Data.StrTag = "AAA";         SetMyStruct(Data);        // Data.StrTag is still "AAA"         SetMyStruct(ref Data);        // Data.StrTag is now "CCC"    } No surprises here. All value types like ints, floats, datetimes, enums, structs, etc. work the same way. And now on to... Class Types and Ref     // ---- Declaration -----------------------------     public class MyClass    {        public string StrTag;    }     // ---- Functions ----------------------------     void SetMyClass(MyClass myClass)  // pass by 'value'    {        myClass.StrTag = "BBB";    }     void SetMyClass(ref MyClass myClass)   // pass by ref    {        myClass.StrTag = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage ---------------------------------------     protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        MyClass Data = new MyClass();        Data.StrTag = "AAA";         SetMyClass(Data);          // Data.StrTag is now "BBB"         SetMyClass(ref Data);        // Data.StrTag is now "CCC"    }  No surprises here either. Since Classes are reference types, you do not need the ref keyword to modify an object. What may seem a little strange is that with or without the ref keyword, the results are the same: The compiler knows what to do. So, why would you need to use the ref keyword when passing an object to a function? Because then you can change the reference itself…ie you can make it refer to a completely different object. Inside the function you can do: myClass = new MyClass() and the old object will be garbage collected and the new object will be returned to the caller. That ends the review. Now let's look at passing strings as parameters. The String Type and Ref Strings are reference types. So when you pass a String to a function, you do not need the ref keyword to change the string. Right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I saw this, I was so surprised that I fell out of my chair. Getting up, I bumped my head on my desk (which really hurt). My bumping the desk caused a large speaker to fall off of a bookshelf and land squarely on my big toe. I was screaming in pain and hopping on one foot when I lost my balance and fell. I struck my head on the side of the desk (once again) and knocked myself out cold. When I woke up, I was in the hospital where due to a database error (thanks Oracle) the doctors had put casts on both my hands. I'm typing this ever so slowly with just my ton..tong ..tongu…tongue. But I digress. Okay, the only true part of that story is that I was a bit surprised. Here is what happens passing a String to a function.     // ---- Functions ----------------------------     void SetMyString(String myString)   // pass by 'value'    {        myString = "BBB";    }     void SetMyString(ref String myString)  // pass by ref    {        myString = "CCC";    }     // ---- Usage ---------------------------------     protected void Button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)    {        String MyString = "AAA";         SetMyString(MyString);        // MyString is still "AAA"  What!!!!         SetMyString(ref MyString);        // MyString is now "CCC"    } What the heck. We should not have to use the ref keyword when passing a String because Strings are reference types. Why didn't the string change? What is going on?   I spent hours unssuccessfully researching this anomaly until finally, I had a Eureka moment: This code: String MyString = "AAA"; Is semantically equivalent to this code (note this code doesn't actually compile): String MyString = new String(); MyString = "AAA"; Key Point: In the function, the copy of the reference is pointed to a new object and THAT object is modified. The original reference and what it points to is unchanged. You can simulate this behavior by modifying the class example code to look like this:      void SetMyClass(MyClass myClass)  // call by 'value'    {        //myClass.StrTag = "BBB";        myClass = new MyClass();        myClass.StrTag = "BBB";    } Now when you call the SetMyClass function without using ref, the parameter is unchanged...just like the string example.  I hope someone finds this useful. Steve Wellens

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• Processing Kinect v2 Color Streams in Parallel

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/08/20/processing-kinect-v2-color-streams-in-parallel.aspxProcessing Kinect v2 Color Streams in Parallel I've really been enjoying being a part of the Kinect for Windows Developer's Preview. The new hardware has some really impressive capabilities. However, with great power comes great system specs. Unfortunately, my little laptop that could is not 100% up to the task; I've had to get a little creative. The most disappointing thing I've run into is that I can't always cleanly display the color camera stream in managed code. I managed to strip the code down to what I believe is the bear minimum: using( ColorFrame _ColorFrame = e.FrameReference.AcquireFrame() ) { if( null == _ColorFrame ) return;   BitmapToDisplay.Lock(); _ColorFrame.CopyConvertedFrameDataToIntPtr( BitmapToDisplay.BackBuffer, Convert.ToUInt32( BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride * BitmapToDisplay.PixelHeight ), ColorImageFormat.Bgra ); BitmapToDisplay.AddDirtyRect( new Int32Rect( 0, 0, _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.Width, _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.Height ) ); BitmapToDisplay.Unlock(); } With this snippet, I'm placing the converted Bgra32 color stream directly on the BackBuffer of the WriteableBitmap. This gives me pretty smooth playback, but I still get the occasional freeze for half a second. After a bit of profiling, I discovered there were a few problems. The first problem is the size of the buffer along with the conversion on the buffer. At this time, the raw image format of the data from the Kinect is Yuy2. This is great for direct video processing. It would be ideal if I had a WriteableVideo object in WPF. However, this is not the case. Further digging led me to the real problem. It appears that the SDK is converting the input serially. Let's think about this for a second. The color camera is a 1080p camera. As we should all know, this give us a native resolution of 1920 x 1080. This produces 2,073,600 pixels. Yuy2 uses 4 bytes per 2 pixel, for a buffer size of 4,147,200 bytes. Bgra32 uses 4 bytes per pixel, for a buffer size of 8,294,400 bytes. The SDK appears to be doing this on one thread. I started wondering if I chould do this better myself. I mean, I have 8 cores in my system. Why can't I use them all? The first problem is converting a Yuy2 frame into a Bgra32 frame. It is NOT trivial. I spent a day of research of just how to do this. In the end, I didn't even produce the best algorithm possible, but it did work. After I managed to get that to work, I knew my next step was the get the conversion operation off the UI Thread. This was a simple process of throwing the work into a Task. Of course, this meant I had to marshal the final write to the WriteableBitmap back to the UI thread. Finally, I needed to vectorize the operation so I could run it safely in parallel. This was, mercifully, not quite as hard as I thought it would be. I had my loop return an index to a pair of pixels. From there, I had to tell the loop to do everything for this pair of pixels. If you're wondering why I did it for pairs of pixels, look back above at the specification for the Yuy2 format. I won't go into full detail on why each 4 bytes contains 2 pixels of information, but rest assured that there is a reason why the format is described in that way. The first working attempt at this algorithm successfully turned my poor laptop into a space heater. I very quickly brought and maintained all 8 cores up to about 97% usage. That's when I remembered that obscure option in the Task Parallel Library where you could limit the amount of parallelism used. After a little trial and error, I discovered 4 parallel tasks was enough for most cases. This yielded the follow code: private byte ClipToByte( int p_ValueToClip ) { return Convert.ToByte( ( p_ValueToClip < byte.MinValue ) ? byte.MinValue : ( ( p_ValueToClip > byte.MaxValue ) ? byte.MaxValue : p_ValueToClip ) ); }   private void ColorFrameArrived( object sender, ColorFrameArrivedEventArgs e ) { if( null == e.FrameReference ) return;   // If you do not dispose of the frame, you never get another one... using( ColorFrame _ColorFrame = e.FrameReference.AcquireFrame() ) { if( null == _ColorFrame ) return;   byte[] _InputImage = new byte[_ColorFrame.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels * _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.BytesPerPixel]; byte[] _OutputImage = new byte[BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride * BitmapToDisplay.PixelHeight]; _ColorFrame.CopyRawFrameDataToArray( _InputImage );   Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { ParallelOptions _ParallelOptions = new ParallelOptions(); _ParallelOptions.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 4;   Parallel.For( 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels / 2, _ParallelOptions, ( _Index ) => { // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd206750(v=vs.85).aspx int _Y0 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 0] - 16; int _U = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 1] - 128; int _Y1 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 2] - 16; int _V = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 3] - 128;   byte _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 0] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 1] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 2] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 3] = 0xFF; // A   _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 4] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 5] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 6] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 7] = 0xFF; } );   Application.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke( () => { BitmapToDisplay.WritePixels( new Int32Rect( 0, 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Width, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Height ), _OutputImage, BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride, 0 ); } ); } ); } } This seemed to yield a results I wanted, but there was still the occasional stutter. This lead to what I realized was the second problem. There is a race condition between the UI Thread and me locking the WriteableBitmap so I can write the next frame. Again, I'm writing approximately 8MB to the back buffer. Then, I started thinking I could cheat. The Kinect is running at 30 frames per second. The WPF UI Thread runs at 60 frames per second. This made me not feel bad about exploiting the Composition Thread. I moved the bulk of the code from the FrameArrived handler into CompositionTarget.Rendering. Once I was in there, I polled from a frame, and rendered it if it existed. Since, in theory, I'm only killing the Composition Thread every other hit, I decided I was ok with this for cases where silky smooth video performance REALLY mattered. This ode looked like this: private byte ClipToByte( int p_ValueToClip ) { return Convert.ToByte( ( p_ValueToClip < byte.MinValue ) ? byte.MinValue : ( ( p_ValueToClip > byte.MaxValue ) ? byte.MaxValue : p_ValueToClip ) ); }   void CompositionTarget_Rendering( object sender, EventArgs e ) { using( ColorFrame _ColorFrame = FrameReader.AcquireLatestFrame() ) { if( null == _ColorFrame ) return;   byte[] _InputImage = new byte[_ColorFrame.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels * _ColorFrame.FrameDescription.BytesPerPixel]; byte[] _OutputImage = new byte[BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride * BitmapToDisplay.PixelHeight]; _ColorFrame.CopyRawFrameDataToArray( _InputImage );   ParallelOptions _ParallelOptions = new ParallelOptions(); _ParallelOptions.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 4;   Parallel.For( 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.LengthInPixels / 2, _ParallelOptions, ( _Index ) => { // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd206750(v=vs.85).aspx int _Y0 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 0] - 16; int _U = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 1] - 128; int _Y1 = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 2] - 16; int _V = _InputImage[( _Index << 2 ) + 3] - 128;   byte _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); byte _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y0 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 0] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 1] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 2] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 3] = 0xFF; // A   _R = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 409 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _G = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 - 100 * _U - 208 * _V + 128 ) >> 8 ); _B = ClipToByte( ( 298 * _Y1 + 516 * _U + 128 ) >> 8 );   _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 4] = _B; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 5] = _G; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 6] = _R; _OutputImage[( _Index << 3 ) + 7] = 0xFF; } );   BitmapToDisplay.WritePixels( new Int32Rect( 0, 0, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Width, Sensor.ColorFrameSource.FrameDescription.Height ), _OutputImage, BitmapToDisplay.BackBufferStride, 0 ); } }

