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• Taskbar Meters Turn Your Taskbar into a System Resource Monitor

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If you’re looking for some simple hardware monitoring tools that don’t clutter up your screen real estate but are right in front of you when you need them, Taskbar Meters sit unobtrusively right on the Windows taskbar. Open source, lightweight, and portable Taskbar Meters is actually a set of three applications. There is one for monitoring memory use, one for CPU use, and one for disk activity. Using the application is as simple as running the specific app for the monitoring you want (we have all three running in the screenshot here) and adjusting the sliders to set the update frequency and the percent utilization at which the meters turn from green, to yellow, to red. If you’re testing software loads and benchmarking Taskbar Meters doesn’t offer the kind of fine-tooth-comb view into system performance that you’ll need but for casual “What’s going on with my machine?” monitoring, it’s unobtrusive and effective. Taskbar Meters is an open source set of portable applications, Windows 7 only. Taskbar Meters [Codeplex] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Macs Don’t Make You Creative! So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? MacX DVD Ripper Pro is Free for How-To Geek Readers (Time Limited!) HTG Explains: What’s a Solid State Drive and What Do I Need to Know? How to Get Amazing Color from Photos in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Lakeside Sunset in the Mountains [Wallpaper] Taskbar Meters Turn Your Taskbar into a System Resource Monitor Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu Create Custom Sized Thumbnail Images with Simple Image Resizer [Cross-Platform] Etch a Circuit Board using a Simple Homemade Mixture Sync Blocker Stops iTunes from Automatically Syncing

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• In-Application Support Made Easier

  - by matt.hicks

  With the availability of Oracle UPK 3.6.1 and Enablement Service Pack 1 for Oracle UPK 3.6.1 (Oracle Support login required for both), there are quite a few changes for content admins to absorb. In addition to the support added for dozens of application releases, patches and new target applications, we've also added features to make implementing and using In-Application Support even easier. First, the old Help Menu Integration Guides have been updated and combined into a single In-Application Support Guide. If you integrate UPK content for user assistance, or if you're interested in doing so, read the new guide! It covers all the integration steps, including a section on the new In-Application Support Configuration Utility. If you've integrated content in multiple languages, or if you've ever had to make configuration changes for UPK Help Integration, then you know how cumbersome it was to manually edit javascript files. No longer! The Player now includes a configuration utility that provides a web browser interface for setting all In-Application Support options. From the main screen, you see a list of applications covered by the published content. Clicking on an application name takes you to the edit configuration screen where you can set all Player options for that application. No more digging through the Player folders to find the right javascript file to edit. No complicated javascript syntax to make changes. And with Enablement Service Pack 1 we've added a new feature we're calling the Tabbed Gateway. The Tabbed Gateway is a top-level navigation bar for Help Integration. And all tabs, links, and text are controlled with the Configuration Utility... I think the Tabbed Gateway is a really cool and exciting feature for content launch. I can't wait to hear how your ideas for how to use it for your content. Let me know in comments or email!

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The EventHandler and EventHandler&lt;TEventArgs&gt; delegates

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates that can be used to eliminate the need for defining custom delegates when creating events: the EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates. Events and delegates Before we begin, let’s quickly consider events in .NET.  According to the MSDN: An event in C# is a way for a class to provide notifications to clients of that class when some interesting thing happens to an object. So, basically, you can create an event in a type so that users of that type can subscribe to notifications of things of interest.  How is this different than some of the delegate programming that we talked about in the last two weeks?  Well, you can think of an event as a special access modifier on a delegate.  Some differences between the two are: Events are a special access case of delegates They behave much like delegates instances inside the type they are declared in, but outside of that type they can only be (un)subscribed to. Events can specify add/remove behavior explicitly If you want to do additional work when someone subscribes or unsubscribes to an event, you can specify the add and remove actions explicitly. Events have access modifiers, but these only specify the access level of those who can (un)subscribe A public event, for example, means anyone can (un)subscribe, but it does not mean that anyone can raise (invoke) the event directly.  Events can only be raised by the type that contains them In contrast, if a delegate is visible, it can be invoked outside of the object (not even in a sub-class!). Events tend to be for notifications only, and should be treated as optional Semantically speaking, events typically don’t perform work on the the class directly, but tend to just notify subscribers when something of note occurs. My basic rule-of-thumb is that if you are just wanting to notify any listeners (who may or may not care) that something has happened, use an event.  However, if you want the caller to provide some function to perform to direct the class about how it should perform work, make it a delegate. Declaring events using custom delegates To declare an event in a type, we simply use the event keyword and specify its delegate type.  For example, let’s say you wanted to create a new TimeOfDayTimer that triggers at a given time of the day (as opposed to on an interval).  We could write something like this: 1: public delegate void TimeOfDayHandler(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e); 2:  3: // A timer that will fire at time of day each day. 4: public class TimeOfDayTimer : IDisposable 5: { 6: // Event that is triggered at time of day. 7: public event TimeOfDayHandler Elapsed; 8:  9: // ... 10: } The first thing to note is that the event is a delegate type, which tells us what types of methods may subscribe to it.  The second thing to note is the signature of the event handler delegate, according to the MSDN: The standard signature of an event handler delegate defines a method that does not return a value, whose first parameter is of type Object and refers to the instance that raises the event, and whose second parameter is derived from type EventArgs and holds the event data. If the event does not generate event data, the second parameter is simply an instance of EventArgs. Otherwise, the second parameter is a custom type derived from EventArgs and supplies any fields or properties needed to hold the event data. So, in a nutshell, the event handler delegates should return void and take two parameters: An object reference to the object that raised the event. An EventArgs (or a subclass of EventArgs) reference to event specific information. Even if your event has no additional information to provide, you are still expected to provide an EventArgs instance.  In this case, feel free to pass the EventArgs.Empty singleton instead of creating new instances of EventArgs (to avoid generating unneeded memory garbage). The EventHandler delegate Because many events have no additional information to pass, and thus do not require custom EventArgs, the signature of the delegates for subscribing to these events is typically: 1: // always takes an object and an EventArgs reference 2: public delegate void EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) It would be insane to recreate this delegate for every class that had a basic event with no additional event data, so there already exists a delegate for you called EventHandler that has this very definition!  Feel free to use it to define any events which supply no additional event information: 1: public class Cache 2: { 3: // event that is raised whenever the cache performs a cleanup 4: public event EventHandler OnCleanup; 5:  6: // ... 7: } This will handle any event with the standard EventArgs (no additional information).  But what of events that do need to supply additional information?  Does that mean we’re out of luck for subclasses of EventArgs?  That’s where the generic for of EventHandler comes into play… The generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegate Starting with the introduction of generics in .NET 2.0, we have a generic delegate called EventHandler<TEventArgs>.  Its signature is as follows: 1: public delegate void EventHandler<TEventArgs>(object sender, TEventArgs e) 2: where TEventArgs : EventArgs This is similar to EventHandler except it has been made generic to support the more general case.  Thus, it will work for any delegate where the first argument is an object (the sender) and the second argument is a class derived from EventArgs (the event data). For example, let’s say we wanted to create a message receiver, and we wanted it to have a few events such as OnConnected that will tell us when a connection is established (probably with no additional information) and OnMessageReceived that will tell us when a new message arrives (probably with a string for the new message text). So for OnMessageReceived, our MessageReceivedEventArgs might look like this: 1: public sealed class MessageReceivedEventArgs : EventArgs 2: { 3: public string Message { get; set; } 4: } And since OnConnected needs no event argument type defined, our class might look something like this: 1: public class MessageReceiver 2: { 3: // event that is called when the receiver connects with sender 4: public event EventHandler OnConnected; 5:  6: // event that is called when a new message is received. 7: public event EventHandler<MessageReceivedEventArgs> OnMessageReceived; 8:  9: // ... 10: } Notice, nowhere did we have to define a delegate to fit our event definition, the EventHandler and generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates fit almost anything we’d need to do with events. Sidebar: Thread-safety and raising an event When the time comes to raise an event, we should always check to make sure there are subscribers, and then only raise the event if anyone is subscribed.  This is important because if no one is subscribed to the event, then the instance will be null and we will get a NullReferenceException if we attempt to raise the event. 1: // This protects against NullReferenceException... or does it? 2: if (OnMessageReceived != null) 3: { 4: OnMessageReceived(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 5: } The above code seems to handle the null reference if no one is subscribed, but there’s a problem if this is being used in multi-threaded environments.  For example, assume we have thread A which is about to raise the event, and it checks and clears the null check and is about to raise the event.  However, before it can do that thread B unsubscribes to the event, which sets the delegate to null.  Now, when thread A attempts to raise the event, this causes the NullReferenceException that we were hoping to avoid! To counter this, the simplest best-practice method is to copy the event (just a multicast delegate) to a temporary local variable just before we raise it.  Since we are inside the class where this event is being raised, we can copy it to a local variable like this, and it will protect us from multi-threading since multicast delegates are immutable and assignments are atomic: 1: // always make copy of the event multi-cast delegate before checking 2: // for null to avoid race-condition between the null-check and raising it. 3: var handler = OnMessageReceived; 4: 5: if (handler != null) 6: { 7: handler(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 8: } The very slight trade-off is that it’s possible a class may get an event after it unsubscribes in a multi-threaded environment, but this is a small risk and classes should be prepared for this possibility anyway.  For a more detailed discussion on this, check out this excellent Eric Lippert blog post on Events and Races. Summary Generic delegates give us a lot of power to make generic algorithms and classes, and the EventHandler delegate family gives us the flexibility to create events easily, without needing to redefine delegates over and over.  Use them whenever you need to define events with or without specialized EventArgs.   Tweet Technorati Tags: .NET, C#, CSharp, Little Wonders, Generics, Delegates, EventHandler

