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• Fight for your rights as a video gamer.

  - by Chris Williams

  Soon, the U.S. Supreme Court may decide whether to hear a case that could have a lasting impact on computer and video games. The case before the Court involves a law passed by the state of California attempting to criminalize the sale of certain computer and video games. Two previous courts rejected the California law as unconstitutional, but soon the Supreme Court could have the final say. Whatever the Court's ruling, we must be prepared to continue defending our rights now and in the future. To do so, we need a large, powerful movement of gamers to speak with one voice and show that we won't sit back while lawmakers try to score political points by scapegoating video games and treating them differently than books, movies, and music. If the Court decides to hear the case, we're going to need thousands of activists like you who can help defend computer and video games by writing letters to editors, calling into talk radio stations, and educating Americans about our passion for and appreciation of computer and video games. You can help build this movement right now by inviting all your friends and fellow gamers to join the Video Game Voters Network. Use our simple tool to send an email to everyone you know asking them to stand up for gaming rights: http://videogamevoters.org/movement You can also help spread the word through Facebook and Twitter, or you can simply forward this email to everyone you know and ask them to sign up at videogamevoters.org. Time after time, courts continue to reject politicians' efforts to restrict the sale of computer and video games. But that doesn't mean the politicians will stop trying anytime soon -- in fact, it means they're likely to ramp up their efforts even more. To stop them, we must make it clear that gamers will continue to stand up for free speech -- and that the numbers are on our side. Help make sure we're ready and able to keep fighting for our gaming rights. Spread the word about the Video Game Voters Network right now: http://videogamevoters.org/movement Thank you. -- Video Game Voters Network

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• Get to Know a Candidate (6 of 25): Jill Stein&ndash;Green Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Stein is a physician with degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.  She serves on the boards of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and MassVoters for Fair Elections, and has been active with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities Jill Stein advocates a "Green New Deal" in which renewable energy jobs would be created to address climate change and environmental issues with the objective of employing "every American willing and able to work". Citing the research of Dr. Phillip Harvey, Professor of Law & Economics at Rutgers University, as evidence of the successful economic effects of the 1930s' New Deal projects, Stein would fund the plan with a 30% reduction in the U.S. military budget, returning US troops home, and increasing taxes on areas such as capital gains, offshore tax havens and multimillion dollar real estate. Stein plans on impacting what she sees as a growing convergence of environmental crises in water, soil, fisheries and forests, through the creation of sustainable infrastructure based in clean renewable energy generation and sustainable communities principles such as increasing intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, creating 'complete streets' that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic and regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture The Green Party of the United States was founded in 1991 as a voluntary association of state green parties. With its founding, the Green Party of the United States became the primary national Green organization in the United States, eclipsing the Greens/Green Party USA, which emphasized non-electoral movement building. The Green Party of the United States of America emphasizes environmentalism, non-hierarchical participatory democracy, social justice, respect for diversity, peace and nonviolence. Their "Ten Key Values," which are described as non-authoritative guiding principles, are as follows: Grassroots democracy Social justice and equal opportunity Ecological wisdom Nonviolence Decentralization Community-based economics Feminism and gender equality Respect for diversity Personal and global responsibility Future focus and sustainability The Green Party does not accept donations from corporations. Thus, the party's platforms and rhetoric critique any corporate influence and control over government, media, and American society at large. Stein has access to 403 electoral votes and is a write-in candidate in GA, IN, and MS Learn more about Jill Stein and Green Party on Wikipedia.

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• What can you do to decrease the number of live issues with applications?