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• June 26th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, .NET and NuGet

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I’ve done in the last year. [I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET Introducing new ASP.NET Universal Providers: Great post from Scott Hanselman on the new System.Web.Providers we are working on.  This release delivers new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, Session, Profile providers that work with SQL Server, SQL CE and SQL Azure. CSS Sprites and the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Library: Great post from Scott Mitchell that talks about a free library for ASP.NET that you can use to optimize your CSS and images to reduce HTTP requests and speed up your site. Better HTML5 Support for the VS 2010 Editor: Another great post from Scott Hanselman on an update several people on my team did that enables richer HTML5 editing support within Visual Studio 2010. Install the Ajax Control Toolkit from NuGet: Nice post by Stephen Walther on how you can now use NuGet to install the Ajax Control Toolkit within your applications.  This makes it much easier to reference and use. May 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit: Another great post from Stephen Walther that talks about the May release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. It includes a bunch of nice enhancements and fixes. SassAndCoffee 0.9 Released: Paul Betts blogs about the latest release of his SassAndCoffee extension (available via NuGet). It enables you to easily use Sass and Coffeescript within your ASP.NET applications (both MVC and Webforms). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Mini-Profiler: The folks at StackOverflow.com (a great site built with ASP.NET MVC) have released a nice (free) profiler they’ve built that enables you to easily profile your ASP.NET MVC 3 sites and tune them for performance.  Globalization, Internationalization and Localization in ASP.NET MVC 3: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to enable internationalization, globalization and localization support within your ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery solutions. Precompile your MVC Razor Views: Great post from David Ebbo that discusses a new Razor Generator tool that enables you to pre-compile your razor view templates as assemblies – which enables a bunch of cool scenarios. Unit Testing Razor Views: Nice post from David Ebbo that shows how to use his new Razor Generator to enable unit testing of razor view templates with ASP.NET MVC. Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3: Nice post by Phil Haack that covers a cool feature added to VS 2010 SP1 that makes it really easy to \bin deploy ASP.NET MVC and Razor within your application. This enables you to easily deploy the app to servers that don’t have ASP.NET MVC 3 installed. .NET Table Splitting with EF 4.1 Code First: Great post from Morteza Manavi that discusses how to split up a single database table across multiple EF entity classes.  This shows off some of the power behind EF 4.1 and is very useful when working with legacy database schemas. Choosing the Right Collection Class: Nice post from James Michael Hare that talks about the different collection class options available within .NET.  A nice overview for people who haven’t looked at all of the support now built into the framework. Little Wonders: Empty(), DefaultIfEmpty() and Count() helper methods: Another in James Michael Hare’s excellent series on .NET/C# “Little Wonders”.  This post covers some of the great helper methods now built-into .NET that make coding even easier. NuGet NuGet 1.4 Released: Learn all about the latest release of NuGet – which includes a bunch of cool new capabilities.  It takes only seconds to update to it – go for it! NuGet in Depth: Nice presentation from Scott Hanselman all about NuGet and some of the investments we are making to enable a better open source ecosystem within .NET. NuGet for the Enterprise – NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System: Great post from Scott Hanselman on how to integrate NuGet within enterprise build environments and enable it with CI solutions. Hope this helps, Scott

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• What are developer's problems with helpful error messages?

  - by Moo-Juice

  It continue to astounds me that, in this day and age, products that have years of use under their belt, built by teams of professionals, still to this day - fail to provide helpful error messages to the user. In some cases, the addition of just a little piece of extra information could save a user hours of trouble. A program that generates an error, generated it for a reason. It has everything at its disposal to inform the user as much as it can, why something failed. And yet it seems that providing information to aid the user is a low-priority. I think this is a huge failing. One example is from SQL Server. When you try and restore a database that is in use, it quite rightly won't let you. SQL Server knows what processes and applications are accessing it. Why can't it include information about the process(es) that are using the database? I know not everyone passes an Applicatio_Name attribute on their connection string, but even a hint about the machine in question could be helpful. Another candidate, also SQL Server (and mySQL) is the lovely string or binary data would be truncated error message and equivalents. A lot of the time, a simple perusal of the SQL statement that was generated and the table shows which column is the culprit. This isn't always the case, and if the database engine picked up on the error, why can't it save us that time and just tells us which damned column it was? On this example, you could argue that there may be a performance hit to checking it and that this would impede the writer. Fine, I'll buy that. How about, once the database engine knows there is an error, it does a quick comparison after-the-fact, between values that were going to be stored, versus the column lengths. Then display that to the user. ASP.NET's horrid Table Adapters are also guilty. Queries can be executed and one can be given an error message saying that a constraint somewhere is being violated. Thanks for that. Time to compare my data model against the database, because the developers are too lazy to provide even a row number, or example data. (For the record, I'd never use this data-access method by choice, it's just a project I have inherited!). Whenever I throw an exception from my C# or C++ code, I provide everything I have at hand to the user. The decision has been made to throw it, so the more information I can give, the better. Why did my function throw an exception? What was passed in, and what was expected? It takes me just a little longer to put something meaningful in the body of an exception message. Hell, it does nothing but help me whilst I develop, because I know my code throws things that are meaningful. One could argue that complicated exception messages should not be displayed to the user. Whilst I disagree with that, it is an argument that can easily be appeased by having a different level of verbosity depending on your build. Even then, the users of ASP.NET and SQL Server are not your typical users, and would prefer something full of verbosity and yummy information because they can track down their problems faster. Why to developers think it is okay, in this day and age, to provide the bare minimum amount of information when an error occurs? It's 2011 guys, come on.