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• How to cross-reference many character encodings with ASCII OR UTFx?

  - by Garet Claborn

  I'm working with a binary structure, the goal of which is to index the significance of specific bits for any character encoding so that we may trigger events while doing specific checks against the profile. Each character encoding scheme has an associated system record. This record's leading value will be a C++ unsigned long long binary value and signifies the length, in bits, of encoded characters. Following the length are three values, each is a bit field of that length. offset_mask - defines the occurrence of non-printable characters within the min,max of print_mask range_mask - defines the occurrence of the most popular 50% of printable characters print_mask - defines the occurrence value of printable characters The structure of profiles has changed from the op of this question. Most likely I will try to factorize or compress these values in the long-term instead of starting out with ranges after reading more. I have to write some of the core functionality for these main reasons. It has to fit into a particular event architecture we are using, Better understanding of character encoding. I'm about to need it. Integrating into non-linear design is excluding many libraries without special hooks. I'm unsure if there is a standard, cross-encoding mechanism for communicating such data already. I'm just starting to look into how chardet might do profiling as suggested by @amon. The Unicode BOM would be easily enough (for my current project) if all encodings were Unicode. Of course ideally, one would like to support all encodings, but I'm not asking about implementation - only the general case. How can these profiles be efficiently populated, to produce a set of bitmasks which we can use to match strings with common characters in multiple languages? If you have any editing suggestions please feel free, I am a lightweight when it comes to localization, which is why I'm trying to reach out to the more experienced. Any caveats you may be able to help with will be appreciated.

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• Can't write to NTFS formatted drives

  - by mloman

  I'm not sure what has happened, but I've all of a sudden lost write access to any of my NTFS external drives. I installed a few games and apps from the software center, and now I can't make new folders or copy and paste files to anything that is NTFS. Everything is now read only, and I've tried so many things to fix it, but it seems hopeless. Just to check if it wasn't the drives themselves, I made a little ntfs formatted truecrypt volume, and a fat formatted volume. And yes, it seems that Ubuntu is blocking me from writing anything to NTFS. What happened here? Whats a way I can simply get write access to my NTFS drives, so I can just backup all my stuff. I'll probably reinstall Ubuntu. Please help. UPDATE (and thanks everyone for their quick replies) The problem has been solved. Prior to noticing that I had lost NTFS write permission, I had installed GParted from the software center, and there was an extension called ntfsprogs that came with it. During my search for a solution to the problem, I uninstalled GParted (as that was one of the apps I installed just before the problem). But that did not solve the problem. I came across an app called 'NTFS Configuration Tool'. When I installed this, it said that the ntfsprogs extension needed to be removed (so I guess uninstalling GPARTED, didn't remove the ntfsprog extension). I launched the NTFS Configuration Tool and now I have write access to NTFS drives. Unfortunately, I didn't check if I had write permission prior to launching the NTFS Configuration Tool, so I'm not sure whether the NTFS Configuration Tool, or the un-installation of ntfsprog gave me back NTFS write permission. Hopefully if another newbee encounters this problem, they'll come across this page and know what to do.

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Access PC Settings Easily from Your Desktop in Windows 8 and 8.1

  - by Akemi Iwaya

  Accessing your system’s settings in Windows 8 is not exactly the most straight-forward of processes, so if you need to change your settings often, then it can be a bit frustrating. With that in mind, the good folks over at 7 Tutorials have created an awesome shortcut that will take all the hassle out of accessing those settings, and make ‘tweaking’ Windows 8 much easier. After downloading the zip file, extract the exe file and place it in an appropriate folder, then create a shortcut. Once you have the new shortcut set up in the desired location (i.e. desktop or pinned to the taskbar), accessing your system’s settings has never been easier in Windows 8 and 8.1! Special Note: If you are someone who runs files through VirusTotal before using them, be aware that two listings there (Commtouch and Symantec) will flag the file as malware. We had no problems on our system whatsoever and believe the malware flags to be false positives. Download the Desktop Shortcut to PC Settings, for Windows 8 & 8.1 [7 Tutorials]     

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• Windows 8, the biggest struggle&hellip;.