  - by User Smith

  First off I have seen this post which is slightly similar to my question. : What can you do to decrease the number of deployment bugs of a live website? Let me layout the situation for you. The team of programmers that I belong to have metrics associated with our code. Over the last several months our errors in our live system have increased by a large amount. We require that our updates to applications be tested by at least one other programmer prior to going live. I personally am completely against this as I think that applications should be tested by end users as end users are much better testers than programmers, I am not against programmers testing, obviously programmers need to test code, but they are most of the times too close to the code. The reason I specify that I think end users should test in our scenario is due to the fact that we don't have business analysts, we just have programmers. I come from a background where BAs took care of all the testing once programmers checked off it was ready to go live. We do have a staging environment in place that is a clone of the live environment that we use to ensure that we don't have issues between development and live environments this does catch some bugs. We don't do end user testing really at all, I should say we don't really have anyone testing our code except programmers, which I think gets us into this mess (Ideally, we would have BAs or QA or professional testers test). We don't have a QA team or anything of that nature. We don't have test cases for our projects that are fully laid out. Ok, I am just a peon programmer at the bottom of the rung, but I am probably more tired of these issues than the managers complaining about them. So, I don't have the ability to tell them you are doing it all wrong.....I have tried gentle pushes in the correct direction. Any advice or suggestions on how to alleviate this issue is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for November 20, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.2.0.0.0 Released | Anthony Shorten Principal Product Manager Anthony Shorten shares an overview of the changes implemented in the new release. Towards Ultra-Reusability for ADF - Adaptive Bindings | Duncan Mills "The task flow mechanism embodies one of the key value propositions of the ADF Framework," says Duncan Mills. "However, what if we could do more? How could we make task flows even more re-usable than they are today?" As you might expect, Duncan has answers for those questions. Oracle BPM Process Accelerators and process excellence | Andrew Richards "Process Accelerators are ready-to-deploy solutions based on best practices to simplify process management requirements," says Capgemini's Andrew Richards. "They are considered to be 'product grade,' meaning they have been designed; engineered, documented and tested by Oracle themselves to a level that they can be deployed as-is for a solution to a problem or extended as appropriate for a particular scenario." Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS 5 introduces BPEL with conditional correlation for aggregation scenarios | Lucas Jellema An extensive, detailed technical post from Oracle ACE Director Lucas Jellema. Check Box Support in ADF Tree Table Different Levels | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis updates last year's "ADF Tree - How to Autoselect/Deselect Checkbox" post with new information. As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living Great New York Times article about mobile app develoment also touches on other significant IT issues. Thought for the Day "Building large applications is still really difficult. Making them serve an organisation well for many years is almost impossible." — Malcolm P. Atkinson Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• Client-side code and UPK

  - by [email protected]

  There is a long running discussion in UPK Development regarding the use of any client side code as part of the end-user playback. By this I mean anything which requires an install including ActiveX controls, browser helper objects, stand-alone applications, things that run in the task bar, etc. We all have grown to love zero-footprint applications over the past ten years, but there are some things which are not technically feasible using HTML alone. One example of this is the functionality provided by our SmartHelp in-application support component. This allows the user to launch context sensitive help without making modifications to the target application. (If you are unfamiliar with SmartHelp, more information can be found in the "In-Application Support Guide" in the UPK manual directory) We always try to implement everything we can using only HTML but there are many features which have been requested over the years that would require some client-side code in order to work. When these come up for discussion, there is always a spirited debate about the acceptability of a client side solution. I thought it would be interesting to ask for feedback from a wider audience. What do you think about client-side components? Would your organization consider them? Do you already deploy SmartHelp? Is there a large hurdle to clear for these to be worth the deployment costs? Let us know. Mark Overton, VP Development for UPK

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• When does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

  - by Petr

  For the sake of argument here's a sample function that prints contents of a given file line-by-line. Version 1: void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); cout << line << endl; } } I know it is recommended that functions do one thing at one level of abstraction. To me, though code above does pretty much one thing and is fairly atomic. Some books (such as Robert C. Martin's Clean Code) seem to suggest breaking the above code into separate functions. Version 2: void printLine(const string & line) { cout << line << endl; } void printLines(fstream & file) { string line; while (file.good()) { getline(file, line); printLine(line); } } void printFile(const string & filePath) { fstream file(filePath, ios::in); printLines(file); } I understand what they want to achieve (open file / read lines / print line), but isn't it a bit of overkill? The original version is simple and in some sense already does one thing - prints a file. The second version will lead to a large number of really small functions which may be far less legible than the first version. Wouldn't it be, in this case, better to have the code at one place? At which point does the "Do One Thing" paradigm become harmful?

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• Creating an expandable, cross-platform compatible program "core".

  - by Thomas Clayson

  Hi there. Basically the brief is relatively simple. We need to create a program core. An engine that will power all sorts of programs with a large number of distinct potential applications and deployments. The core will be an analytics and algorithmic processor which will essentially take user-specific input and output scenarios based on the information it gets, whilst recording this information for reporting. It needs to be cross platform compatible. Something that can have platform specific layers put on top which can interface with the core. It also needs to be able to be expandable, for instance, modular with developers being able to write "add-ons" or "extensions" which can alter the function of the end program and can use the core to its full extent. (For instance, a good example of what I'm looking to create is a browser. It has its main core, the web-kit engine, for instance, and then on top of this is has a platform-specific GUI and can also have add-ons and extensions which can change the behavior of the program.) Our problem is that the extensions need to interface directly with the main core and expand/alter that functionality rather than the platform specific "layer". So, given that I have no experience in this whatsoever (I have a PHP background and recently objective-c), where should I start, and is there any knowledge/wisdom you can impart on me please? Thanks for all the help and advice you can give me. :) If you need any more explanation just ask. At the moment its in the very early stages of development, so we're just researching all possible routes of development. Thanks a lot

