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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 25, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 25, 2010New ProjectsAptusSoftware.Threading: AptusSoftware.Threading is a class library designed primarily to assist in the development of multi-threaded WinForm applications, although there i...AxiomGameDesigner: It is going to be a universal scene editor for Axiom 3D game engine. It is in pure C# and will be kept portable to MONO for compatibility with linu...Badger - Unity Productivity Extensions: A set of Microsoft Unity Extensions. Why Badger? Because I love badgers.Business & System Analysis Templates and Best Practices for Russian: http://saway.codeplex.com/Conectayas: Conectayas is an open source "Connect Four" alike game but transformable to "Tic-Tac-Toe" and to a lot of similar games that uses mouse. Written in...FastCode: .NET 3.5 Extensions set to increase coding speed.Hundiyas: Hundiyas is an open source "Battleship" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. This cross-platform and cro...Icelandic Online Banking: Icelandic Online Banking is project defining a web service interface for online banking.IE8 AddOns XML Creator: Application that helps on creating the xml files for IE8 Accelerators, Search Providers and the markup for Web Slices.iKnowledge: a asp.net mvc demoLearn ASP.NET MVC: Learn ASP.NET MVC is a project for the members of the Peer Learning group in Silicon Valley. It contains the SportsStore solution from the Pro ASP...Live at Education Meta Web-Service: Live at Education Meta Web-Service is intended to abstract from several technologies that are included in Live@edu set of services. This web-ser...Low level wave sound output for VB.NET: Low level sound output class for VB.NET using platform invocation services to call winmm.dllMailQ: MailQ makes it easier for developers to send mail messages from an application. The system sends mails based on a database queue system (store, se...Managed DXGI: Managed DXGI library is Fully managed wrapper writen on C# for DXGI 1.0 and 1.1 technology. It makes easier to support DXGI in managed application....Multivalue AutoComplete WinForms TextBox in C#: This project is a sample application that demonstrates how to create a multivalue WinForms textbox in C# using .NET Framework 3.5.Nifty CSharp Tools: Nifty CSharp Tools, will contain various tools and snippets. IRCBot, splashscreens, linq, world of warcraft log parsing, screenshot uploaders, twi...PHP MPQ: A port of StormLib to PHP for handling Blizzard MPQ files.RedDevils strategy - Project Hoshimi Programming Battle: Source Code of RedDevils strategy. Imagine Cup 2008 - Project Hoshimi Programming Battle.RNUNIT: rNunit is a distributed Nunit project. Many application these days are client-server application, distributed application and regular unit testing ...Samar Solution: Samar Solutions is a business system for office automation.Silverlight OOMRPG Game Engine: Silverlight OOMRPG Game EngineSimulator: GPSSimulatorSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit: SLARToolkit is a flexible Augmented Reality library for Silverlight with the aim to make real time Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight ...Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD) for Russian: Это русская версия сайта sadd.codeplex.comSQLSnapshotManager: Easily manage SQL Server database snapshots in a easy to use visual interface.Twilio with VB.NET MVC: Twilio with VB.NET MVC is a sample application for developing with Twilio's REST based telephony API. It includes an XML Schema of the TwiML respon...Ultra Speed Dial: UltraSpeedDial.com - Online Speed Dial Page.Visual HTML Editor justHTML: justHTML - is simle windows-application WYSIWYG editor that allow everyone - without any knowledge of HTML - to create and edit web-pages. It supp...WinMTR.NET: .NET Clone of the popular Windows clone of the popular Linux Matt's TracerouteWPF Dialogs: "WPF Dialogs" is a library for different Dialogs in WPF (e.g. FolderBrowseDialog, SaveFileDialog, OpenFileDialog etc.). These Dialogs are written i...WPFLogin: A small Login window in WPF and C#XNA PerformanceTimers: CPU Timers for Windows and Xbox360. Can track multiple threads, and presents output as a log on-screen.New ReleasesAptusSoftware.Threading: 2.0.0: First public release. This release is in production as part of several commercial applications and is stable. The source code download includes a...BizTalk Software Factory: BizTalk Software Factory v2.1: This is a service release for the BizTalk Software Factory for BizTalk Server 2009, containing so far: Fix for x64: the SN.EXE tool is now locate...Business & System Analysis Templates and Best Practices for Russian: R00 The Place reserver: Just to reserve the place Will be filled out soonChronos WPF: Chronos v1.0 Beta 2: Added a new SplashScreen Added a new Login View and implemented Log Off Added a new PasswordBoxHelper (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/371...dotNetTips: dotNetTips.Utility 3.5 R2: This is a new release (version 3.5.0.3) compatible with .NET 3.5. Lots of new classes/features!! Requires SP1 if using the Entity Framework extensi...fleXdoc: template-based server-side document generator (docx): fleXdoc 1.0 beta 3: The third and final beta of fleXdoc. fleXdoc consists of a webservice and a (test)client for the service. Make sure you also download the testclien...FluentPS: FluentPS v1.0: - FluentPS is moved from ASMX to WCF interface of the Project Server Interface (PSI) - Impersonation changes to work in compliance with WCF interfa...FolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.4.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.3.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.1.3707 Beta 3: As promised, the iTuner Automated Librarian is now available. This automatically cleans an entire album of dead tracks and duplicates as tracks ar...Live at Education Meta Web-Service: LAEMWS v 1.0 beta: Release Candidate for LAEMWS.Macaw Reusable Code Library: LanguageConfigurationSolution: This Solution helps developing a multi language publishing web siteManaged DXGI: Initial Release.: Base declaration of interfaces, most of them untested yet.Math.NET Numerics: 2010.2.24.667 Build: Latest alpha buildMiniTwitter: 1.08.1: MiniTwitter 1.08.1 更新内容 変更 インクリメンタル検索時には大文字小文字の区別をしないように変更 クライアント名の表示を本家にあわせて from から via に変更 修正 公式 RT 時にステータスが上に表示されたり二重に表示されるバグを修正 自分が自分へ返信...Multivalue AutoComplete WinForms TextBox in C#: 1.0 First public release: Multivalue autocomplete textbox control and host application in this release are released in a single Visual Studio 2008 projects. See my related b...NMock3: NMock3 - Beta3, .NET 3.5: This release has some exciting new features. Please start providing feedback on the tutorials. The first several are complete and the rest are no...nxAjax - an asp.net ajax library using jQuery: nxAjax v3 codeplex 7: nxAjax v3 codeplex 7 binary and test website. Bug Fixed: ajax:Form control Add: Drag and drop Rewritten: DragnDropManager DragPanel DropPan...Office Apps: 0.8.7: whats new? Document.Editor and Document.Viewer now supports FlowDocument (.xaml) files bug fix'sPDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.3: Application PrerequisitesMicrosoft Windows Operating Systems (XP (tested) - Vista - 7) Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime A PDF rendering sof...ShellLight: ShellLight 0.1.0.1 Src: Codeplex project released. This is only a preview of the product. Until the first final release there will be many improvements.Silverlight OOMRPG Game Engine: SilverlightGameTutorialSolution v1.01: Please visit my blog for Silverlight OOMROG Game Tutorial: http://www.cnblogs.com/Jax/archive/2010/02/24/1673053.html.Simple Savant: Simple Savant v0.4: Added support for full-text indexing (See Full-Text Indexing) Added support for attribute spanning and compression for property values larger tha...Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD) for Russian: R00: R00 to reserve site nameTeamReview - TFS Code Review: Release 1.1.3: Release Features New expanded product positioning for capturing any targeted coding work as a trackable, assignable, reportable Work Item for any r...Text Designer Outline Text Library: 10th minor release: Version 0.3.1 (10th minor release)Fixed the gradient brush being too big for the text, resulting in not much gradient shown in the text. Gradient...TFS Workflow Control: TeamExplorer and TSWA control 1.0 for TFS 2010 RC: This is a special version for TFS 2010 RC. Use the RC version of the power tools to modify the layout of your work items (http://visualstudiogaller...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.7) - VS2010 RC Support: This update adds support for Visual Studio 2010 RC in addition to Visual Studio 2008. Please note that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is NOT supported a...Tumblen3: tumblen3 Version 25Feb2010: ready for Twitter's xAuthUMD文本编辑器: UMDEditor文本编辑器V2.1.0: 2.1.0 (2010-02-24) 增加查找章节内指定文本内容的功能 2.0.4 (2010-02-06) 章节内容框增加右键菜单，包含编辑文本的基本操作 ------------------------------------------------------- 执行 reg.bat ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30224.