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  As always, it’s hard to be original. It’s easy to copy great stuff others have done but to think of something nice that others might have done is not trivial. The number of applications in the Windows 8 Store is growing rappidly. That was to be expected; a lot of developers already have the skills needed to build Win8 apps so all it took was some ideas. And they have ideas. Another factor that helps with the growing number of apps in the store is the availability of the project templates in Visual Studio 2012. When you start a new project you are given a ready to run sample that you can adapt to your needs. All the stuff needed to navigate through the app, to display data, to do semantic zoom, it’s all available. So what do we do? We tweak, change, adapt and modify these samples to fit our application. However, the underlying structure of the app remains the same. Somehow developers can’t seem to break free from the structure that the sample apps give you. Result: all apps looks alike. My tip for the day: take the samples and use them to learn. Don’t use them as a foundation of your app. Make you app different from those others and you’ll find you will have something special. I’m curious to see what you come up with!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 06, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 06, 2013Popular ReleasesMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.580b: Fixed IMDB Actor names and Actor Roles, empty <actor> entries in movie nfo, and actor scraping during initial movie scrape. Revision HistoryEvent-Based Components AppBuilder: AB3.Iteration.53: Iteration 53 (Feature): Allow drag&drop of existing component (flow, step) from component list to chart. Duplicate names are automatically recognized and solved. By the color of the draged component you can see what kind of component (flow or step) is currently draged. New: AddExistingComponentFlow, PartDragDropEventHandler, ExistingStepPreparerPulse: Pulse 0.6.7.3: Pulse is now accepting donations. To donate by Bitcoin or PayPal see https://pulse.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Donations Lots of updates in v0.6.7.3: (Feature) New option allows you to disable wallpaper changing when a full screen application is running. This way Pulse doesn't slow down/lag your videos and games :) (Fix) Some users were getting Wallbase errors when logging in. This has been fixed. (Feature) Right click a provider and you can now make a copy of it by selecting the "Dupl...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.1: Release 1.11.1 =========== =Bug Fixes= =========== Added more tile blocks (Clouds, crimstone) Added items (binoculars, rope, Pirahna Gun) Added ores (Lead, Tin) Chests now work, I broke them yesterday. =============== =Known Issues= =============== I am having trouble with new background walls. So you will see a red outline for crimson then a pink inside. Same with where I think the queen bee lives.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.19: NEW: Added Option to login as Guest NEW: Added Menu Option to delete an Forum Account NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org links FIXED: Fixed Ripping of http://forum.babeunion.com ForumsSimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.03: SourceCode and Sample .Net Framework 3.5 AnyCPU compile.Application Architecture Guidelines: App Architecture Guidelines 3.0.8: This document is an overview of software qualities, principles, patterns, practices, tools and libraries.fastJSON: v2.0.22: 2.0.22 - added .net 3.5 project - now compiling to 'output' directory - added signed assembly - version numbers will stay at 2.0.0.0 for drop in compatibility - file version will reflect the build number - bug fix deserializing to dictionaries instead of dataset when type is not definedResponsive SharePoint: Bootstrap 3 for SharePoint 2013 - Alpha 0.1: Bootstrap 3 for SharePoint 2013 Alpha version 0.1 NOTE - This is an alpha version, there are bound to be issues. Please help us solve them by contributing in our Discussion. Publishing - The source for Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.0 integrated into SharePoint 2013 for a site with Publishing enabled. Non-Publishing - A master page and branding assets for Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.0 integrated into SharePoint 2013 without Publishing enabled. PageLayoutSampleContent - Sample content for included page l...C++ AMP Conformance Test Suite: C++ AMP Conformance Test Suite 1.0.0: This release contains following changes from previous release: Removed the tests that were testing Microsoft specific behavior not part of open specification. The test suite now contains two folders, containing set of test cases, named ‘Tests’ and ‘TestsWithProp'. The set of tests under these two folders are identical except one difference. The set of test cases under directory ‘TestsWithProp’ makes use of ‘properties’ (which the compiler being tested should handle as mentioned in the open ...ASP.NET dhtmxGantt Class: dhtmlxGantt2.vb class: This is the latest class based on work performed. For more information read the project description and get the source files from dhtmlx.comExpressiveDataGenerators: Alpha 2: Fix serveral bugs, more testsQuickTestsFramework: 1.0.0: First release with stable API.VS Tiny Extension for TortoiseGit: 0.1c: + Icons revised + Push button disappeared when IDE loads the menu instead of toolbar. + Detected twice loading and prevented. + About box deprecated. + Next version will have major improvements. NEW: Visual Studio 2013 Support!BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.6: 2013.09.30 Ver5.9.6 (1)SMTP???????、???????????????? (2)WinAPI??????? (3)Web???????CGI???????????????????????PayBox payment gateway provider for NB_Store: NB_Store_Gateway_01.00.02_PayBox: Paybox DNN module installMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.2: Mostly internal code tweaks. added -nosize switch to turn off the size- and gzip-calculations done after minification. removed the comments in the build targets script for the old AjaxMin build task (discussion #458831). Fixed an issue with extended Unicode characters encoded inside a string literal with adjacent \uHHHH\uHHHH sequences. Fixed an IndexOutOfRange exception when encountering a CSS identifier that's a single underscore character (_). In previous builds, the net35 and net20...AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2013 Release (Updated) Version 7.1005September 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Important UpdateThis release has been updated to fix three issues: Up...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha is for testers to figure out if we got the NEW api plugged in ok. thanksVisual Log Parser: VisualLogParser: Portable Visual Log Parser for Dotnet 4.0New ProjectsBasic4Android (B4A) Charting Framework: dhtlmxCharts, GoogleCharts etc: Basic4Android (B4A) mobile charting framework.Client Meeting Tool: This site facilitate users to create and schedule meetings for an event.FoodScan: This app focuses on implementing diet monitoring application for Malaysian overweight and obese adolescents using AR technique on Windows Phone 8.Hello Team foundation server: Try to use team foundation server and compare it with GitKDG C# Password Generator: C# password generator developed by KDG.KDG's C# Password Generator: C# password generator that uses Random to create strong passwords based on user input.Meta: Meta is the EECS 111 programming language at Northwestern University. Meta is a dynamically-typed scheme-like language built on .NET. This is its home.Monoscript: Allows using Mono and C# for scripting on Unix. Source files are automatically compiled and executed. Caching is employed to avoid recompiling unchanged files.mtdsharp: Developed by Chris Hyndman, Alec KC, Lu Huang and Merrill Huang for CS 196 at the University of Illinois.Planr.me: Planr is a time management website currently in the early development stageProject Hermes: This very project is currently closed door and under core development. The project description and other works would be published soon.Remindme for Windows Phone 8: Simple, open source Pocket client for Windows Phone 8Remindme for WinRT: Simple, open source Pocket client for WinRT and Windows 8.SQL Server Periodic Table with Molecules: This a SQL Server Database intended to be used by students and researchers for Chemistry and Physics projects. Tesseract: The Tesseract Project aims to easily display and rotate 4 Dimensional Objects in 3D Test Case Manager: A Windows Application which extends Microsoft Test Manager. Features: * one click search * test case export * better test case reader * extended edit modeTest Project for Assignment 1: This is a test ProjectTorah File: Torah File is an project that allow you to use Torah Bible and Mishneh for the computer by type of the programming languages that will be able to use the ToUSAePay nopCommerce Payment Plugin: A simple plugin for nopCommerce to use the USAePay SOAP API interface for processing credit cards.Veterinaria Dr Leo: Este es nuestro Proyecto del curso Calidad y Pruebas de Software 2013-2 Arevalo Ticlla, Susan. Chalán Malca, Elvis. Cruzado Asencio, Gustavo.Visual Studio Test Extensions: The Visual Studio Test Extensions provides extensions and tools for the Visual Studio MSTest engine. It allows to execute unit tests in a separate AppDomain.WSAAD7COM1052: Central repository for 7COM1052 - Web Scripting & Application Development (COM)wscc2013online: this is a project related to Web Application Development at the University of Hertfordshire

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• Reader for Android Updates; Now with Feed Widgets and More

  - by ETC

  Android phone owners rocking the official Google Reader app will be pleased to see the new update includes much requested features such as polished feed widgets, unread counter widgets, and a handy “mark previous as read” button. Widgets have long been one of the most requested feature for Google Reader for Android. This update rolls them out in two forms. News ticker widgets show you current headlines for your Google Reader folders (as seen in the screenshot here); folder widgets function just as unread counters and only take up a 1×1 space. In addition to the widgets another much requested feature made an appearance. While scrolling through your feed you can now mark all the previous entries as read. Hit up the link below to read more or visit the Android Market on your phone to update the application. Updates to the Google Reader App for Android [The Official Google Reader Blog] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar Reader for Android Updates; Now with Feed Widgets and More

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• DDD East Anglia, 29th June 2013 - Async Patterns presentation and source code

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/07/01/ddd-east-anglia-29th-june-2013---async-patterns-presentation.aspxMany thanks to the team in Cambridge for an awesome first conference DDD East Anglia.  I definitely appreciate how each of the different areas have their own distinctive atmosphere and feel.  Thanks to some great sponsors we enjoyed a great venue and some excellent nibbles. For those who attended my Async my source code and presentation are available on GitHub, https://github.com/westleyl/DDDEastAnglia2013-Async.git If you are new to Git then the easiest client to install is GitHub for Windows, a graphical UI for accessing GitHub. Personally, I also have Git Extensions and Tortoise Git installed. Tortoise Git is the file explorer add-in that works in a familiar manner to TortoiseSVN. As I mentioned during the presentation I have not included the sample data, the music files, in the source code placed on GitHub but I have included instructions on how to download them from http://silents.bandcamp.comand place them in the correct folders. Also, Windows Media Player, by default, does not play Ogg Vorbis and Flac music files, however you can download the codec installer for these, for free, from http://xiph.org/dshow. I have included the .Net 4.0 version of the source code that uses the Microsoft.Bcl.Async NuGet package - once you have got the project from GitHub you will need to install this NuGet package for the code to compile. Load Project into Visual Studio 2012 Access the NuGet package manager (Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Manage NuGet Packages For Solution) Highlight Online and then Search Online for microsoft.bcl.async Click on Install button Resources : You can download the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern white paper by Stephen Toub, which was the inspiration for this presentation from here - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=19957 Presentation : If you just want the presentation and don’t want to bother with a GitHub login you can download the PowerPoint presentation from here.