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• Travelling MVP #1: Visit to SharePoint User Group Finland

  - by DigiMortal

  My first self organized trip this autumn was visit to SharePoint User Group Finland community evening. As active community leaders who make things like these possible they are worth mentioning and on spug.fi side there was Jussi Roine the one who invited me. Here is my short review about my trip to Helsinki. User group meeting As Helsinki is near Tallinn I went there using ship. It was easy to get from sea port to venue and I had also some minutes of time to visit academic book store. Community evening was held on the ground floor of one city center hotel and room was conveniently located near hotel bar and restaurant. Here is the meeting schedule: Welcome (Jussi Roine) OpenText application archiving and governance for SharePoint (Bernd Hennicke, OpenText) Using advanced C# features in SharePoint development (Alexey Sadomov, NED Consulting) Optimizing public-facing internet sites for SharePoint (Gunnar Peipman) After meeting, of course, local dudes doesn’t walk away but continue with some beers and discussion. Sessions After welcome words by Jussi there was session by Bernd Hennicke who spoke about OpenText. His session covered OpenText history and current moment. After this introduction he spoke about OpenText products for SharePoint and gave the audience good overview about where their SharePoint extensions fit in big picture. I usually don’t like those vendors sessions but this one was good. I mean vendor dudes were not aggressively selling something. They were way different – kind people who introduced their stuff and later answered questions. They acted like good guests. Second speaker was Alexey Sadomov who is working on SharePoint development projects. He introduced some ways how to get over some limitations of SharePoint. I don’t go here deeply with his session but it’s worth to mention that this session was strong one. It is not rear case when developers have to make nasty hacks to SharePoint. I mean really nasty hacks. Often these hacks are long blocks of code that uses terrible techniques to achieve the result. Alexey introduced some very much civilized ways about how to apply hacks. Alex Sadomov, SharePoint MVP, speaking about SharePoint coding tips and tricks on C# I spoke about how I optimized caching of Estonian Microsoft community portal that runs on SharePoint Server and that uses publishing infrastructure. I made no actual demos on SharePoint because I wanted to focus on optimizing process and share some experiences about how to get caches optimized and how to measure caches. Networking After official part there was time to talk and discuss with people. Finns are cool – they have beers and they are glad. It was not big community event but people were like one good family. Developers there work often for big companies and it was very interesting to me to hear about their experiences with SharePoint. One thing was a little bit surprising for me – SharePoint guys in Finland are talking actively also about Office 365 and online SharePoint. It doesn’t happen often here in Estonia. I had to leave a little bit 21:00 to get to my ship back to Tallinn. I am sure spug.fi dudes continued nice evening and they had at least same good time as I did. Do I want to go back to Finland and meet these guys again? Yes, sure, let’s do it again! :)

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• Text Expansion Awareness for UX Designers: Points to Consider

  - by ultan o'broin

  Awareness of translated text expansion dynamics is important for enterprise applications UX designers (I am assuming all source text for translation is in English, though apps development can takes place in other natural languages too). This consideration goes beyond the standard 'character multiplication' rule and must take into account the avoidance of other layout tricks that a designer might be tempted to try. Follow these guidelines. For general text expansion, remember the simple rule that the shorter the word is in the English, the longer it will need to be in English. See the examples provided by Richard Ishida of the W3C and you'll get the idea. So, forget the 30 percent or one inch minimum expansion rule of the old Forms days. Unfortunately remembering convoluted text expansion rules, based as a percentage of the US English character count can be tough going. Try these: Up to 10 characters: 100 to 200% 11 to 20 characters: 80 to 100% 21 to 30 characters: 60 to 80% 31 to 50 characters: 40 to 60% 51 to 70 characters: 31 to 40% Over 70 characters: 30% (Source: IBM) So it might be easier to remember a rule that if your English text is less than 20 characters then allow it to double in length (200 percent), and then after that assume an increase by half the length of the text (50%). (Bear in mind that ADF can apply truncation rules on some components in English too). (If your text is stored in a database, developers must make sure the table column widths can accommodate the expansion of your text when translated based on byte size for the translated character and not numbers of characters. Use Unicode. One character does not equal one byte in the multilingual enterprise apps world.) Rely on a graceful transformation of translated text. Let all pages to resize dynamically so the text wraps and flow naturally. ADF pages supports this already. Think websites. Don't hard-code alignments. Use Start and End properties on components and not Left or Right. Don't force alignments of components on the page by using texts of a certain length as spacers. Use proper label positioning and anchoring in ADF components or other technologies. Remember that an increase in text length means an increase in vertical space too when pages are resized. So don't hard-code vertical heights for any text areas. Don't be tempted to manually create text or printed reports this way either. They cannot be translated successfully, and are very difficult to maintain in English. Use XML, HTML, RTF and so on. Check out what Oracle BI Publisher offers. Don't force wrapping by using tricks such as /n or /t characters or HTML BR tags or forced page breaks. Once the text is translated the alignment will be destroyed. The position of the breaking character or tag would need to be moved anyway, or even removed. When creating tables, then use table components. Don't use manually created tables that reply on word length to maintain column and row alignment. For example, don't use codeblock elements in HTML; use the proper table elements instead. Once translated, the alignment of manually formatted tabular data is destroyed. Finally, if there is a space restriction, then don't use made-up acronyms, abbreviations or some form of daft text speak to save space. Besides being incomprehensible in English, they may need full translations of the shortened words, even if they can be figured out. Use approved or industry standard acronyms according to the UX style rules, not as a space-saving device. Restricted Real Estate on Mobile Devices On mobile devices real estate is limited. Using shortened text is fine once it is comprehensible. Users in the mobile space prefer brevity too, as they are on the go, performing three-minute tasks, with no time to read lengthy texts. Using fragments and lightning up on unnecessary articles and getting straight to the point with imperative forms of verbs makes sense both on real estate and user experience grounds.

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• 5 Steps to getting started with IronRuby