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• Data Pump: Consistent Export?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Ouch ... I have to admit as I did say in several workshops in the past weeks that a data pump export with expdp is per se consistent. Well ... I thought it is ... but it's not. Thanks to a customer who is doing a large unicode migration at the moment. We were discussing parameters in the expdp's par file. And I did ask my colleagues after doing some research on MOS. And here are the results of my "research": MOS Note 377218.1 has a nice example showing a data pump export of a partitioned table with DELETEs on that table as inconsistent Background:Back in the old 9i days when Data Pump was designed flashback technology wasn't as popular and well known as today - and UNDO usage was the major concern as a consistent per default export would have heavily relied on UNDO. That's why - similar to good ol' exp - the export won't operate per default in consistency mode To get a consistent data pump export with expdp you'll have to set: FLASHBACK_TIME=SYSTIMESTAMPin your parameter file. Then it will be consistent according to the timestamp when the process has been started. You could use FLASHBACK_SCN instead and determine the SCN beforehand if you'd like to be exact. So sorry if I had proclaimed a feature which unfortunately is not there by default - Mike

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• Silverlight Cream Top Posted Authors July to December, 2010

  - by Dave Campbell

  It's past the first of January, and it's now time to recognize devs that have a large number of posts in Silverlight Cream. Ground Rules I pick what posts are on the blog Only posts that go in the database are included The author has to appear in SC at least 4 of the 6 months considered I averaged the monthly posts and am only showing Authors with an average greater than 1. Here are the Top Posted Authors at Silverlight Cream for July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010: It is my intention to post a new list sometime shortly after the 1st of every month to recognize the top posted in the previous 6 months, so next up is January 1! Some other metrics for Silverlight Cream: At the time of this posting there are 7304 articles aggregated and searchable by partial Author, partial Title, keywords (in the synopsis), or partial URL. There are also 118 tags by which the articles can be searched. This is an increase of 317 posts over last month. At the time of this posting there are 783 articles tagged wp7dev. This is an increase of 119 posts over last month, or over a third of the posts added. Stay in the 'Light!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 14, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 14, 2013Popular ReleasesBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.1: 2013.06.13 Ver5.9.1 (1) Web??????SSI?#include???、CGI?????????????????????? (2) ???????????????????????????BrightstarDB: BrightstarDB 1.3.40613: This is the first "official" BrightstarDB release under the MIT open source license. The code base has been reworked to replace / remove the use of third-party closed-source tools and has been updated to use a patched version of dotNetRDF 1.0 that includes the most recent updates for SPARQL 1.1 and Turtle. We have also extended the core RDF API to support targeting a specific graph with an update or query operation and made a change to the core profiling code to disable it by default, leadin...Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2.1 RTM: - Dynamic text localization - A new application wide message busPokemon Battle Online: ETV: ETV???2012?12??????，????，???????$/PBO/branches/PrivateBeta??。 ???????bug???????。 ???? Server??????，?????。 ?????????，?????????????，?????????。 ????????，????，?????????，???????????（??）??。 ???? ????????????。 ???????。 ???PP????，????????????????????PP????，??3。 ?????????????，??????????。 ???????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??? ??? ??? ???????? ???? ???? ???????????????、???????????，??“???????”??。 ???bug ???Web Pages CMS: 0.5.0.5: Added empty media directoryModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.4: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. Related downloads NuGet ModernUI for WPF is also available as NuGet package in the NuGet gallery, id: ModernUI.WPF Download Modern UI for WPF Templates A Visual Studio 2012 extension containing a collection of project and item templates for Modern UI for WPF. The extension includes the ModernUI.WPF NuGet package. DownloadToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.11): XrmToolbox improvement Add exception handling when loading plugins Updated information panel for displaying two lines of text Tools improvementMetadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10)New tool Web Resources Manager (v1.2013.6.11)Retrieve list of unused web resources Retrieve web resources from a solution All tools listAccess Checker (v1.2013.2.5) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.1.17) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.3.4) Iconator (v1.2013.1.17) Metadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10) Privilege...Document.Editor: 2013.23: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.23: New Insert Emoticon support Improved Format support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.4 for VS2012: V2.4 - Release Date 6/10/2013 Items addressed in this 2.4 release Updated MSBuild Community Tasks reference to 1.4.0.61 Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesLayered Architecture Sample for .NET: Leave Sample - June 2013 (for .NET 4.5): Thank You for downloading Layered Architecture Sample. Please read the accompanying README.txt file for setup and installation instructions. This is the first set of a series of revised samples that will be released to illustrate the layered architecture design pattern. This version is only supported on Visual Studio 2012. This samples illustrates the use of ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET Model Binding, Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Microsoft Ente...Papercut: Papercut 2013-6-10: Feature: Shows From, To, Date and Subject of Email. Feature: Async UI and loading spinner. Enhancement: Improved speed when loading large attachments. Enhancement: Decoupled SMTP server into secondary assembly. Enhancement: Upgraded to .NET v4. Fix: Messages lost when received very fast. Fix: Email encoding issues on display/Automatically detect message Encoding Installation Note:Installation is copy and paste. Incoming messages are written to the start-up directory of Papercut. If you do n...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1.BETA Unit test Generator Documentation: Welcome to the Unit Test Generator Once you’ve moved to Visual Studio 2012, what’s a dev to do without the Create Unit Tests feature? Based on the high demand on User Voice for this feature to be restored, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers have introduced the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension. The extension adds the “create unit test” feature back, with a focus on automating project creation, adding references and generating stubs, extensibility, and targeting of multiple test framewor...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.8 - Release Candidate - 32Bit: Download the release notes here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/MapWindow4Dev/Bin/MapWindowNotes.rtfLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.VR Player: VR Player 0.3.1 ALPHA: New plugin system with individual folders TrackIR support Maya and 3ds max formats support Dual screen support Mono layouts (left and right) Cylinder height parameter Barel effect factor parameter Razer hydra filter parameter VRPN bug fixes UI improvements Performances improvements Stabilization and logging with Log4Net New default values base on users feedback CTRL key to open menuSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 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). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.13: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageJumbo.com" links FIXED: Ripping of Threads with multiple pagesNew ProjectsControl de stock: sistema para control de stockEmails Outlook Mac Recovery Software That Is Provenly Better Than Others: Recover OLM Emails with Outlook Mac Recovery Software that restore Mac OLM files as well as Convert OLM files in EML and DBX file format. Horarios e Disciplinas: O projeto de Grade Horária do CEPE é desenvolvido por um analista programador experiente e dois estagiários ciosos de conhecimento nas linguagens C#, Razor, Entity Framework, AJAX.Hyper-v VHost and VM Inventory Reports: Get a detailed inventory/report from your VHost and it's VMs. Powershell script that dumps the report as a test file.jean0614changbranch: ddjean0614jabbrchangebranch: dLandscape: Planned Maintenance System, is a system being used for any fleet of assets where a regular maintenance is required.MongoCamp: MongoCamp for MongoDBNo-nonsense Flickr Uploader: Simple, easy to-use, stable, flickr uploader for large batch uploads.Outlook PST Converter to Export, Convert & Save PST in Other Formats: Outlook PST Converter to export Outlook emails in other formats from PST format which will be a better option to change format of Outlook PST file to PDF, MSG.Penrose Tiles: A simple windows forms based penrose tile generator.Ranch Master - an Object Oriented Progamming 2013 College Project: Raise the sheep by maintaining the Hunger & Thirst level low, keep the condition to 'Healthy', collect wools produced, trade the wools into points.SH Demo App: Summary!Stock Right: Initial releaseTesting Project: testingtestjabbr0613: testUnits of Measure: Simple solution to cope with units of measure in C# applications. You can develop your own unit system, be it SI-based or anything else that suits your needs.User Friendly Registration Plugin for DotNetNuke: This plugin makes DotNetNuke registration process more user friendly. Main idea is to inform user about possible mistakes in the registration form immediately,