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• TFS Build 2010: BuildNumber and DropLocation

  - by javarg

  Automatic Builds for Application Release is a current practice in every major development factory nowadays. Using Team Foundation Server Build 2010 to accomplish this offers many opportunities to improve quality of your releases. The following approach allow us to generate build drop folders including the BuildNumber and the Changeset or Label provided. Using this procedure we can quickly identify the generated binaries in the Drop Server with the corresponding Version. Branch the DefaultTemplate.xaml and renamed it with CustomDefaultTemplate.xaml Open it for edit (check out) Go to the Set Drop Location Activity and edit the DropLocation property. Write the following expression: BuildDetail.DropLocationRoot + "\" + BuildDetail.BuildDefinition.Name + "\" + If(String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(GetVersion), BuildDetail.SourceGetVersion, GetVersion) + "_" + BuildDetail.BuildNumber Check in the branched template. Now create a build definition named TestBuildForDev using the new template. The previous expression sets the DropLocation with the following format: (ChangesetNumber|LabelName)_BuildName_BuildNumber The first part of the folder name will be the changeset number or the label name (if triggered using labels). Folder names will be generated as following: C1850_TestBuildForDev_20111117.1 (changesets start with letter C) LLabelname_TestBuildForDev_20111117.1 (labels start with letter L) Try launching a build from a Changeset and from a Label. You can specify a Label in the GetVersion parameter in the Queue new Build Wizard, going to the Parameters tab (for labels add the “L” prefix):

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 13, 2012Popular ReleasesArduino Installer For Atmel Studio 6: Arduino Installer - Version 1.01 Beta2: Bug Fixes - Handling spaces in avrdude path - Handling spaces in avrdude config path - Handling spaces in project names - Handling spaces in project path - hard coded directories pointing to my space has been removed New Features - Total of 7 project templates included - C program - C library - C++ program - C++ library - Arduino Unit Tests - Arduino library - Arduino program (sketch) - Group all supporting scripts under a script directory in the solution - Support for calling multiple pre-...AcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.2: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.8: See Change Log for details of the new features and bugfixes included in this release, and methods that are now deprecated. Note changes to the PDF Writer: tcPDF is no longer bundled with PHPExcel, but should be installed separately if you wish to use that 3rd-Party library with PHPExcel. Alternatively, you can choose to use mPDF or DomPDF as PDF Rendering libraries instead: PHPExcel now provides a configurable wrapper allowing you a choice of PDF renderer. See the documentation, or the PDF s...DirectX Tool Kit: October 12, 2012: October 12, 2012 Added PrimitiveBatch for drawing user primitives Debug object names for all D3D resources (for PIX and debug layer leak reporting)Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.70: Fixed issue described in discussion #399087: variable references within case values weren't getting resolved.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.1: Some important bug fixes and couple of new features were added. There are no major changes to the sample website. Source code could be downloaded from the Source Code section selecting branch release-6.1. Thus just builds of GoogleMap Control are issued here in this release. NuGet Package GoogleMap Control 6.1 NuGet Package FeaturesBounds property to provide ability to create a map by center and bounds as well; Setting in markup <artem:GoogleMap ID="GoogleMap1" runat="server" MapType="HY...mojoPortal: 2.3.9.3: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2393-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...OstrivDB: OstrivDB 0.1: - Storage configuration: objects serialization (Xml, Json), storage file compressing, data block size. - Caching for Select queries. - Indexing. - Batch of queries. - No special query language (LINQ used). - Integrated sorting and paging. - Multithreaded data processing.D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.4: Fixed a bug where the server ip was not logged properly in the stats file.Captcha MVC: Captcha Mvc 2.1.2: v 2.1.2: Fixed problem with serialization. Made all classes from a namespace Jetbrains.Annotaions as the internal. Added autocomplete attribute and autocorrect attribute for captcha input element. Minor changes. v 2.1.1: Fixed problem with serialization. Minor changes. v 2.1: Added support for storing captcha in the session or cookie. See the updated example. Updated example. Minor changes. v 2.0.1: Added support for a partial captcha. Now you can easily customize the layout, s...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the module printing function was only visible to administrators Fixed issue where pane level skinning was being assigned to a default container for any content pane Fixed issue when using password aging and FB / Google authentication Fixed issue that was causing the DateEditControl to not load the assigned value Fixed issue that stopped additional profile properties to be displayed in the member directory after modifying the template Fixed er...Advanced DataGridView with Excel-like auto filter: 1.0.0.0: ?????? ??????WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE:...VidCoder: 1.4.4 Beta: Fixed inability to create new presets with "Save As".MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.2: Changelog for 2.3.2 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for generating XBMC XML NFO files for files in the conversion queue (store it along with the source video with source video name.nfo). Right click on the file in queue and select generate XML 2. UI bugifx, start and end trim box locations interchanged 3. Added support for removing commercials from non DVRMS/WTV files (MP4, AVI etc) 4. Now checking for Firewall port status before enabling (might help with some firewall problems) 5. User In...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.5.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release supports the Sandcastle October 2012 Release (v2.7.1.0). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release suppor...The GLMET Project: Shutdown Manager: Shutdown, Log off and Restart Timer Set time for shutdown, log off and restartClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.68.0: ClosedXML now resolves formulas! Yes it finally happened. If you call cell.Value and it has a formula the library will try to evaluate the formula and give you the result. For example: var wb = new XLWorkbook(); var ws = wb.AddWorksheet("Sheet1"); ws.Cell("A1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("B1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("C1").FormulaA1 = "\"The total value is: \" & SUM(A1:B2)"; var...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 10: New feature - Added Portable build to NuGet package New feature - Added GetValue and TryGetValue with StringComparison to JObject Change - Improved duplicate object reference id error message Fix - Fixed error when comparing empty JObjects Fix - Fixed SecAnnotate warnings Fix - Fixed error when comparing DateTime JValue with a DateTimeOffset JValue Fix - Fixed serializer sometimes not using DateParseHandling setting Fix - Fixed error in JsonWriter.WriteToken when writing a DateT...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.2: Changes: Tested against KeePass 2.20.1 Tested under Ubuntu 12.10 (and KeePass 2.20) Added GenerateAsUtf8 method returning the encrypted passphrase as a UTF8 byte array.New ProjectsAaron.Core: It's a special core be used to help your project become standardization. It provides the standard platform, including core systems, data flows,...AFSSignarlRServer: Server ready tryAgileFramework: Agile Framework in order to build easily application based on WCF, NHibernate , WPF, and multithreadingala, A Programming Language: ala, A Programming LanguageBaseSRS (Basic Service Request System): BaseSRS is a basic "Service Request System" or "SRS" which can be adapted and used by anyone. ContainerVariations: ContainerVariations is a collection of similar unit tests projects, each applied to a different Inversion of Control container. If successful, it will provide a consistent and comprehensive set of examples for popular .NET IoC containers. It is developed in C#.COST Policies - ART Work: COST Policies: ART Work ? ??????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?? ??????????: -baceCP -guideCPCS Script Runner: Provide users an easy way of executing C# programs (scripts) that are compiled on the fly.DbUtility: DbUtility is a free utility to display databases info like, size, backup date, instance name, database name, last backup log date, with export to excel feature.EchoLink Monitor: EchoLink Monitor is a management tool for EchoLink sysops maintaining remote EchoLink nodes.NextUI: We are on the way...Notas Alexandre: Apenas teste ainda...será modificado depois...Orchard CMS Amba.HtmlBlocks: Amba.HtmlBlocks module for Orchard CMS 1.5.1Portable Basemap Server: multiple map data source<--PBS-->multiple map apiRonYee: ??????????????。 ????（viewer）???????????????????，???????????????。 ????（customer）?????????????????，???????，?????????????????。 ??????（user）??????????????????。ShangWu: ????，???StoreIpAddress: Examine different means to store IP addressesSummon for Umbraco: Summon for Umbraco is a .NET solution for Summon API, provided by Serials Solutions.teasingg: this is for testing code plexWeb Scripting and Content Creation assignment: A stub project.WriteableBitmapEx for Windows Embedded: WriteableBitmapEx for Windows Embedded Compact 7 and Silverlight for Windows Embedded. Requires XAML In The Hand for managed code development.X.Web.Sitemap: X.Web.Sitemap is a part of X-Framework library. X.Web.Sitemap allows quickly and easily generate a Google-compatible filesZeropaste: A pastebin with minimal features.??: ?????EPUB????。

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• .Net Rocks Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip coming to Raleigh, NC May 6th

  - by Jim Duffy

  Listen up .NET developers within 50 miles of Research Triangle Park, NC!  Take out that red, blue, green, black or any other color Sharpie marker you fancy and circle May 6th! Fellow Microsoft Regional Directors Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell are going to be bringing the .Net Rocks Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip to town. What’s that you say, you’ve never been to a .Net Rocks Road Trip event and don’t know what to expect? Let me help with that. I stol… uhhh… I mean I was “inspired” by some content I found on the event information page. “Carl and Richard are loading up the DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) and driving to your town again to show off their favorite bits of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0! Richard talks about Web load testing and Carl talks about Silverlight 4.0 and multimedia. And to make the night even more fun, we’re going to bring a mystery rock star from the Visual Studio world to the event and interview them for a special .NET Rocks Road Trip show series. Along the way we’ll be giving away some great prizes, showing off some awesome technology and having a ton of laughs. So come out to the most fun you can have in a geeky evening – and learn a few things along the way about web load testing and Silverlight 4!“   I know I’ll be there so what are you waiting for? Head over to the event registration page and sign up today! Have a day. :-|

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• The fastest way to resize images from ASP.NET. And it’s (more) supported-ish.