  - by Eric Nelson

  IronRuby is a Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming language for .NET, heavily relying on Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime. The project's #1 goal is to be a true Ruby implementation, meaning it runs existing Ruby code. Check out this summary of using the Ruby standard library and 3rd party libraries in IronRuby. IronRuby has tight integration with .NET, so any .NET types can be used from IronRuby and the IronRuby runtime can be embedded into any .NET application. These 5 steps should get you nicely up and running on IronRuby – OR … you could just watch a video session from the lead developer which took place earlier this month (March 2010 - 60mins). But the 5 steps will be quicker :-) Step 1 – Install IronRuby :-) You can install IronRuby automatically using an MSI or manually. For simplicity I would recommend the MSI install. TIP: As of the 25th of March IronRuby has not quite shipped. The download above is a Release Candidate (RC) which means it is still undergoing final testing by the team. You will need to uninstall this version (RC3) once the final release is available. The good news is that uninstalling IronRuby RC3 will work without a hitch as the MSI does relatively little. Step 2 – Install an IronRuby friendly editor You will need to Install an editor to work with IronRuby as there is no designer support for IronRuby inside Visual Studio. There are many editors to choose from but I would recommend you either went with: SciTE (Download the MSI): This is a lightweight text editor which is simple to get up and running. SciTE understands Ruby syntax and allows you to easily run IronRuby code within the editor with a small change to the config file. SharpDevelop 3.2 (Download the MSI): This is an open source development environment for C#, VB, Boo and now IronRuby. IronRuby support is new but it does include integrated debugging. You might also want to check out the main site for SharpDevelop. TIP: There are commercial tools for Ruby development which offer richer support such as intellisense.. They can be coerced into working with IronRuby. A good one to start with is RubyMine which needs some small changes to make it work with IronRuby. Step 3 – Run the IronRuby Tutorial Run through the IronRuby tutorial which is included in the IronRuby download. It covers off the basics of the Ruby languages and how IronRuby integrates with .NET. In a typical install it will end up at C:\Program Files\IronRuby 0.9.4.0\Samples\Tutorial. Which will give you the tutorial implemented in .NET and Ruby. TIP: You might also want to check out these two introductory posts Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’ and What's IronRuby, and how do I put it on Rails? Step 4 – Get some good books to read Get a great book on Ruby and IronRuby. There are several free ebooks on Ruby which will help you learn the language. The little book of Ruby is a good place to start. I would also recommend you purchase IronRuby Unleashed (Buy on Amazon UK | Buy on Amazon USA). You might also want to check out this mini-review. Other books are due out soon including IronRuby in Action. TIP: Also check out the official documentation for using .NET from IronRuby. Step 5 – Keep an eye on the team blogs Keep an eye on the IronRuby team blogs including Jimmy Schementi, Jim Deville and Tomas Matousek (full list) TIP: And keep a watch out for the final release of IronRuby – due anytime soon!

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• Google Chrome OS

  - by Piet

  It’s about time someone took this initiative: Google Chrome OS I especially like the following: Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work. I recently had the ‘pleasure’ witnessing several 60+ yr old friends and family (all respect for everyone in their 2nd or 3rd youth) buying their first pc, taking their first steps using a pc and the net. Have you ever seen the gazillions of little ‘useful’ tools that are installed on a new standard Vista pc or laptop ? This is like learning to drive a new car and being placed in an airplane cockpit. And all the messages one gets about virus/security checks, fingerprint nog being enrolled, trial period expiring (because half those really useful tools come with a trial period), … If I was in their shoes, being confronted with this as a total newbie, I guess I’d just give up pretty soon. As a matter of fact, I actually gave up on Vista on my work-laptop, it was driving me crazy. Thank god I was allowed to install XP. I’m a Linux user at home, and Vista was such a frustrating experience that Windows XP actually felt like breath of fresh air. And what are those people using? Email, browsing…. and maybe writing a little letter now and then or storing their photo’s if they have a digital camera. Actually (side note), I get the impression that hearing about facebook is a major motivator for the digital newbies to finally take the plunge, buy a pc and get on-line. And OK, we’ve seen initiatives like this before, but Google is a brand everyone knows… unlike Ubuntu, Debain or Mandriva. Google = God. If I was Microsoft I’d be wetting my pants knowing Google was about to release their own OS, without a doubt fully optimized to use their own on-line office suit. On the other hand, the old adage ‘no one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft’ still holds a lot of truth. I hope I’ll be able to give it a big thumbs up if a would-be pc-user asks me what kind of pc/OS they should go for in the near future. On the other hand, if I’d do that, I’m pretty sure a couple of weeks later I’d get a call asking how to install this game or photo editing tool they got from one of their Windows using friends… or that nifty photo-printer they just bought. But then, I also get those questions now from newbie Windows users. It takes a couple of years before Newbie pc users understand that some things just don’t work and aren’t worth the time trying to fix them. I’d just wish they’d go back to the shop when something doesn’t work. You also don’t let you mechanic friend try to fix a problem with your brand new car. But that’s another story… Wait and see…

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• Uncovering Compiler Errors in ASP.NET MVC Views

  - by Ben Griswold

  ASPX and ASCX files are compiled on the fly when they are requested on the web server. This means it’s possible that you aren’t catching compile errors associated with your views when you build your ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio.  Unless you’re willing to click through your entire application, rendering each view looking for errors, you application is left a little vulnerable to user issues.  Fortunately, there’s a work around.  Open up your MVC project file in notepad or within the Visual Studio IDE by unloading the project and then editing the .csproj file (both actions are available by right-clicking on the Project Node in Solution Explorer.)  Notice the MvcBuildViews option.  It’s probably set to false.  Flip the value to true and you’ll magically start compiling your views when you build your application. <MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews> Taking this action will slow down your builds a bit, but if you’re a hack like me, it’ll probably save your day in the long run. Now you’re probably thinking, “Neat trick – how’s it work?”  Scroll down toward the bottom of your csproj file and you will notice the AfterBuild target triggers the AspNetCompiler action if the MvcBuildViews option is set to true.  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">   <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp"                   PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" /> </Target> Great. One more thing. Let’s say you don’t want to slow down all of your builds, but you absolutely want to know if there are any compiler issues with your views before you commit your code to version control or deploy or whatever.  Here’s what you can do – change the AfterBuild condition to run if your configuration is set to Release mode.  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">   <!– Always pre-compile ASPX and ASCX in release mode –>   <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp"                   PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" /> </Target> Now your debug mode builds will continue to be as fast as ever and you can quickly validate your views by building in release mode when you so choose.  There’s one little catch – this setup won’t consider the MvcBuildViews option whatsoever! So if you decide to go with this configuration, you might want to add a comment near the MvcBuildViews option letting other developers know they can change the MvcBuildViews option as much as they’d like but it’s not going to affect the AfterBuild action.  Or don’t include the comment and let your team members figure it out for themselves…

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• gnome3 and unity bug in 11.10

  - by LinuxNoob

  Yes I am new to Linux but am learning stuff daily as I finally migrated my work systems to Ubuntu 11.10 and they works pretty decent given the fact that some of the application I have to use to do my job are not supported by Linux ... yet. Anyways, I was working with Unity, not even knowing there was a Gnome3 environment until I ran across a post while searching for a fix on another unrelated issue. Lo and behold, I was able after much searching to log in Gnome 3 after installing the required packages. I don't know how many articles I had to read for someone to tell me how to log into Gnome3 or into Unity by selecting the little wheel on the login screen to get the drop down for the different environments ...(I know... I'm such a Noob but I'm sure we all were at one time or another). Again, after using Unity, I was hooked on Linux and decided if I can get it to work with all the Apps I need at work and play a little WOW every now and again, I'm good to go. But again to the point. I logged into Gnome3. No icons but just a cool experience to see what the heck this thing does. I eventually figured out how to use it and I love Gnome 3 but it is as buggy as the C++ programs I first learned to write in college. I don't know if it's because i installed the packages after I was up and running in Unity or what. The issues I have are that it locks the desktop up randomly..just locks it up. Usually when i have a lot of screens opened. Never fails that it does it when i put the mouse up in the top/left corner to swap Apps. Then I can't get to the windows in the back to shut them down. A few times i just have to turn the power off on my PC ( sigh, what a POS I say to myself every time I decide "oh it was an isolated incidence"...try it again..it's so cool and designed the way I would design a desktop .. intuitive...just cool man cool) but it fails me again and again. If I had to guess I would say it's a memory problem..i do have 2gigs but nevertheless it just stops working. The mouse doesn't respond ...eventually the keyboard doesn't respond. Just the Power Off button is the only way out. Never had an issue like this in Unity. Using the same Apps in the same way and I bet the system will crash in 45 minutes to an hour. Usually, I have 7-10 windows opened. I wish I knew enough to get the correct logs, I'm sure it's a bug. I'm not doing anything fancy..just running email, word docs, jave apps, vpn, pidgin, maybe some SQL stuff or communication Apps, etc. Anyways I've decided to wait for another major release to try it again... until then I'm sticking with Unity which is also very cool.