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual HTML Editor justHTML: Latest binary: Latest buid here. Executable and mshtml.dll included in this archive. Ready to use ;)Visual HTML Editor justHTML: Source code for version 2.5: Visual studio 2008 project with full source code.VOB2MKV: vob2mkv-1.0.2: The release vob2mkv-1.0.2 is a feature update of the VOB2MKV project. It now includes a DirectShow source filter, MKVSOURCE. A source filter allo...WinMTR.NET: V 1.0: V 1.0WPF Dialogs: Version 0.1.0: Version 0.1.0 FolderBrowseDialog is implementet for more information look here Version 0.1.0 (german: Version 0.1.0 - Deutsch).WPF Dialogs: Version 0.1.1: Version 0.1.1 Features FolderBrowseDialog was extended / FolderBrowseDialog - Deutsch wurde erweitertXNA PerformanceTimers: XNA PerformanceTimers 0.1: Initial release.Zeta Resource Editor: Release 2010-02-24: Added HTTP proxy server support.Most Popular ProjectsASP.NET Ajax LibraryManaged Extensibility FrameworkWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolDotNetZip LibraryMDownloaderVirtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2MFCMAPIDroid ExplorerUseful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow ActivitiesOxiteMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netBlogEngine.NETRawrInfoServiceSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality ToolkitNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesRapid Entity Framework. (ORM). CTP 2Common Context Adapters

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• Working with PivotTables in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010New ProjectsASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Open source Content management system based on ASP.NET MVC platform.AutoFolders: AutoFolders package for Umbraco CMS This package auto creates folder structures for new and existing pages. The folders structures can be date bas...AutoPex: This project combines CCI with Pex by allowing the developer to run Pex on methods based on differences between two assemblies. Canvas VSDOC Intellisense: JavaScript VSDOC documentation for HTML5 Canvas element and 2d Context interface.CSUDH: California State University, Domguiez Hills Game projectsD-AMPS: System for Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic StructuresDispX: Disease PredictorEmployee Info Starter Kit: This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a com...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Provide later... publishing project to share with Malaysians firstFlowPad: Flowpad is a light, fast and easy to use flow diagram editor. It helps you quickly pour your algorithms from your mind to 'paper'. It is written us...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D is a 3D physics library written in C# for XNA. It is implemented entirely in managed code and is compatible with the XBOX 360.Hybrid Windows Service: Abstracted design pattern for running a windows service interactively. Implemented as a base class to replace ServiceBase it will automatically pro...Image Cropper datatype for Umbraco: Stand alone version of the Image Cropper datatype in Umbraco. Listinator: A social wishlist application done in asp.net MVCMicrosoft Dynamics Ax User Group (AXUG) Code Repository: The goal of this project is to make it easier for customers of Microsoft Dynamics Ax to be able to share relevant source code. Code base should inc...Mobil Trials: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Demo : http://gameagam.co.cc/default.html Mirror link...NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NExtLib: NExtLib is a general-purpose extension library for .NET, which adds some useful features and addresses some alleged omissions.Nom - .NET object-mapper: Nom is a light-weight, storage-type agnostic persistence framework which is intended to provide an abstraction over both relational and non-relatio...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods, Silverlight, Math Parser, Simple, EulerOpenGLViewController for Visual Basic .NET 2008: A single class in pure VB.NET code to create and control an OpenGL window by calling opengl32.dll directly without use of additional wrapper librar...RestaurantMIS: RestaurantMIS is a simple Restaurant management system developed in Visual C# 2008 with Chinese language.SmartKonnect: <project name>A WPF application for windows with shoutcast, twitter, facebook and etc.SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: SSRS wont support renaming excel reports sheet rename. This program support to generate the report and change the excel sheet nameSWENTRIZ.NET: SWENTRIZ.NET allows to build graphics of implicit functions via .NET functionality.TFT: Tropical forecast tracker is a web application. It will measure the error of the National Hurricane Center's forecast as compared to the actual tr...WCF Dynamic Client Proxy: A WCF Dynamic Client Proxy so you don't have to inherit from ClientBase all the time. The proxy also has fault tolerance so you don't have to dispo...Web.Config Role Provider: Stores ASP.NET Roles in web.config. Easy to set up and deploy. Works great for simple websites with authentication. The projects includes support ...WPF Line of Business App: Example WPF patterns for line of business applications. Includes navigation, animation, and visualization.YuBiS Framework: Silverlight and WF based a workflow RAD framework. New ReleasesASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): AtomicCms 1.0: This is the first public release of AtomicCms. To get more information about this content management system, visit website http://atomiccms.com/Blogsprajeesh.Blogspot samples: Designing Modular Smart Clients using CAL: This whitepaper provides architectural guidance for designing and implementing enterprise WPF/ silverlight client applications based on the Composi...DB Ghost Build Tools: 1.0.2: Made a change to the datetime format per dewee.