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  I’ve shown before how to resize images using GDI, which is fairly common but is explicitly unsupported because we know of very real problems that this can cause. Still, many sites still use that method because those problems are fairly rare, and because most people assume it’s the only way to get the job done. Plus, it works in medium trust. More recently, I’ve shown how you can use WPF APIs to do the same thing and get JPEG thumbnails, only 2.5 times faster than GDI (even now that GDI really ultimately uses WIC to read and write images). The boost in performance is great, but it comes at a cost, that you may or may not care about: it won’t work in medium trust. It’s also just as unsupported as the GDI option. What I want to show today is how to use the Windows Imaging Components from ASP.NET APIs directly, without going through WPF. The approach has the great advantage that it’s been tested and proven to scale very well. The WIC team tells me you should be able to call support and get answers if you hit problems. Caveats exist though. First, this is using interop, so until a signed wrapper sits in the GAC, it will require full trust. Second, the APIs have a very strong smell of native code and are definitely not .NET-friendly. And finally, the most serious problem is that older versions of Windows don’t offer MTA support for image decoding. MTA support is only available on Windows 7, Vista and Windows Server 2008. But on 2003 and XP, you’ll only get STA support. that means that the thread safety that we so badly need for server applications is not guaranteed on those operating systems. To make it work, you’d have to spin specialized threads yourself and manage the lifetime of your objects, which is outside the scope of this article. We’ll assume that we’re fine with al this and that we’re running on 7 or 2008 under full trust. Be warned that the code that follows is not simple or very readable. This is definitely not the easiest way to resize an image in .NET. Wrapping native APIs such as WIC in a managed wrapper is never easy, but fortunately we won’t have to: the WIC team already did it for us and released the results under MS-PL. The InteropServices folder, which contains the wrappers we need, is in the WicCop project but I’ve also included it in the sample that you can download from the link at the end of the article. In order to produce a thumbnail, we first have to obtain a decoding frame object that WIC can use. Like with WPF, that object will contain the command to decode a frame from the source image but won’t do the actual decoding until necessary. Getting the frame is done by reading the image bytes through a special WIC stream that you can obtain from a factory object that we’re going to reuse for lots of other tasks: var photo = File.ReadAllBytes(photoPath); var factory = (IWICComponentFactory)new WICImagingFactory(); var inputStream = factory.CreateStream(); inputStream.InitializeFromMemory(photo, (uint)photo.Length); var decoder = factory.CreateDecoderFromStream( inputStream, null, WICDecodeOptions.WICDecodeMetadataCacheOnLoad); var frame = decoder.GetFrame(0); We can read the dimensions of the frame using the following (somewhat ugly) code: uint width, height; frame.GetSize(out width, out height); This enables us to compute the dimensions of the thumbnail, as I’ve shown in previous articles. We now need to prepare the output stream for the thumbnail. WIC requires a special kind of stream, IStream (not implemented by System.IO.Stream) and doesn’t directlyunderstand .NET streams. It does provide a number of implementations but not exactly what we need here. We need to output to memory because we’ll want to persist the same bytes to the response stream and to a local file for caching. The memory-bound version of IStream requires a fixed-length buffer but we won’t know the length of the buffer before we resize. To solve that problem, I’ve built a derived class from MemoryStream that also implements IStream. The implementation is not very complicated, it just delegates the IStream methods to the base class, but it involves some native pointer manipulation. Once we have a stream, we need to build the encoder for the output format, which could be anything that WIC supports. For web thumbnails, our only reasonable options are PNG and JPEG. I explored PNG because it’s a lossless format, and because WIC does support PNG compression. That compression is not very efficient though and JPEG offers good quality with much smaller file sizes. On the web, it matters. I found the best PNG compression option (adaptive) to give files that are about twice as big as 100%-quality JPEG (an absurd setting), 4.5 times bigger than 95%-quality JPEG and 7 times larger than 85%-quality JPEG, which is more than acceptable quality. As a consequence, we’ll use JPEG. The JPEG encoder can be prepared as follows: var encoder = factory.CreateEncoder( Consts.GUID_ContainerFormatJpeg, null); encoder.Initialize(outputStream, WICBitmapEncoderCacheOption.WICBitmapEncoderNoCache); The next operation is to create the output frame: IWICBitmapFrameEncode outputFrame; var arg = new IPropertyBag2[1]; encoder.CreateNewFrame(out outputFrame, arg); Notice that we are passing in a property bag. This is where we’re going to specify our only parameter for encoding, the JPEG quality setting: var propBag = arg[0]; var propertyBagOption = new PROPBAG2[1]; propertyBagOption[0].pstrName = "ImageQuality"; propBag.Write(1, propertyBagOption, new object[] { 0.85F }); outputFrame.Initialize(propBag); We can then set the resolution for the thumbnail to be 96, something we weren’t able to do with WPF and had to hack around: outputFrame.SetResolution(96, 96); Next, we set the size of the output frame and create a scaler from the input frame and the computed dimensions of the target thumbnail: outputFrame.SetSize(thumbWidth, thumbHeight); var scaler = factory.CreateBitmapScaler(); scaler.Initialize(frame, thumbWidth, thumbHeight, WICBitmapInterpolationMode.WICBitmapInterpolationModeFant); The scaler is using the Fant method, which I think is the best looking one even if it seems a little softer than cubic (zoomed here to better show the defects): Cubic Fant Linear Nearest neighbor We can write the source image to the output frame through the scaler: outputFrame.WriteSource(scaler, new WICRect { X = 0, Y = 0, Width = (int)thumbWidth, Height = (int)thumbHeight }); And finally we commit the pipeline that we built and get the byte array for the thumbnail out of our memory stream: outputFrame.Commit(); encoder.Commit(); var outputArray = outputStream.ToArray(); outputStream.Close(); That byte array can then be sent to the output stream and to the cache file. Once we’ve gone through this exercise, it’s only natural to wonder whether it was worth the trouble. I ran this method, as well as GDI and WPF resizing over thirty twelve megapixel images for JPEG qualities between 70% and 100% and measured the file size and time to resize. Here are the results: Size of resized images   Time to resize thirty 12 megapixel images Not much to see on the size graph: sizes from WPF and WIC are equivalent, which is hardly surprising as WPF calls into WIC. There is just an anomaly for 75% for WPF that I noted in my previous article and that disappears when using WIC directly. But overall, using WPF or WIC over GDI represents a slight win in file size. The time to resize is more interesting. WPF and WIC get similar times although WIC seems to always be a little faster. Not surprising considering WPF is using WIC. The margin of error on this results is probably fairly close to the time difference. As we already knew, the time to resize does not depend on the quality level, only the size does. This means that the only decision you have to make here is size versus visual quality. This third approach to server-side image resizing on ASP.NET seems to converge on the fastest possible one. We have marginally better performance than WPF, but with some additional peace of mind that this approach is sanctioned for server-side usage by the Windows Imaging team. It still doesn’t work in medium trust. That is a problem and shows the way for future server-friendly managed wrappers around WIC. The sample code for this article can be downloaded from: http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/WicResize.zip The benchmark code can be found here (you’ll need to add your own images to the Images directory and then add those to the project, with content and copy if newer in the properties of the files in the solution explorer): http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/bleroy/Samples/WicWpfGdiImageResizeBenchmark.zip WIC tools can be downloaded from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wictools To conclude, here are some of the resized thumbnails at 85% fant:

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• How to Customize the Ubuntu Bootloader Screen

  - by Omar Hafiz

  We all know Grub2 is the default bootloader for Ubuntu, but it isn’t the prettiest bootloader ever. Since we also know that Ubuntu is highly customizable, this week we’re going to show you how to beautify your bootloader. To accomplish this, we’re going to utilize an add-on called BURG, which is a Brand-new Universal loadeR based on Grub and is created by Bean. It has much prettier GUI and it supports themes and customizations. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Macs Don’t Make You Creative! So Why Do Artists Really Love Apple? MacX DVD Ripper Pro is Free for How-To Geek Readers (Time Limited!) HTG Explains: What’s a Solid State Drive and What Do I Need to Know? How to Get Amazing Color from Photos in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Lakeside Sunset in the Mountains [Wallpaper] Taskbar Meters Turn Your Taskbar into a System Resource Monitor Create Shortcuts for Your Favorite or Most Used Folders in Ubuntu Create Custom Sized Thumbnail Images with Simple Image Resizer [Cross-Platform] Etch a Circuit Board using a Simple Homemade Mixture Sync Blocker Stops iTunes from Automatically Syncing