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• Revolutionizing Digital Commerce

  - by bwalstra

  The confluence of the Internet, the pace of change in technology, and the demands of the value-conscious consumer are accelerating the evolution of the global digital marketplace at an unprecedented rate. Success in the new digital economy has become inextricably linked with the agility to launch innovative products, services, and new business models efficiently with minimal risk. A major obstacle to agility, and by extension to success in digital commerce, is the fact that by and large information technology (IT) infrastructure is tightly coupled with particular business models. Enterprises, through well intentioned but misconstrued costsaving belief, continue to customize existing infrastructure and create now silos to support new business models. In reality, this approach results in rigid, inflexible business processes and exposes the enterprise to unnecessary risks, higher opportunity costs, and lower profit margins. Oracle, a leading supplier of business solutions to the enterprise, is enabling the business strategies necessary to succeed in the digital economy by offering a modern, open, modular, and functionally comprehensive revenue management solution that decouples IT infrastructure from business models. Enterprises using the Oracle solution are able to focus on core competencies and innovate unimpeded, assuring that business and IT systems will seamlessly adapt to changing conditions of the digital economy. Revolutionizing Digital Commerce:  An Oracle Revenue Management Solution

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• What I saw at TechEd North America 2014

  - by Brian Schroer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brians/archive/2014/05/19/teched-north-america-2014.aspxI was thrilled to be able to attend TechEd North America 2014 in Houston last week. I got to go to Orlando in 2008, and since then I’ve had to settle for watching the sessions online (which ain’t bad – They’re all available on Channel 9 for streaming or downloading. Here are links to the Developer Track sessions and to the sessions from all tracks.) The sessions I attended (with my favorites bolded) were: Shiny new stuff The Microsoft Application Platform for Developers: Create Applications That Span Devices and Services INTRODUCING: The Future of .NET on the Server DEEP DIVE: The Future of .NET on the Server ASP.NET: Building Web Application Using ASP.NET and Visual Studio The Next Generation of .NET for Building Applications The Future of Visual Basic and C# Stuff you can use now Building Rich Apps with AngularJS on ASP.NET Get the Most Out of Your Code Maps SignalR: Building Real-Time Applications with ASP.NET SignalR Performance Optimize Your ASP.NET Web App Modern Web and Visual Studio Visual Studio Power User: Tips and Tricks Debugging Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2013 In a world where the whole company uses TFS… Using Functional, Exploratory and Acceptance Testing to Release with Confidence A Practical View of Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 From Vanity to Value, Metrics That Matter: Improving Lean and Agile, Kanban, and Scrum Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That As usual, there were some time slots with nothing of interest and others with 5 things I wanted to see at the same time. Here are the sessions I’m still planning to watch… Getting Started with TypeScript Building a Large Scale JavaScript Application in TypeScript Modern Application Lifecycle Management Why a Hacker Can Own Your Web Servers in a Day! Async Best Practices for C# and Visual Basic Building Multi-Device Apps with the New Visual Studio Tooling for Apache Cordova Applying S.O.L.I.D. Principles in .NET/C# Native Mobile Application Development for iOS, Android, and Windows in C# and Visual Studio Using Xamarin Latest Innovations in Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications Zero to Hero: Untested to Tested with Microsoft Fakes Using Visual Studio Cool and Elegant ASP.NET Web Forms with HTML 5 for the Modern Web The Present and Future of .NET in a World of Devices and Services

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• Rendering a big game universe - bitmaps or vector graphics?

  - by user1641923

  I am new to an Android development, though I have much experience with Java, C++, PHP programming and a bit experience with vector graphics too (basic 3d Studio Max, Flash, etc). I am starting to work on an Android game. It is going to be a 2D space shooter/RPG, and I am not going to use any game engines and any 3D party libs. I really want to create a very large game universe, or even pseudo-infinite (without visible borders, as if it were a 2D projection of a sphere). It should include 10-12 clusters of 7-8 planets/other space objects and random amount of single asteroids/comets, which player can interact with and also not interactive background. I am looking for a least complicated aproach to create such a universe. My current ideas are: Simply create bitmaps with space scenery background so that they can be tiled seamlessly repeated and construct my 2D universe of this tiles, then place interactive objects (planets, other spaceships) on it. Using vector graphics. I would have a solid color background, some random background objects and gradients here and there. My problems here: Lack of knowledge of how well vector graphics is integrated in Android. Performance? Memory usage? Does Android manage big bitmaps well? Do all of the bitmaps have to be in memory during all game process? I am interested in technical details regarding each of the ideas and a suggestion, which I should go with.

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• Avoiding Object Oriented Pitfalls, Migrating from C, What Worked for You?

  - by Stephen

  I've been programming in procedural languages for quite some time now, and my first reaction to a problem is to start breaking it down into tasks to perform rather than to consider the different entities (objects) that exist and their relationships. I have had a university course in OOP, and understand the fundamentals of encapsulation, data abstraction, polymorphism, modularity and inheritance. I read Learning to think in the Object Oriented Way and Learning object oriented thinking, and will be looking at some of the books pointed to in those answers. I think that several of my medium to large sized projects will benefit from effective use of OOP but as a novice I would like to avoid time consuming, common errors. Based on your experiences, what are these pitfalls and what are reasonable ways around them? If you could explain why they are pitfalls, and how your suggestion is effective in addressing the issue it'd be appreciated. I'm thinking along the lines of something like "Is it common to have a fair number of observer and modifier methods and use private variables or are there techniques for consolidating/reducing them?" I'm not worried about using C++ as a pure OO language, if there are good reasons to mix methods. (Reminiscent of the reasons to use GOTOs, albeit sparingly.) Thank you!

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• Do you know the minimum builds to create on any branch?

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  You should always have three builds on your team project. These should be setup and tested using an empty solution before you write any code at all. Figure: Three builds named in the format [TeamProject].[AreaPath]_[Branch].[Gate|CI|Nightly] for every branch.   These builds should use the same XAML build workflow; however you may set them up to run a different set of tests depending on the time it takes to run a full build. Gate – Only needs to run the smallest set of tests, but should run most if not all of the Unit Test. This is run before developers are allowed to check-in CI – This should run all Unit Tests and all of the automated UI tests. It is run after a developer check-in. Nightly – The Nightly build should run all of the Unit Tests, all of the Automated UI tests and all of the Load and Performance tests. The nightly build is time consuming and will run but once a night. Packaging of your Product for testing the next day may be done at this stage as well. Figure: You can control what tests are run and what data is collected while they are running. Note: We do not run all the tests every time because of the time consuming nature of running some tests, but ALL tests should be run overnight. Note: If you had a really large project with thousands of tests including long running Load tests you may need to add a Weekly build to the mix.     Figure: Bad example, you can’t tell what these builds do if they are in a larger list   Figure: Good example, you know exactly what project, branch and type of build these are for.   Technorati Tags: SSW,SSW Rules,VS2010,VS ALM,Team Build 2010,Team Build