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• My new laptop - with a really nice battery option

  - by Rob Farley

  It was about time I got a new laptop, and so I made a phone-call to Dell to discuss my options. I decided not to get an SSD from them, because I’d rather choose one myself – the sales guy tells me that changing the HD doesn’t void my warranty, so that’s good (incidentally, I’d love to hear people’s recommendations for which SSD to get for my laptop). Unfortunately this machine only has one HD slot, but I figure that I’ll put lots of stuff onto external disks anyway. The machine I got was a Dell Studio XPS 16. It’s red (which suits my company), but also has the Intel® Core™ i7-820QM Processor, which is 4 Cores/8 Threads. Makes for a pretty Task Manager, but nothing like the one I saw at SQLBits last year (at 96 cores), or the one that my good friend James Rowland-Jones writes about here. But the reason for this post is actually something in the software that comes with the machine – you know, the stuff that most people uninstall at the earliest opportunity. I had just reinstalled the operating system, and was going through the utilities to get the drivers up-to-date, when I noticed that one of Dell applications included an option to disable battery charging. So I installed it. And sure enough, I can tell the battery not to charge now. Clearly Dell see it as a temporary option, and one that’s designed for when you’re on a plane. But for me, I most often use my laptop with the power plugged in, which means I don’t need to have my battery continually topping itself up. So I really love this option, but I feel like it could go a little further. I’d like “Not Charging” to be the default option, and let me set it when I want to charge it (which should theoretically make my battery last longer). I also intend to work out how this option works, so that I can script it and put it into my StartUp options (so it can be the Default setting). Actually – if someone has already worked this out and can tell me what it does, then please feel free to let me know. Even better would be an external switch. I had a switch on my old laptop (a Dell Latitude) for WiFi, so that I could turn that off before I turned on the computer (this laptop doesn’t give me that option – no physical switch for flight mode). I guess it just means I’ll get used to leaving the WiFi off by default, and turning it on when I want it – might save myself some battery power that way too. Soon I’ll need to take the plunge and sync my iPhone with the new laptop. I’m a little worried that I might lose something – Apple’s messages about how my stuff will be wiped and replaced with what’s on the PC doesn’t fill me with confidence, as it’s a new PC that doesn’t have stuff on it. But having a new machine is definitely a nice experience, and one that I can recommend. I’m sure when I get around to buying an SSD I’ll feel like it’s shiny and new all over again! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• POP Forums v9 Beta 1 for ASP.NET MVC 3 posted to CodePlex!

  - by Jeff

  As promised, I posted a beta build of my forum app for ASP.NET MVC 3. Get the new goodies here: http://popforums.codeplex.com/releases/view/58228 This is the first beta for the ASP.NET MVC 3 version of POP Forums. It is nearly feature complete, and ready for testing and feedback. For previous release notes, look here, here and here.Check out the live preview: http://preview.popforums.com/ForumsSetup instructions are on the home page of this project. The new hotness in the beta, or what has been done since the last preview: All views converted to use Razor E-mail subscription/notification of new posts New post indicators/mark read buttons Permalinks to posts Jump to newest post (from new post indicators) Recent topics Favorite topics Moderator functions for topics (pin/close/delete, plus move and rename) Search, ported from v8. Not a ton of optimization here, or new unit testing, but the old version worked pretty well User posts (topics the user posted in) Forgot password Vanity items (signatures and avatars) Hide vanity items per user preference Some minor data caching where appropriate A little bit of UI refinement Lots-o-bug fixes Lots-o-unit tests What's next? The plan between now and the next beta is as follows: Continue working through features/tasks, and fix bugs as they're reported Integrate the forum into a real, production site Refine the UI Refactor as much as possible... the code organization is not entirely logical in some places After the second beta, a release candidate will follow, with a real "final" release after that. Subsequent releases should come relatively frequently and without a lot of risk. The trick in building this thing has been that it mostly tossed the previous WebForms version, which was all full of crusties. The time table for this is a little harder to pin down, as day jobs and families will have their effect. Other notes Refactoring will be a priority. As the features of MVC have evolved, so have my desires to use it in a fashion that makes things clear and easy to follow. I don't even know if anyone will ever start mucking around in the code, but on the off chance they do, I'd like what they find to not suck. Other nice-to-haves are builds to target Windows Azure and SQL CE. A nice setup UI would be super too. I think the ASP.NET MVC world has gone long enough without a decent forum.The biggest challenge that I've found is making the forum something that can be dropped in any app. While it does rope its views into an area, areas are mostly just routing details. I haven't thought of a clever way yet to limit dependency injection, for example, to just the forum bits. I mean, everyone should be using Ninject, but how realistic is that? ;)How much time and effort should you spend on POP Forums in its current state? Change is inevitable, but at this point I'm reasonably committed to not changing the database schema. I really think it will stay as-is. All bets are off for the various interfaces throughout the app, but the data should generally resist change. It's not even that different from v8, which was one of the original goals because I didn't want to rewrite SQL or introduce a new ORM or whatever. My point is that if you wanted to build a site around this today, even though it's not entirely functional, I think it's low risk in terms of data loss. I can't vouch for whether or not you know what you're doing.I've been having some chats with people lately about quoting posts, and honestly there has to be something better and straight forward. That continues to be a holy grail of mine, and some day, I hope to find it.Enjoy... it's starting to feel more real every day!

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• Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 (and a cool scenario w/ ASP.NET MVC 2)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the seventeenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers two new language feature being added to C# 4.0 – optional parameters and named arguments – as well as a cool way you can take advantage of optional parameters (both in VB and C#) with ASP.NET MVC 2. Optional Parameters in C# 4.0 C# 4.0 now supports using optional parameters with methods, constructors, and indexers (note: VB has supported optional parameters for awhile). Parameters are optional when a default value is specified as part of a declaration.  For example, the method below takes two parameters – a “category” string parameter, and a “pageIndex” integer parameter.  The “pageIndex” parameter has a default value of 0, and as such is an optional parameter: When calling the above method we can explicitly pass two parameters to it: Or we can omit passing the second optional parameter – in which case the default value of 0 will be passed:   Note that VS 2010’s Intellisense indicates when a parameter is optional, as well as what its default value is when statement completion is displayed: Named Arguments and Optional Parameters in C# 4.0 C# 4.0 also now supports the concept of “named arguments”.  This allows you to explicitly name an argument you are passing to a method – instead of just identifying it by argument position.  For example, I could write the code below to explicitly identify the second argument passed to the GetProductsByCategory method by name (making its usage a little more explicit): Named arguments come in very useful when a method supports multiple optional parameters, and you want to specify which arguments you are passing.  For example, below we have a method DoSomething that takes two optional parameters: We could use named arguments to call the above method in any of the below ways: Because both parameters are optional, in cases where only one (or zero) parameters is specified then the default value for any non-specified arguments is passed. ASP.NET MVC 2 and Optional Parameters One nice usage scenario where we can now take advantage of the optional parameter support of VB and C# is with ASP.NET MVC 2’s input binding support to Action methods on Controller classes. For example, consider a scenario where we want to map URLs like “Products/Browse/Beverages” or “Products/Browse/Deserts” to a controller action method.  We could do this by writing a URL routing rule that maps the URLs to a method like so: We could then optionally use a “page” querystring value to indicate whether or not the results displayed by the Browse method should be paged – and if so which page of the results should be displayed.  For example: /Products/Browse/Beverages?page=2. With ASP.NET MVC 1 you would typically handle this scenario by adding a “page” parameter to the action method and make it a nullable int (which means it will be null if the “page” querystring value is not present).  You could then write code like below to convert the nullable int to an int – and assign it a default value if it was not present in the querystring: With ASP.NET MVC 2 you can now take advantage of the optional parameter support in VB and C# to express this behavior more concisely and clearly.  Simply declare the action method parameter as an optional parameter with a default value: C# VB If the “page” value is present in the querystring (e.g. /Products/Browse/Beverages?page=22) then it will be passed to the action method as an integer.  If the “page” value is not in the querystring (e.g. /Products/Browse/Beverages) then the default value of 0 will be passed to the action method.  This makes the code a little more concise and readable. Summary There are a bunch of great new language features coming to both C# and VB with VS 2010.  The above two features (optional parameters and named parameters) are but two of them.  I’ll blog about more in the weeks and months ahead. If you are looking for a good book that summarizes all the language features in C# (including C# 4.0), as well provides a nice summary of the core .NET class libraries, you might also want to check out the newly released C# 4.0 in a Nutshell book from O’Reilly: It does a very nice job of packing a lot of content in an easy to search and find samples format. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Subterranean IL: Pseudo custom attributes