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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 2: Preventing Disaster with User Account Control

  - by Ciprian Rusen

  In this second lesson in our How-To Geek School about securing the Windows devices in your network, we will talk about User Account Control (UAC). Users encounter this feature each time they need to install desktop applications in Windows, when some applications need administrator permissions in order to work and when they have to change different system settings and files. UAC was introduced in Windows Vista as part of Microsoft’s “Trustworthy Computing” initiative. Basically, UAC is meant to act as a wedge between you and installing applications or making system changes. When you attempt to do either of these actions, UAC will pop up and interrupt you. You may either have to confirm you know what you’re doing, or even enter an administrator password if you don’t have those rights. Some users find UAC annoying and choose to disable it but this very important security feature of Windows (and we strongly caution against doing that). That’s why in this lesson, we will carefully explain what UAC is and everything it does. As you will see, this feature has an important role in keeping Windows safe from all kinds of security problems. In this lesson you will learn which activities may trigger a UAC prompt asking for permissions and how UAC can be set so that it strikes the best balance between usability and security. You will also learn what kind of information you can find in each UAC prompt. Last but not least, you will learn why you should never turn off this feature of Windows. By the time we’re done today, we think you will have a newly found appreciation for UAC, and will be able to find a happy medium between turning it off completely and letting it annoy you to distraction. What is UAC and How Does it Work? UAC or User Account Control is a security feature that helps prevent unauthorized system changes to your Windows computer or device. These changes can be made by users, applications, and sadly, malware (which is the biggest reason why UAC exists in the first place). When an important system change is initiated, Windows displays a UAC prompt asking for your permission to make the change. If you don’t give your approval, the change is not made. In Windows, you will encounter UAC prompts mostly when working with desktop applications that require administrative permissions. For example, in order to install an application, the installer (generally a setup.exe file) asks Windows for administrative permissions. UAC initiates an elevation prompt like the one shown earlier asking you whether it is okay to elevate permissions or not. If you say “Yes”, the installer starts as administrator and it is able to make the necessary system changes in order to install the application correctly. When the installer is closed, its administrator privileges are gone. If you run it again, the UAC prompt is shown again because your previous approval is not remembered. If you say “No”, the installer is not allowed to run and no system changes are made. If a system change is initiated from a user account that is not an administrator, e.g. the Guest account, the UAC prompt will also ask for the administrator password in order to give the necessary permissions. Without this password, the change won’t be made. Which Activities Trigger a UAC Prompt? There are many types of activities that may trigger a UAC prompt: Running a desktop application as an administrator Making changes to settings and files in the Windows and Program Files folders Installing or removing drivers and desktop applications Installing ActiveX controls Changing settings to Windows features like the Windows Firewall, UAC, Windows Update, Windows Defender, and others Adding, modifying, or removing user accounts Configuring Parental Controls in Windows 7 or Family Safety in Windows 8.x Running the Task Scheduler Restoring backed-up system files Viewing or changing the folders and files of another user account Changing the system date and time You will encounter UAC prompts during some or all of these activities, depending on how UAC is set on your Windows device. If this security feature is turned off, any user account or desktop application can make any of these changes without a prompt asking for permissions. In this scenario, the different forms of malware existing on the Internet will also have a higher chance of infecting and taking control of your system. In Windows 8.x operating systems you will never see a UAC prompt when working with apps from the Windows Store. That’s because these apps, by design, are not allowed to modify any system settings or files. You will encounter UAC prompts only when working with desktop programs. What You Can Learn from a UAC Prompt? When you see a UAC prompt on the screen, take time to read the information displayed so that you get a better understanding of what is going on. Each prompt first tells you the name of the program that wants to make system changes to your device, then you can see the verified publisher of that program. Dodgy software tends not to display this information and instead of a real company name, you will see an entry that says “Unknown”. If you have downloaded that program from a less than trustworthy source, then it might be better to select “No” in the UAC prompt. The prompt also shares the origin of the file that’s trying to make these changes. In most cases the file origin is “Hard drive on this computer”. You can learn more by pressing “Show details”. You will see an additional entry named “Program location” where you can see the physical location on your hard drive, for the file that’s trying to perform system changes. Make your choice based on the trust you have in the program you are trying to run and its publisher. If a less-known file from a suspicious location is requesting a UAC prompt, then you should seriously consider pressing “No”. What’s Different About Each UAC Level? Windows 7 and Windows 8.x have four UAC levels: Always notify – when this level is used, you are notified before desktop applications make changes that require administrator permissions or before you or another user account changes Windows settings like the ones mentioned earlier. When the UAC prompt is shown, the desktop is dimmed and you must choose “Yes” or “No” before you can do anything else. This is the most secure and also the most annoying way to set UAC because it triggers the most UAC prompts. Notify me only when programs/apps try to make changes to my computer (default) – Windows uses this as the default for UAC. When this level is used, you are notified before desktop applications make changes that require administrator permissions. If you are making system changes, UAC doesn’t show any prompts and it automatically gives you the necessary permissions for making the changes you desire. When a UAC prompt is shown, the desktop is dimmed and you must choose “Yes” or “No” before you can do anything else. This level is slightly less secure than the previous one because malicious programs can be created for simulating the keystrokes or mouse moves of a user and change system settings for you. If you have a good security solution in place, this scenario should never occur. Notify me only when programs/apps try to make changes to my computer (do not dim my desktop) – this level is different from the previous in in the fact that, when the UAC prompt is shown, the desktop is not dimmed. This decreases the security of your system because different kinds of desktop applications (including malware) might be able to interfere with the UAC prompt and approve changes that you might not want to be performed. Never notify – this level is the equivalent of turning off UAC. When using it, you have no protection against unauthorized system changes. Any desktop application and any user account can make system changes without your permission. How to Configure UAC If you would like to change the UAC level used by Windows, open the Control Panel, then go to “System and Security” and select “Action Center”. On the column on the left you will see an entry that says “Change User Account Control settings”. The “User Account Control Settings” window is now opened. Change the position of the UAC slider to the level you want applied then press “OK”. Depending on how UAC was initially set, you may receive a UAC prompt requiring you to confirm this change. Why You Should Never Turn Off UAC If you want to keep the security of your system at decent levels, you should never turn off UAC. When you disable it, everything and everyone can make system changes without your consent. This makes it easier for all kinds of malware to infect and take control of your system. It doesn’t matter whether you have a security suite or antivirus installed or third-party antivirus, basic common-sense measures like having UAC turned on make a big difference in keeping your devices safe from harm. We have noticed that some users disable UAC prior to setting up their Windows devices and installing third-party software on them. They keep it disabled while installing all the software they will use and enable it when done installing everything, so that they don’t have to deal with so many UAC prompts. Unfortunately this causes problems with some desktop applications. They may fail to work after you enable UAC. This happens because, when UAC is disabled, the virtualization techniques UAC uses for your applications are inactive. This means that certain user settings and files are installed in a different place and when you turn on UAC, applications stop working because they should be placed elsewhere. Therefore, whatever you do, do not turn off UAC completely! Coming up next … In the next lesson you will learn about Windows Defender, what this tool can do in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x, what’s different about it in these operating systems and how it can be used to increase the security of your system.

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• Was ist EPPM?