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• Procedural world generation oriented on gameplay features

  - by Richard Fabian

  In large procedural landscape games, the land seems dull, but that's probably because the real world is largely dull, with only limited places where the scenery is dramatic or tactical. Looking at world generation from this point of view, a landscape generator for a game (that is, not for the sake of scenery, but for the sake of gameplay) needs to not follow the rules of landscaping, but instead some rules married to the expectations of the gamer. For example, there could be a choke point / route generator that creates hills ravines, rivers and mountains between cities, rather than the natural way cities arise, scattered on the land based on resources or conditions generated by the mountains and rainfall patterns. Is there any existing work being done like this? Start with cities or population centres and then add in terrain afterwards? The reason I'm asking is that I'd previously pondered taking existing maps from fantasy fiction (my own and others), putting the information into the system as a base point, and then generating a good world to play in from it. This seems covered by existing technology, that is, where the designer puts in all the necessary information such as the city populations, resources, biomes, road networks and rivers, then allows the PCG fill in the gaps. But now I'm wondering if it may be possible to have a content generator generate also the overall design. Generate the cities and population centres, balancing them so that there is a natural seeming need of commerce, then generate the positions and connectivity, then from the type of city produce the list of necessary resources that must be nearby, and only then, maybe given some rules on how to make the journey between cities both believable and interesting, generate the final content including the roads, the choke points, the bridges and tunnels, ferries and the terrain including the biomes and coastline necessary. If this has been done before, I'd like to know, and would like to know what went wrong, and what went right.

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• GPL - what is distribution?

  - by Martin Beckett

  An interesting point came up on another thread about alleged misappropriation of a GPL project. In this case the enterprise software was used by some large companies who essentially took the code, changed the name, removed the GPL notices and used the result. The point was - if the company did this and only used the software internally then there isn't any distribution and that's perfectly legal under GPL. Modifications by their own employees for internal use would also be allowed. So At what point does it become a distribution? Presumably if they brought in outside contractors under 'work for hire' their modifications would also be internal and so not a distribution. If they hired an external software outfit to do modifications and those changes were only used internally by the company - would those changes be distributed? Does the GPL apply to the client or to the external developers? If the company then give the result to another department, another business unit, another company? What if the other company is a wholly owned subsidiary? ps. yes I know the answer is ask a lawyer. But all the discussion I have seen over GPL2/GPL3 distribution has been about webservices - not about internal use.

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• Many small scripts, one repository or multiple?

  - by The Jug

  A co-worker and myself have run into an issue that we have multiple opinions on. Currently we have a git repository that we are keeping all of our cronjobs in. There are about 20 crons and they are not really related except for the fact that they are all small python scripts and essential for some activity. We are using a fabric.py file to deploy and a requirements.txt file to manage requirements for all of the scripts. Our issue is basically, do we keep all of these scripts in one git repository or should we be separating them out into their own repositories? By keeping them in one repository it is easier to deploy them onto one server. We can use just one cron file for all the scripts. However this feels wrong, as the 20 cronjobs are not logically related. Additionally, when using one requirements.txt file for all the scripts, it's hard to figure out what the dependencies are for a particular script and they all have to use the same versions of packages. We could separate all of the scripts out into their own repositories but this creates 20 different repositories that need to be remembered and dealt with. Most of these scripts are not very large and that solution seems to be overkill. A related question is, do we use one big crontab file for all cronjobs, or a separate file for each? If each has their own, how does one crontab's installation avoid overwriting the other 19? This also seems like a pain as there would then by 20 different cron files to keep track of. In short, our main question and issue is do we keep them all closely bundled as one repository or do we separate them out into their own repository with their own requirements.txt and fabfile.py? We feel like we're also probably looking over some really simple solution. Is there an easier way to deal with this issue?