  - by Simon Cooper

  Custom attributes were designed to make the .NET framework extensible; if a .NET language needs to store additional metadata on an item that isn't expressible in IL, then an attribute could be applied to the IL item to represent this metadata. For instance, the C# compiler uses DecimalConstantAttribute and DateTimeConstantAttribute to represent compile-time decimal or datetime constants, which aren't allowed in pure IL, and FixedBufferAttribute to represent fixed struct fields. How attributes are compiled Within a .NET assembly are a series of tables containing all the metadata for items within the assembly; for instance, the TypeDef table stores metadata on all the types in the assembly, and MethodDef does the same for all the methods and constructors. Custom attribute information is stored in the CustomAttribute table, which has references to the IL item the attribute is applied to, the constructor used (which implies the type of attribute applied), and a binary blob representing the arguments and name/value pairs used in the attribute application. For example, the following C# class: [Obsolete("Please use MyClass2", true)] public class MyClass { // ... } corresponds to the following IL class definition: .class public MyClass { .custom instance void [mscorlib]System.ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool) = { string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true) } // ... } and results in the following entry in the CustomAttribute table: TypeDef(MyClass) MemberRef(ObsoleteAttribute::.ctor(string, bool)) blob -> {string('Please use MyClass2' bool(true)} However, there are some attributes that don't compile in this way. Pseudo custom attributes Just like there are some concepts in a language that can't be represented in IL, there are some concepts in IL that can't be represented in a language. This is where pseudo custom attributes come into play. The most obvious of these is SerializableAttribute. Although it looks like an attribute, it doesn't compile to a CustomAttribute table entry; it instead sets the serializable bit directly within the TypeDef entry for the type. This flag is fully expressible within IL; this C#: [Serializable] public class MySerializableClass {} compiles to this IL: .class public serializable MySerializableClass {} For those interested, a full list of pseudo custom attributes is available here. For the rest of this post, I'll be concentrating on the ones that deal with P/Invoke. P/Invoke attributes P/Invoke is built right into the CLR at quite a deep level; there are 2 metadata tables within an assembly dedicated solely to p/invoke interop, and many more that affect it. Furthermore, all the attributes used to specify p/invoke methods in C# or VB have their own keywords and syntax within IL. For example, the following C# method declaration: [DllImport("mscorsn.dll", SetLastError = true)] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] private static extern bool StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string wszFilePath, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] bool fForceVerification, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.U1)] ref bool pfWasVerified); compiles to the following IL definition: .method private static pinvokeimpl("mscorsn.dll" lasterr winapi) bool marshal(unsigned int8) StrongNameSignatureVerificationEx( string marshal(lpwstr) wszFilePath, bool marshal(unsigned int8) fForceVerification, bool& marshal(unsigned int8) pfWasVerified) cil managed preservesig {} As you can see, all the p/invoke and marshal properties are specified directly in IL, rather than using attributes. And, rather than creating entries in CustomAttribute, a whole bunch of metadata is emitted to represent this information. This single method declaration results in the following metadata being output to the assembly: A MethodDef entry containing basic information on the method Four ParamDef entries for the 3 method parameters and return type An entry in ModuleRef to mscorsn.dll An entry in ImplMap linking ModuleRef and MethodDef, along with the name of the function to import and the pinvoke options (lasterr winapi) Four FieldMarshal entries containing the marshal information for each parameter. Phew! Applying attributes Most of the time, when you apply an attribute to an element, an entry in the CustomAttribute table will be created to represent that application. However, some attributes represent concepts in IL that aren't expressible in the language you're coding in, and can instead result in a single bit change (SerializableAttribute and NonSerializedAttribute), or many extra metadata table entries (the p/invoke attributes) being emitted to the output assembly.

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• &lsquo;Publish&hellip;&rsquo; Resulting in Directory With No Files

  - by ToStringTheory

  I was pulling my hair out with this one…  Which isn’t good considering I have so little of it left!  I had just upgraded to the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK the day before with no problems, and used the upgraded ‘Publish…’ dialog to successfully publish a website to my hard disk for hosting on an internal development server.  However, when trying to deploy another project to my file system, it said it was successful, but there were no files in the directory.  The only difference, the first project was an Azure project, the second was a standard ASP.Net Web Application.  If you installed the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK, you may want to read this. The Problem At first it appears that there is no problem: However you may remember that when publishing a web application, the output window will generally iterate through each of the directories as it copies the files from that directory over.  Sure enough, when looking at the output directory – there are no files, no bin directory, no nothing… Troubleshooting Since one site published and the other did not, I believed that the failure may have been to a failed SQL Server 2012 installation that happened between publish.  I rolled back the installation, however that did not work either.  I also checked the Configuration Manager dialog, and ensured that the projects were selected to actually build (just checking, even though the output said it built them..)  I checked the properties of the solution and the projects, and a selection of files in the project to make sure that they were selected for content…  Nothing seemed to work. I then decided to uninstall the Azure 1.7 SDK to see if that was the culprit.  When I opened the Windows 7 ‘Uninstall a Program’ dialog, I noticed that the Azure SDK came with 2 extra packages that just so happen to be in a Release Candidate state from Microsoft – ‘Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0’ and ‘Microsoft Web Publish – Visual Studio 2010’.  It dawned on me that the publish dialog must not be just for Azure, since it appeared when I tried to deploy the regular web application as well.  Therefore, it must have been an upgrade to the publish mechanism in Visual Studio.  I uninstalled both of the programs and received my old publish dialog once again, and was able to successfully publish the solution above as I had done before. After celebrating solving the problem, I tried reinstalling the Azure package, to see if it would repair the publishing process. Even though it brought back the updated dialogs, it did not publish any files. Instead of uninstalling and retreating, I now KNEW what the cause was, and these were packages not just for Azure. I now knew a product name to search for. The Solution Sure enough, with the correct search term in Google – ‘microsoft web publish no files’, and setting the timeline to 1 week, I found what I needed - Microsoft Connect - Publish Web Application FAILS! (by Andrew Rits). I am surprised that I missed something that ended up being so simple…  In the Configuration Manager, I had the following settings: This is how I had been building and debugging the solution always…  However, apparently when installing the new Web Publishing package, it does things a little differently in its configuration for publishing: You see the difference?  The configuration here is set to ‘x86’ instead of ‘Any CPU’.  Sure enough, as soon as I switched the configuration to ‘Release – Any CPU’, the deployment built and published all of my files as I expected. Conclusion It was a small change, but apparently the new ‘Publish web application’ defaults to the x86 configuration, thereby not copying any of the project/bin files to the publish target directory.  I spent forever trying things, but this small drop down eluded me until I was able to target that the dialog was actually working apparently, I just didn’t have the correct configuration. I hope that this saves you the hours of frustration and hastened hair loss that it caused me…  I also hope that before Microsoft brings this publishing package out of RC status, that they change the behavior of that menu to default to the settings of the old publish menu for the first time. Happy Coding!