  - by britta wolf

  Unternehmen müssen schnell auf kurzfristige Veränderungen am Markt und veränderte Projekt- und Programmvoraussetzungen reagieren und gleichzeitig für klare Strukturen und umsetzbare Informationen in heterogenen Projekt-Teams sorgen. EPPM-Lösungen bieten Organisationen mit vielen Projekten die Möglichkeit einer intelligenten Programm- und Projektverwaltung — von kleinen und einfachen bis hin zu großen und komplexen Vorhaben. ermöglichen fundiertere Entscheidungen im Portfolio-Management und umfassende Einblicke in relevante Informationen in Echtzeit. Es lassen sich Risiken und Chancen von Projekten und Programmen durch Funktionen in den Bereichen Projektmanagement, Zusammenarbeit, Kontrolle zuverlässig bewerten. So können Projekte zeit- und budgetgerecht und in der vorgesehen Qualität und Form durchgeführt werden. Enterprise Project Portfolio Management – Die Synergie von Portfolio Management und Project Management mit Oracle Primavera ! Gerne stellen wir Ihnen auf Mailanfrage diese beiden u.a. Präsentationen zur Verfügung: Enterprise Project Portfolio Management  - die richtigen Projekte auswählen und diese dann richtig durchführen Portfolio and Project Management - Investitionsideen sammeln, Szenarien planen, die richtigen Investitionen auswählen und bis zum Lebenszyklusende steuern Wir empfehlen Ihnen ausserdem diese Links: Deutsche Oracle Primavera Webseite - Schnelleinführung ins Thema, Webcasts, Veranstaltungen, Info zur Online Community, Broschüren/Whitepapers usw. Oracle's Primavera Resource Library - Ausführliche Sammlung von englischen Demos,Web-und Podcasts, Broschüren, Special Reports usw.

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• Code review “on a napkin” — could it be useful?

  - by gaRex

  Preconditions Team uses DVCS IDE supports comments parsing (like TODO and etc.) Tools like CodeCollaborator are expensive for budget Tools like gerrit are too complex for install or not usable Workflow Author publishes somewhere on central repo feature branch Reviewer fetch it and start review In case of some question/issue reviewer create comment with special label, like "BLA". Such label MUST not be in production code -- only on review stage: $somevar = 123; // BLA Why do echo this here? echo $somevar; When reviewer finish post comments -- it just commits with stupid message "comments" and pushes back Author pulls feature branch back and answer comments in similar way or improve code and push it back When "BLA" comments have gone we can think, that review has successfully finished. Author interactively rebases feature branch, stashes it to remove those "comment" commits and now is ready to merge feature to develop or make any action that usualy could be after successful internal review IDE support I know, that custom comment tags are possible in eclipse & netbeans. Sure it also should be in blablaStorm family. So my specific questions are Do you think this methodology is viable? Do you know something similar? What can be improved in it? ps: migrated from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12692695/code-review-on-a-napkin-could-it-be-useful

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• SQL SERVER – Solution – Generating Zero Without using Any Numbers in T-SQL

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server MVP and my friend My friend Madhivanan has asked very interesting question on his blog regarding How to Generate Zero without using Any Numbers in T-SQL. He has demonstrated various methods how one can generate Zero. When I posted note regarding how one he has generated Zero without using number in my blog post for Free Online Training, blog readers have come up with few very interesting answers. I really found them very interesting and here I am listing them with due credit. Special mention to Andery.ca as the answer Andery provided is the one, I myself come up with after very first look and that is why I had left the same as hint in the original article. anil try this select count(cast(null as int)) or any false condition select count(*) where ‘a’=’b’ Varinder Sandhu It seems every currency symbol that SQL Server supports. Return the same value as zero i tried some as select € select ¥ select £ Andrey.ca select count(*)-count(*) Vinay Kumar Another way for generate zero. select Ascii(‘Y’)-Ascii(‘Y’) OR select LEN(”) I like Madhivanan’s answer. and it was awesome. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• l'e-news Arrow ECS-Oracle

  - by mseika

  Si vous ne visualisez pas cet email, cliquez ici Agenda Accompagnement Arrow ECS Cut-off Q4FY12 Oracle SoftwareEn raison du closing Oracle de mai, les commandes Oracle doivent être enregistrées chez Arrow ECS avant : - Le 27 avril 2012 pour les commandes Hardware - Le 20 mai 2012 pour les commandes Software Pour plus d'information, contactez votre commercial dédié Oracle Les WebExperts Oracle by Arrow45 minutes pour monter en compétence grâce à nos formations gratuites en ligne.Prochaines sessions :- La tarification Oracle SW : 2 avril à 11h- Le programme OMM : 4 avril à 11h- ODA : l'appliance Oracle pour les PME-PMI : 16 avril à 11h- Weblogic, les différentes éditions : 2 mai 2012 à 11h Forum Big Data le 5 avrilDécouvrez comment Oracle va accélérer et faciliter vos projets de déploiement Big Data.Pour en savoir plus et vous inscrire Workshop technique Oracle VM3Venez découvrir les nouveautés d'Oracle VM3 et de Linux 6 lors d'un workshop technique, le 26 avril prochain à Colombes.Pour en savoir plus et vous inscrire Bootcamp ODA en régions Arrow vous propose des formations sur la solution Oracle Database Appliance.Les prochaines étapes : Aix, Bordeaux et Nantes.Préinscrivez-vous dès aujourd'hui ! "Bootcamp Implementation" Oracle : obtenez la préférence de vos clients en devenant spécialiste Oracle Nous vous proposons 2 sessions de préparation à ces examens au tarif spécial de 1090€ HT : - Oracle Database 11g Certified Implementation Specialist : du 23 au 27 avril 2012 - Oracle WebLogic Server 11g : Administration avancé, du 21 au 25 mai 2012 Inscrivez-vous vite, le nombre de places est limité.Pour en savoir plus, contactez l'équipe formation L'Exalabs Solution Center d'Arrow ECS Centre de formation unique en France, l'Exalabs Solution Center dispose de l'intégralité de l'infrastructure technique intégrée d'Oracle : Exadata, Exalogic, ODA...Mobile, il permet d'organiser des démonstrations pratiques, des séminaires de formation, des POC* in situ.*Proof Of ConceptFaîtes vos demandes auprès de notre équipe dédiée Ateliers de certification OracleLe passage des tests de certification est l'étape préalable vers la Spécialisation de votre société.Nous vous proposons de vous accompagner lors d'ateliers dédiés.Vous êtes intéressés ? Faites-le nous savoir Formez-vous sur les produits OracleVous souhaitez former vos commerciaux aux nouveaux produits Oracle : ODA, Exadata...Faîtes vos demandes auprès de notre équipe dédiée Lancez votre activité Oracle avec le Starter KitVous souhaitez démarrer votre business Oracle Software ou Oracle Hardware ?Arrow ECS vous propose un programme dédié pour vous aider à développer rapidement les ventes.Demandez votre Starter Kit L'équipe Oracle chez Arrow ECS - Tél : 01 49 97 59 63 - email : [email protected] Pour passer vos commandes, un n° de fax : 01 49 97 49 49

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• C#.NET vs VB.NET, Which language is better?