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.02.03: Major HighlightsFixed the issue where LinkClick.aspx links were incorrect for child portals Fixed the issue with the PayPal URL settings. Fixed...Employee Directory webpart for sharepoint 2007 user profiles: Employee Directory Source V2.0: Features: 1. Displays a complete list of all Active Directory profiles imported by the SSP into SharePoint 2007. 2. Displays the following fields ...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Alpha Release: Meant for those who attended my presentation. Not cleaned upESPEHA: Espeha 9 PFR: Some small issues fixedFlowPad: FlowPad 0.1: FlowPad 0.1 build. Run it to get fammiliar with major concepts of easy diagramming :)Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2 Includes: - Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) - Demo Application - Samples - Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextu...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D Source (2010-02): This is the initial 2010-02 release.Highlight: Highlight 2.5: This release is primarily a maintenance release of the library and is functionally equivalent to version 2.3 that was released in 2004.Magiq: Magiq 0.3.0: Magiq 0.3.0 contains: Magiq-to-objects: Full support to Linq-to-objects Magiq-to-sql: Full support to Linq-to-sql New features: Plugin model Bu...Microsoft Points Converter: Pre-Alpha ClickOnce Installer v0.03: This release builds on the 0.02 release by adding more thorough validation checks for the amount to convert from as well as adding several currency...Mobil Trials: Mobil Trials Source Code: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Game ini masih perlu dikembangkan lebih jauh lagi! Si...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods on Silverlight 1.00: This a new version of Numerical Methods on Silverlight.OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.5.0.0): Changed point is as next. 7037 Fix spell miss of RequestFactoryMedthodSharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.1.0: Now it supports simply attaching SharePoint documents feature.Sharpy: Sharpy 1.1 Alpha: This is the second Sharpy release. Only a single change has been made - the foreach function now uses IEnumerable as a source instead of IList. Th...SkinDroidCreator: SkinDroidCreator ALPHA 1: Primera releaseTan solo carga mapas, ya sea de un zip o de un directorio. Para probarlo se pueden cargar temas Metamorph o temas flasheables, ya se...SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 0.8.9: SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly version 0.8.9. Changes/improvements: - Added Web Proxy support - Introduced WebDriveInfo - Introduced DownloadUrl...spikes: Salient.Web.Administration 1.0: WebAdmin is simply the built in ASP.NetWebAdministrationFiles application cleaned up with codebehinds to make customization and refactoring possibl...SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: Change SSRS excel file sheet name: Create stored procedure from the attached file in sql server 2005/2008SWENTRIZ.NET: Approach 1: First approachTortoiseSVN Addin for Visual Studio: TortoiseSVN Addin 1.0.4: Visual Studio 2005 support Custom working root bug fixingTotal Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.4: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.4. Bug fixes: - Upgraded SkyDriveWebClient to version 0.8.9 Please do not forget to expres...UnOfficial AW Wrapper dot Net: UAWW.Net 0.1.5.85 Béta 2: Fixed and Added SomethingVr30 OS: Space Brick Break 1.1: A brick breaker. ADD Level 3, 4, 5Web.Config Role Provider: First release: Three downloads are available: A compiled dll ready to use. The schema to enable intellisense The complete source (zipped)WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.1: This release improves the work item selection functionality. These selection methods are now supported (some require at least one item selected): ...WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.2: Improved error handling and fix for linking several times in a row. DISCLAIMER: While I have tested this app on my TFS Server, by downloading and...ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip: ZipStorer 2.30: Added stream-oriented methods Improved support for ePUB & Open Container Format specification (OCF) Automatic switch from Deflate to Store algo...Most Popular ProjectsRawrDotNetNuke® Community EditionASP.NET Ajax LibraryFacebook Developer ToolkitWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolWSPBuilder (SharePoint WSP tool)Virtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2Json.NETPerformance Analysis of Logs (PAL) ToolQuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .NetMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrSharpyBlogEngine.NETSimple SavantjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer Toolkit