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• More SQL Smells

  - by Nick Harrison

  Let's continue exploring some of the SQL Smells from Phil's list. He has been putting together. Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) This is a great example poking holes in the whole theory of "If it works it's not broken" Queries will this probably will generally work and give the correct response. In fact, without careful analysis, you probably may be completely oblivious that there is even a problem. This subtle little problem will needlessly complicate queries and slow them down regardless of the indexes applied. Consider this example: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Page](     [PageId] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,     [Title] [varchar](75) NOT NULL,     [Sequence] [int] NOT NULL,     [ThemeId] [int] NOT NULL,     [CustomCss] [text] NOT NULL,     [CustomScript] [text] NOT NULL,     [PageGroupId] [int] NOT NULL;  CREATE PROCEDURE PageSelectBySequence ( @sequenceMin smallint , @sequenceMax smallint ) AS BEGIN SELECT [PageId] , [Title] , [Sequence] , [ThemeId] , [CustomCss] , [CustomScript] , [PageGroupId] FROM [CMS].[dbo].[Page] WHERE Sequence BETWEEN @sequenceMin AND @SequenceMax END  Note that the Sequence column is defined as int while the sequence parameter is defined as a small int. The problem is that the database may have to do a lot of type conversions to evaluate the query. In some cases, this may even negate the indexes that you have in place. Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) There are two main problems here. The first is a little subjective, since this is a non-standard way of expressing the query, it is harder to understand. The other problem is much more objective and potentially problematic. You are taking much of the control away from the optimizer. Written properly, such a query may well out perform a corresponding query written with traditional joins. More likely than not, performance will degrade. Whenever you assume that you know better than the optimizer, you will most likely be wrong. This is the fundmental problem with any hint. Consider a query like this:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , ( SELECT EffectName FROM dbo.Effect WHERE EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId ) AS EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId  This can and should be written as:  SELECT Page.Title , Page.Sequence , Page.ThemeId , Page.CustomCss , Page.CustomScript , PageEffectParams.Name , PageEffectParams.Value , EffectName FROM Page INNER JOIN PageEffect ON Page.PageId = PageEffects.PageId INNER JOIN PageEffectParam ON PageEffects.PageEffectId = PageEffectParams.PageEffectId INNER JOIN dbo.Effect ON dbo.Effects.EffectId = dbo.PageEffects.EffectId  The correlated query may just as easily show up in the where clause. It's not a good idea in the select clause or the where clause. Few or No comments. This one is a bit more complicated and controversial. All comments are not created equal. Some comments are helpful and need to be included. Other comments are not necessary and may indicate a problem. I tend to follow the rule of thumb that comments that explain why are good. Comments that explain how are bad. Many people may be shocked to hear the idea of a bad comment, but hear me out. If a comment is needed to explain what is going on or how it works, the logic is too complex and needs to be simplified. Comments that explain why are good. Comments may explain why the sql is needed are good. Comments that explain where the sql is used are good. Comments that explain how tables are related should not be needed if the sql is well written. If they are needed, you need to consider reworking the sql or simplify your data model. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Calling a function in the where clause will often negate the indexing strategy. The function will be called for every record considered. This will often a force a full table scan on the tables affected. Calling a function will not guarantee that there is a full table scan, but there is a good chance that it will. If you find that you often need to write queries using a particular function, you may need to add a column to the table that has the function already applied.

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• Tough Decisions

  - by Johnm

  There was once a thriving business that employed two Database Administrators, Sam and Jim. Both DBAs were certified, educated and highly talented in their skill sets. During lunch breaks these two DBAs were often found together discussing best practices, troubleshooting techniques and the latest release notes for the upcoming version of SQL Server. They genuinely loved what they did. The maintenance of the first database was the responsibility of Sam. He was the architect of this server's setup and he was very meticulous in its configuration. He regularly monitored the health of the database, validated backup files and regularly adhered to the best practices that were advocated by well respected professionals. He was very proud of the fact that there was never a database that he managed that lost data or performed poorly. The maintenance of the second database was the responsibility of Jim. He too was the architect of this server's setup. At the time that he built this server, his understanding of the finer details of configuration were not as clear as they are today. The server was build on a shoestring budget and with very little time for testing and implementation. Jim often monitored the health of the database; but in more of a reactionary mode due to user complaints of slowness or failed transactions. Deadlocks abounded and the backup files were never validated. One day, the announcement was made that revealed that the business had hit financially hard times. Budgets were being cut, limitation on spending was implemented and the reduction in full-time staff was required. Since having two DBAs was regarded a luxury by many, this meant that either Sam or Jim were about to find themselves out of a job. Sam and Jim's boss, Frank, was faced with a very tough decision. Sam's performance was flawless. His techniques and practices were perfection. The databases he managed were reliable and efficient. His solutions are "by the book". When given a task it is certain that, while it may take a little longer, it will be done right the first time. Jim's techniques and practices were not perfect; but effective and responsive. He made mistakes regularly; but he shows that he learns from them and they often result in innovative solutions. When given a task it is certain that, while the results may require some tweaking, it will be done on time and under budget. You are Frank's best friend. He approaches you and presents this scenario. He must layoff one of his valued DBAs the very next morning. Frank asks you: "All else being equal, who would you let go? and Why?" Another pertinent question is raised: "Regardless of good times or bad, if you had to choose, which DBA would you want on your team when tough challenges arise?" Your response is. (This is where you enter a comment below)

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• Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 3)

  - by Sadequl Hussain

  Continuing from Part 2 of the Database Migration Checklist series: Step 10: Full-text catalogs and full-text indexing This is one area of SQL Server where people do not seem to take notice unless something goes wrong. Full-text functionality is a specialised area in database application development and is not usually implemented in your everyday OLTP systems. Nevertheless, if you are migrating a database that uses full-text indexing on one or more tables, you need to be aware a few points. First of all, SQL Server 2005 now allows full-text catalog files to be restored or attached along with the rest of the database. However, after migration, if you are unable to look at the properties of any full-text catalogs, you are probably better off dropping and recreating it. You may also get the following error messages along the way: Msg 9954, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 The Full-Text Service (msftesql) is disabled. The system administrator must enable this service. This basically means full text service is not running (disabled or stopped) in the destination instance. You will need to start it from the Configuration Manager. Similarly, if you get the following message, you will also need to drop and recreate the catalog and populate it. Msg 7624, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Full-text catalog ‘catalog_name‘ is in an unusable state. Drop and re-create this full-text catalog. A full population of full-text indexes can be a time and resource intensive operation. Obviously you will want to schedule it for low usage hours if the database is restored in an existing production server. Also, bear in mind that any scheduled job that existed in the source server for populating the full text catalog (e.g. nightly process for incremental update) will need to be re-created in the destination. Step 11: Database collation considerations Another sticky area to consider during a migration is the collation setting. Ideally you would want to restore or attach the database in a SQL Server instance with the same collation. Although not used commonly, SQL Server allows you to change a database’s collation by using the ALTER DATABASE command: ALTER DATABASE database_name COLLATE collation_name You should not be using this command for no reason as it can get really dangerous.  When you change the database collation, it does not change the collation of the existing user table columns.  However the columns of every new table, every new UDT and subsequently created variables or parameters in code will use the new setting. The collation of every char, nchar, varchar, nvarchar, text or ntext field of the system tables will also be changed. Stored procedure and function parameters will be changed to the new collation and finally, every character-based system data type and user defined data types will also be affected. And the change may not be successful either if there are dependent objects involved. You may get one or multiple messages like the following: Cannot ALTER ‘object_name‘ because it is being referenced by object ‘dependent_object_name‘. That is why it is important to test and check for collation related issues. Collation also affects queries that use comparisons of character-based data.  If errors arise due to two sides of a comparison being in different collation orders, the COLLATE keyword can be used to cast one side to the same collation as the other. Continues…