  Features I cannot say any language good or bad as long as it's compiler can produce MSIL can run under .NET CLR. If someone says C# has more futures, you can understand that those new features are of C# compiler but not .NET, because if C# has a specific future then CLR cannot understand them. So the new features of C# will have to convert to the code understood by CLR eventually. that means the new features are developed for C# compiler basically to facilitates the developer to write their code in better way. so that means no difference in feature list between C# and VB.NET if you think in CLR perspective. Ease of writing Code I feel writing code in C# is easy, because my background is C and C++, Java, syntaxes very are similar. I assume most developers feel the same. Readability But some people say VB.NET code most readable for the members who are from non technical background, because keywords are generally in English rather special charectors. No of Projects in Market I assume 80 percent of market uses C# in their .NET development. for example in my company many projects are there .nET and all are using C#. Productivity & Experience though the feature list is same, generally developers wants to write code in their familiar languages. because it increase the productivity. Hope this helps to choose the language which suits for you. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 10, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 10, 2012Popular ReleasesA C# 4.0 Push Notification Helper Library for WP7.0 & WP7.1: Easy Notification 1.0.0: New Feature - Send Tile, Toast & Raw Notifications to Windows Phone Devices. New Feature - Supports Windows Phone 7.0 & Windows Phone 7.1. New Feature - Validation rules are in-built for Push Notification Messages. New Feature - Strongly typed interfaces. New Feature - Supports synchronous & asynchronous methods to send notifications. New Feature - Supports authenticated notifications using X509 Certificates. New Feature - Supports Callback Registration Requests. New Feature - S...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5.4: Fixed a bug where the server ip was not logged properly in the stats file.Captcha MVC: Captcha Mvc 2.1.2: v 2.1.2: Fixed problem with serialization. Made all classes from a namespace Jetbrains.Annotaions as the internal. Added autocomplete attribute and autocorrect attribute for captcha input element. Minor changes. v 2.1.1: Fixed problem with serialization. Minor changes. v 2.1: Added support for storing captcha in the session or cookie. See the updated example. Updated example. Minor changes. v 2.0.1: Added support for a partial captcha. Now you can easily customize the layout, s...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the module printing function was only visible to administrators Fixed issue where pane level skinning was being assigned to a default container for any content pane Fixed issue when using password aging and FB / Google authentication Fixed issue that was causing the DateEditControl to not load the assigned value Fixed issue that stopped additional profile properties to be displayed in the member directory after modifying the template Fixed er...Online Image Editor: Online Image Editor v1.1: If you have problems with this tool, please email me at amisouvikdas@gmail.com or You can also participate this project to improve this.Advanced DataGridView with Excel-like auto filter: 1.0.0.0: ?????? ??????Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.69: Fix for issue #18766: build task should not build the output if it's newer than all the input files. Fix for Issue #18764: build taks -res switch not working. update build task to concatenate input source and then minify, rather than minify and then concatenate. include resource string-replacement root name in the assumed globals list. Stop replacing new Date().getTime() with +new Date -- the latter is smaller, but turns out it executes up to 45% slower. add CSS support for single-...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.3: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features Attachable Behaviors AwaitableUI extensions Controls Converters Debugging helpers Extension methods Imaging helpers IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE:...DevLib: 69721 binary dll: 69721 binary dllVidCoder: 1.4.4 Beta: Fixed inability to create new presets with "Save As".MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.2: Changelog for 2.3.2 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for generating XBMC XML NFO files for files in the conversion queue (store it along with the source video with source video name.nfo). Right click on the file in queue and select generate XML 2. UI bugifx, start and end trim box locations interchanged 3. Added support for removing commercials from non DVRMS/WTV files (MP4, AVI etc) 4. Now checking for Firewall port status before enabling (might help with some firewall problems) 5. User In...DotNetNuke Boards: 01.00.00: This beta release represents the end of training session 1, based on jQuery and Knockout integration in DotNetNuke 6.2.3. It is designed to allow a single user or multiple users to add/edit/delete cards but no cards can be assigned to anyone at this point. This release is not intended for production use!Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.5.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release supports the Sandcastle October 2012 Release (v2.7.1.0). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release suppor...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.68.0: ClosedXML now resolves formulas! Yes it finally happened. If you call cell.Value and it has a formula the library will try to evaluate the formula and give you the result. For example: var wb = new XLWorkbook(); var ws = wb.AddWorksheet("Sheet1"); ws.Cell("A1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("B1").SetValue(1).CellBelow().SetValue(1); ws.Cell("C1").FormulaA1 = "\"The total value is: \" & SUM(A1:B2)"; var...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 10: New feature - Added Portable build to NuGet package New feature - Added GetValue and TryGetValue with StringComparison to JObject Change - Improved duplicate object reference id error message Fix - Fixed error when comparing empty JObjects Fix - Fixed SecAnnotate warnings Fix - Fixed error when comparing DateTime JValue with a DateTimeOffset JValue Fix - Fixed serializer sometimes not using DateParseHandling setting Fix - Fixed error in JsonWriter.WriteToken when writing a DateT...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.2: Changes: Tested against KeePass 2.20.1 Tested under Ubuntu 12.10 (and KeePass 2.20) Added GenerateAsUtf8 method returning the encrypted passphrase as a UTF8 byte array.JSLint for Visual Studio 2010: 1.4.2: 1.4.2patterns & practices: Prism: Prism for .NET 4.5: This is a release does not include any functionality changes over Prism 4.1 Desktop. These assemblies target .NET 4.5. These assemblies also were compiled against updated dependencies: Unity 3.0 and Common Service Locator (Portable Class Library).Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.8.0: Snoop 2.8.0Announcing Snoop 2.8.0! It's been exactly six months since the last release, and this one has a bunch of goodies in it. In particular, there is now a PowerShell scripting tab, compliments of Bailey Ling. With this tab, the possibilities are limitless. It basically lets you automate/script the application that you are Snooping. Bailey has a couple blog posts (one and two) on his tab already, and I am sure more is to come. Please note that if you do not have PowerShell installed, y....NET Micro Framework: .NET MF 4.3 (Beta): This is the 4.3 Beta version of the .NET Micro Framework. Feature List for v4.3 Support for Visual Studio 2012 (including the Windows Desktop Express version) All v4.2 QFEs features and bug fixes (PWM enhancements, lwIP and network driver reliability improvements, Analog Output, WinUSB and latest GCC support) Improved diagnostic information for deployment Decreased boot time Bug fixes Work Item 1736 - Create link for MFDeploy under start menu Work Item 1504 - Customizing lwIP o...New Projectsadcc2: adccAP.Framework: This a asp.net mvc3 of test web site .EFCodeFirst: Projeto criado para experimentos e estudos com o Entity FrameworkEXPS-RAT: HelloFiskalizacija za developere: Projekt je namijenjen razvojnim inženjerima, programerima, developerima i svima ostalima koji se bave razvojem programskih rješenja za fiskalne blagajne.Galleriffic App for SharePoint 2013: Galleriffic App is an app part for SharePoint 2013 to display a picture gallery with cool JQuery animations and effects. Hack.net: Hack.net is a Roguelike clone similar to NetHack or Roguelike.Inno Setup For .NET Application: This is a simple inno setup for .net developerJava Special Functions Library: Java Special Functions Library implemented as a public class part of my larger mathematical package.LocalFileOpener: The LocalFileOpener plugin opens an intent to help you easily open local files on the device under installed applications.localizr - .NET Collaborative Translation & Localization: Localizr is a platform for collaborative localization and translation of .NET projects.Metro UI CSS: Metro UI CSS a set of styles to create a site with an interface similar to Windows 8 Metro UI. MoskieDotNet: A sandbox for me learn some new technologies.Mouse Automation: Allows a user to automate repetitive clicking within EverQuestMS SQL DB Schema Updater: Simple tool for updating MS SQL database schema based on "ideal" database model.n8design Tools: Tools any Source Code by Stefan Bauer.NasosCS: ???? ?? ??????Pokemonochan: ALright this is a Pokemon MMo bound to come out someday!PotatoSoft: ?????????????!Power Mirrors: Leverage the usefulness of SQL Server mirrors using PowerShell and SMO. Create mirrors from scratch, assign witnesses and test failovers, all from PowerShell! Project13251010: sdfdReal Time Data Bus: A collection of real time data bus implementations.Ricky Tailor's ASP.NET Web 2.0 Project: 7COM0203 Web Scripting And Content Creation Task 1. SampleTFS2: Sample Projectslotcarduino - An Arduino based slotcar timing project: Slotcar timing project based on Arduino Uno/Mega 2560. Standalone system with serial enabled graphic display.System.Data.Entity.Repository: Entity framework code first framework wrapper with support for generic repository pattern, N-Tier application and Transaction Management for rapid developmentTest Marron: This project is a test to explore codeplexTmib Video Downloader: A small youtube video downloader. Created in C#Web Scripting & Content Creation: Fhame Rashid MSc Software Engineering Module Log: Web-Scripting and Content Creationwebbase: webbaseWebScriptingandContentCreation: This project is for the MSc module Web Scripting and Content Creation.Zuordnung: Zuordnung

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• Storage Forum at Oracle OpenWorld

  - by kgee

  For anyone attending Oracle OpenWorld and involved in Storage, join us at the Storage Forum & Reception. This special engagement offers you the ability to meet Oracle’s top storage executives, architects and fellow storage colleagues. Features include interactive sessions and round-table discussions on Oracle's storage strategy, product direction, and real-world customer implementations. It’s your chance to ask questions and learn first-hand about Oracle's response to top trends and what keeps storage managers up at night, including how to contain storage costs, improve performance, and ensure seamless integration with Oracle software environments. Featured Speakers: Mike Workman, SVP of Pillar Axiom Storage Group; Phil Bullinger, SVP of Sun ZFS Storage Group; and Jim Cates, VP of Tape Systems Storage Group Added Bonus: The Storage Forum will be followed by an exclusive Wine and Cocktail Reception where you can... Meet and network with peers, and other storage professionals Interact with Oracle’s experts in a fun and relaxed setting Wind down and prepare for the Oracle Customer Appreciation Event featuring Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon Date & Times:Wednesday, October 3, 20123:30 – 5:00 p.m. Forum 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. Reception Disclaimer: Space is limited, so register at http://bit.ly/PULcyR as soon as possible! If you want any more information, feel free to email [email protected]

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