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• Graduate expectations versus reality

  - by Bobby Tables

  When choosing what we want to study, and do with our careers and lives, we all have some expectations of what it is going to be like. Now that I've been in the industry for almost a decade, I've been reflecting a bit on what I thought (back when I was studying Computer Science) programming working life was going to be like, and how it's actually turning out to be. My two biggest shocks (or should I say, broken expectations) by far are the sheer amount of maintenance work involved in software, and the overall lack of professionalism: Maintenance: At uni, we were all told that the majority of software work is maintenance of existing systems. So I knew to expect this in the abstract. But I never imagined exactly how overwhelming this would turn out to be. Perhaps it's something I mentally glazed over, and hoped I'd be building cool new stuff from scratch a lot more. But it really is the case that most jobs are overwhelmingly maintenance, bug fixing, and support oriented. Lack of professionalism: At uni, I always had the impression that commercial software work is very process-oriented and stringently engineered. I had images of ISO processes, reams of technical documentation, every feature and bug being strictly documented, and a generally professional environment. It came as a huge shock to realise that most software companies operate no differently to a team of students working on a large semester-long project. And I've worked in both the small agile hack shop, and the medium sized corporate enterprise. While I wouldn't say that it's always been outright "unprofessional", it definitely feels like the software industry (on the whole) is far from the strong engineering discipline that I expected it to be. Has anyone else had similar experiences to this? What are the ways in which your expectations of what our profession would be like were different to the reality?

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• Static "LoD" hack opinions

  - by David Lively

  I've been playing with implementing dynamic level of detail for rendering a very large mesh in XNA. It occurred to me that (duh) the whole point of this is to generate small triangles close to the camera, and larger ones far away. Given that, rather than constantly modifying or swapping index buffers based on a feature's rendered size or distance from the camera, it would be a lot easier (and potentially quite a bit faster), to render a single "fan" or flat wedge/frustum-shaped planar mesh that is tessellated into small triangles close to the near or small end of the frustum and larger ones at the far end, sort of like this (overhead view) (Pardon the gap in the middle - I drew one side and mirrored it) The triangle sizes are chosen so that all are approximately the same size when projected. Then, that mesh would be transformed to track the camera so that the Z axis (center vertical in this image) is always aligned with the view direction projected into the XZ plane. The vertex shader would then read terrain heights from a height texture and adjust the Y coordinate of the mesh to match a height field that defines the terrain. This eliminates the need for culling (since the mesh is generated to match the viewport dimensions) and the need to modify the index and/or vertex buffers when drawing the terrain. Obviously this doesn't address terrain with overhangs, etc, but that could be handled to a certain extent by including a second mesh that defines a sort of "ceiling" via a different texture. The other LoD schemes I've seen aren't particularly difficult to implement and, in some cases, are a lot more flexible, but this seemed like a decent quick-and-dirty way to handle height map-based terrain without getting into geometry manipulation. Has anyone tried this? Opinions?

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• Data migration - dangerous or essential?

  - by MRalwasser

  The software development department of my company is facing with the problem that data migrations are considered as potentially dangerous, especially for my managers. The background is that our customers are using a large amount of data with poor quality. The reasons for this is only partially related to our software quality, but rather to the history of the data: Most of them have been migrated from predecessor systems, some bugs caused (mostly business) inconsistencies in the data records or misentries by accident on the customer's side (which our software allowed by error). The most important counter-arguments from my managers are that faulty data may turn into even worse data, the data troubles may awake some managers at the customer and some processes on the customer's side may not work anymore because their processes somewhat adapted to our system. Personally, I consider data migrations as an integral part of the software development and that data migration can been seen to data what refactoring is to code. I think that data migration is an essential for creating software that evolves. Without it, we would have to create painful software which somewhat works around a bad data structure. I am asking you: What are your thoughts to data migration, especially for the real life cases and not only from a developer's perspecticve? Do you have any arguments against my managers opinions? How does your company deal with data migrations and the difficulties caused by them? Any other interesting thoughts which belongs to this topics?

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• ODI 11g – Faster Files

  - by David Allan

  Deep in the trenches of ODI development I raised my head above the parapet to read a few odds and ends and then think why don’t they know this? Such as this article here – in the past customers (see forum) were told to use a staging route which has a big overhead for large files. This KM is an example of the great extensibility capabilities of ODI, its quite simple, just a new KM that; improves the out of the box experience – just build the mapping and the appropriate KM is used improves out of the box performance for file to file data movement. This improvement for out of the box handling for File to File data integration cases (from the 11.1.1.5.2 companion CD and on) dramatically speeds up the file integration handling. In the past I had seem some consultants write perl versions of the file to file integration case, now Oracle ships this KM to fill the gap. You can find the documentation for the IKM here. The KM uses pure java to perform the integration, using java.io classes to read and write the file in a pipe – it uses java threading in order to super-charge the file processing, and can process several source files at once when the datastore's resource name contains a wildcard. This is a big step for regular file processing on the way to super-charging big data files using Hadoop – the KM works with the lightweight agent and regular filesystems. So in my design below transforming a bunch of files, by default the IKM File to File (Java) knowledge module was assigned. I pointed the KM at my JDK (since the KM generates and compiles java), and I also increased the thread count to 2, to take advantage of my 2 processors. For my illustration I transformed (can also filter if desired) and moved about 1.3Gb with 2 threads in 140 seconds (with a single thread it took 220 seconds) - by no means was this on any super computer by the way. The great thing here is that it worked well out of the box from the design to the execution without any funky configuration, plus, and a big plus it was much faster than before, So if you are doing any file to file transformations, check it out!