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• Wipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy Way

  - by The Geek

  Giving a computer to somebody else? Maybe you’re putting it out on Craigslist to sell to a stranger—either way, you’ll want to make sure that your drive is completely wiped, scrubbed, and clean of any personal data. Here’s the easy way to do it. If you only have access to an Ubuntu Live CD or thumb drive, you can actually use that instead if you prefer, and we’ve got you covered with a full guide to securely wiping your PC’s hard drive. Otherwise, keep reading. Wipe the Drive with DBAN Darik’s Boot and Nuke CD is the easiest way to permanently and totally destroy every bit of personal information on that drive—nobody is going to recover a thing once this is done. The first thing you’ll need to do is download a copy of the ISO image, and then burn it to a blank CD with something really useful like Imgburn. Just choose Burn image to Disc at the start screen, select the little file icon, grab the downloaded ISO, and then go. If you need a little more help, we’ve got you covered with a beginner’s guide to burning an ISO image. Once you’re done, stick the disc into the drive, start the PC up, and then once you boot to the DBAN prompt you’ll see a menu. You can pretty much ignore everything on here, and just type… autonuke And there you are, your disk is now being securely wiped. Once it’s all done, you can remove the CD, and then either pack the PC up to sell, or re-install Windows on there if you feel like it. More Advanced Method If you’re really paranoid, want to run a different type of wipe, or just like fiddling with the options, you can choose F3 or hit Enter at the prompt to head to the advanced selection screen. Here you can choose exactly which drive to wipe, or hit the M key to change the method. You’ll be able to choose between a bunch of different wipe options. The Quick Erase is all you really need though.   So there you are, easy PC wiping in one package. What about you? Do you make sure to wipe your old PCs before giving them away? Personally I’ve always just yanked out the hard drives before I got rid of an old PC, but that’s just me. Download DBAN from dban.org Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard DriveHow to Dispose of Old Computers ResponsiblyHow To Delete a VHD in Windows 7Speed up External USB Hard Drives in Windows VistaSpeed Up SATA Hard Drives in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites

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• Review: ComponentOne Studio for Entity Framework

  - by Tim Murphy

  While I have always been a fan of libraries that improve coding efficiency and reduce code redundancy I have mostly been using ones that were in the public domain.  As part of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program a got my hands on ComponentOne’s Studio for Entity Framework.  Below are my thought after working with the product for several weeks. My coding preference has always been maintainable code that is reusable across an enterprises protfolio.  Because of this my focus in reviewing this product is less on the RAD components and more on its benefits for layered applications using code first Entity Framework. Before we get into the pros and cons here is a summary of the main feature listed for SEF. Unified Data Context Virtual Data Access More Powerful Data Binding Pros The first thing that I found to my liking is the C1DataSource. It basically manages a cache for your Entity Model context.  Under RAD conditions this is setup automatically when you drop the object on a your design surface.  If you are like me and want to abstract you data management into a library it takes a little more work, but it is still acceptable and gains the same benefits. The second feature that I found beneficial is the definition of views with improved sorting and filtering.  Again the ease of use of these features is greater on the RAD side but no capabilities are missing when manipulating object in code. Linq has become my friend over the last couple of years and it was great to see that ComponentOne had ensured that it remained a first class citizen in their design.  When you look into this product yourself I would suggest taking a dive into LiveLinq which allow the joining of different data source types. As I went through discovering the features of this framework I appreciated the number of examples that they supplied for different uses.  Besides showing how to use SEF with WinForms, WPF and Silverlight they also showed how to accomplish tasks both RAD, code only and MVVM approaches. Cons The only area that I would really like to see improvement is in there level of detail in their documentation.  Specifically I would like to have seen some of the supporting code explained, such as what some supporting object did, in the examples instead of having to go to the programmer’s reference. I did find some times where currently existing projects had some trouble determining scope that the RAD controls were allowed, but I expect this is something that is in part end user related. Summary Overall I found the Studio for Entity Framework capable and well thought out.  If you are already using the Entity Framework this product will fit into your environment with little effort in return for greater flexibility and greater robustness in your solutions. Whether the $895 list price for a standard version works for you will depend on your return on investment. Smaller companies with only a small number of projects may not be able to stomach it, you get a full featured product that is supported by a well established company.  The more projects and the more code you have the greater your return on investment will be. Personally I intend to apply this product to some production systems and will probably have some tips and tricks in the future. del.icio.us Tags: ComponentOne,Studio for Entity Framework,Geeks With Blogs,Influencers,Product Reviews

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• Expert F# &ndash; Pattern Matching with Adam and Eve

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am loving my Expert F# book. I wish I had more time with it, but the little time I get I really enjoy. However today I was completely stumped by what the book was trying to get across with regards to pattern matching. On Page 38 – Chapter 3, it briefly describes F# option values. On this page it gives the code snippet along the code lines below and then goes on to speak briefly about pattern matching... open System type 'a option = | None | Some of 'a let people = [ ("Adam", None); ("Eve", None); ("Cain", Some("Adam", "Eve")); ("Abel", Some("Adam", "Eve")) ] let showParents(name, parents) = match parents with | Some(dad, mum) -> printfn "%s has father %s, mother %s" name dad mum | None -> printfn "%s has no parents!" name Console.WriteLine(showParents("Adam", None))   Originally when I read this code I think I misunderstood the purpose of the example code. I for some reason thought that the showParents function would magically be parsing the people array and looking for a match of name and then showing the parents. But obviously it cannot do this since there is no reference to the people array in the showParents method. After rereading the page I realized that I had just combined the two segments of code together, possibly incorrectly, and that a better example would have been to have a code snippet like the following. let showParents(name, parents) = match parents with | Some(dad, mum) -> printfn "%s has father %s, mother %s" name dad mum | None -> printfn "%s has no parents!" name Console.WriteLine(showParents("Adam", None)) Console.WriteLine(showParents("Cain", Some("Adam", "Eve"))) Console.ReadLine()   However, what if I wanted to have a function that was passed a list of people and a name would then show the parents of the name if there were any, and if not would show that they had no parents… so that doesnt seem to difficult does it… lets look at my very unoptimized noob F# code to try and achieve this… open System let people = [ ("Adam", None); ("Eve", None); ("Cain", Some("Adam", "Eve")); ("Abel", Some("Adam", "Eve")) ] // // returns the name of the person // let showName(person : string * (string * string) option) = let name = fst(person) name // // Returns a string with the parents details or not // let showParents(itemData : string * (string * string) option) = let name = fst(itemData) let parents = snd(itemData) match parents with | Some(dad, mum) -> "Father " + dad + " and Mother " + mum | None -> "Has no parents!" // // Prints the details // let showDetails(person : string * (string * string) option) = Console.WriteLine(showName(person)) Console.WriteLine(showParents(person)) // // Check if the name matches the first portion of person // if so, return true, else return false // let nameMatch(name : string , person : string * (string * string) option) = match name with | x when x = fst(person) -> true | _ -> false // // Searches an array of people and looks for a match of names // let findPerson(name : string, people : (string * (string * string) option) list) = let o = Seq.tryFind(fun x -> nameMatch(name, x)) people if Option.isSome o then o else Option.None // // Try and find a person, if found show their details // else show no match // let FoundPerson = findPerson("Cain", people) match FoundPerson with | None -> Console.WriteLine("Not found") | Some(x) -> showDetails(x) Console.ReadLine() So, my code isn’t the cleanest but it did teach me a bit more F#. The area that I learnt about was the option keyword. The challenge being, if a match of the name isn’t found – and if a name is found but the person doesn’t have parents it should react accordingly. I’m pretty sure I can optimize this code quite a bit more and I think I may come back to it sometime in the future and relook at it, but for now at least I was able to achieve what I wanted.. and my brain has gone just that wee little bit more functional.

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