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• Am I misunderstanding chown and chmod?

  - by isomorphismes

  I want to either extend the size of my guest partition or figure out how to copy stuff from the guest partition to my normal /home directory. (Because of some other problems I can only run Xorg as guest, but I can log into virtual console as myself or root.) Here's the motivation: I want to torrent a large file. It's larger than my guest filesystem. But I have plenty of space on my real drive, I just can't log into it graphically. So I tried to set up a "pipe" to get the file out of the tmpfs. I did: su -u myself #catch mkdir ~/receiver_dir sudo su cd /tmp/guest-lkj567UIO/ #throw ln -s mario_pipe /home/myself/receiver_dir chown -R guest-lkj567UIO /home/myself/receiver_dir chown -R guest-lkj567UIO /tmp/guest-lkj567UIO/mario_pipe chmod -R a+rw /home/myself/receiver_dir chmod -R a+rw /tmp/guest-lkj567UIO/mario_pipe su -u guest-lkj567UIO cd /tmp/guest-lkj567UIO cd mario_pipe touch something #success! However, when I try to torrent to /tmp/guest-lkj567UIO/mario_pipe, Transmission says I don't have write permissions. But it looks like I just wrote there? And that everybody (a+rw) can write there in fact? Maybe this indicates I don't actually understand chown and chmod but nothing from their man pages pops out.

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• MVVM Light V4.1 with support for Windows Phone 8

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Today is a very exciting day: After the official release of Windows 8 (and Microsoft Surface!) on Friday, and the official release of Windows Phone 8 on Monday, the Build conference is starting! This is the conference in which we will learn all about the developer experience for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. As a partner of Microsoft, I had the privilege of trying out some of the new things early, and this gave me the opportunity to port MVVM Light to Windows Phone 8 (it was already running for Windows 8), and today I am officially publishing this new version. Before you go and update, please not the following: V4.1 (4.1.24.0) only supports Visual Studio 2012 (and Express). If for some reason you are still using Visual Studio 2010, don’t despair! In the next few days I will publish an update supporting these versions as well. But for now, please only upgrade if you are on VS12! That being said, here we go: The download page is available on Codeplex and you can download the updated MSI and install it. Please make sure to read the Readme HTML page that automatically opens in your web browser after the MSI completes! It contains important information on how to install selected Project and Item templates for the frameworks of your choice. This version also support the following versions of Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2012 Pro, Premium, Ultimate Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone 8 Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web (Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5) Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop (WPF3.5, WPF4, WPF4.5) We also support Expression Blend of course. Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 are very very exciting opportunities for developers in the whole world. There are already a number of apps running on top of MVVM Light in the Windows Store and of course a large range of apps for Windows Phone too. With this release, we hope to support the developers and speed up application development. It is a pleasure to serve such an innovative and creative community! Happy coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Camera Collision inside the room model

  - by sanddy

  I am having a problem in Calculating the camera collision for my Room model which consists of sofa, tables and other models. The users shall be moving the camera front, back, rotating so i need to make sure that the camera does not collide with any of the models with in the room. I have treated all my models inside the room by BoundingBox[] and the camera by BoundingSphere. So, far i have implemented collision by looking into the tutorial from http://www.toymaker.info/Games/XNA/html/xna_model_collisions.html which was great. But, I guess the problem lies in the Transformation part. I debugged and found some points to be at Vector(-XXX,-XXX,-XXX) where X is digit. Also i found my radius of some models where too large(in thousand, i just looked into its radius value before converting to BoundingBox). Do I need to scale the model for collision??? Below are my code:- On My LoadContent(): Matrix[] transforms = new Matrix[myModel.Bones.Count]; myModel.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(transforms); int index = 0; box = new List<BoundingBox>(); BoundingBox worldModel = Utility.CalculateBoundingBox(myModel); foreach (ModelMesh mesh in myModel.Meshes) { Vector3[] obb = new Vector3[8]; worldModel.GetCorners(obb); Vector3[] asdf = (Vector3[])obb.Clone(); Vector3.Transform(obb, ref transforms[mesh.ParentBone.Index], obb); BoundingBox worldBox = BoundingBox.CreateFromPoints(obb); box.Add(worldBox); index++; } On CameraPosition Update: BoundingSphere bs = new BoundingSphere(this.cameraPos, 5.0f); if (RoomWalkthrough.Utility.CheckCollision(bs, bb)) { // Do Something } Please Help.

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