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 11, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 11, 2010New ProjectsArkzia: This Silverlight game.CodePlex Wiki Editor: CodePlex Wiki Editor makes it easier for CodePlex users to create their wiki documentations. This project offer a rich interface for the edition...Evaluate: Evaluate & Comet DWR like .NET library with powerfull Evaluate and Ajax Comet support. Also, you may use Evaluate library in your own .Net applicat...FamAccountor: 家庭记账薄Horadric: This is common tools freamwork!K8061.Managed: This is a solution to use the Velleman Extended K8061 USB Interface board with .net and to have a nice wrapper handling most of the overhead for us...Latent semantic analysis: all you need is to use!: Baggr is feed aggregator with web interface, user rating and LSA filter. Enjoy it!LIF7 ==> RISK : TOWER DEFENSE: Université Lyon 1, L2 MATH-INFO 2009-2010 Semestre de printemps Projet RISK : TOWER DEFENSE Membres : Jessica El Melhem, Vincent Sébille, et Jonat...Managed ESL Suite: Managed ESL Suite using C# for FreeSWITCH Omni-Tool - A program version concept of the tool used in Mass Effect.: A program version concept of the tool used in Mass Effect. It will support little apps (plugins) that run inside the UI. Its talor mainly at develo...PdxCodeCamp: Web application for Portland Code CampProjeto Vírus: Desenvolvimento do Jogo Virus em XNAsilverlight control - stars with rounded corners: Draw stars and cogs including rounded cornersSilverlight MathParser: Implementation of mathematical expressions parser to compute and functions.turing machine simulator: Project for JCE in course SW engeenering. Turing Machine simulator with GUI.WpD - Wallpapers Downloader: You can easy download wallpapers to your computer without any advertising or registration. On 5 minutes you can download so many wallpapers!New ReleasesAJAX Control Framework: v1.0.0.0: New AJAX project that helps you create AJAX enabled controls. Make use of control level AJAX methods, a Script Manager that works like you'd expect...AutoFixture: Version 1.1: This is version 1.1 of AutoFixture. This release contains no known bugs. Compared to Release Candidate 1 for version 1.1, there are no changes. Ho...AutoPoco: AutoPoco 0.3: Method Invocation in configuration Custom type providers during configuration Method invocation for generationBacicworx (Basic Services Framework): 3.0.10.410 (Beta): Major update, winnowing, and recode of the library. Removed redundant classses and methods which have similar functionality to those available in ...Bluetooth Radar: Version 1.5: Mostly UI and Animation Changes.BUtil: BUtil 4.9: 1. Icons of kneo are almost removed 2. Deployment was moved to codeplex.com 3. Adding of storages was unavailable when any of storages are used FIXEDcrudwork library: crudwork 2.2.0.3: few bug fixes new object viewer - allow the user to view and change an object through the property grid and/or the simple XML editor pivot table ...EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.5: Release v1.9.8.5Removed the debugging output from the Armor Penetration change.EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.6: Release v1.9.8.6Updated release to include the correct version of EnhSimGUIEvaluate: Evaluate Library: This file contains Evaluate library source code under Visual Studio project. Also, there is a sample project to see the use.ExcelDna: ExcelDna Version 0.25: This is an important bugfix release, with the following changes: Fix case where unpacked .config temp file might not be deleted. Fix compiler pro...FamAccountor: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.1: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.1 该版本提供基本功能，还有待扩展! Feature: 实现基本添加、编辑、删除功能。FamAccountor: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.2: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.2 该版本提供基本功能，还有待扩展! Feature: 添加账户管理功能。Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.2: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.2), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.3 Beta: Added Silverlight support for Gko.Utils Added ExtensionsHash Calculator: HashCalculator 1.2: HashCalculator 1.2HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: Version: TrailersOnly if set to 'true' only titles with 'trailer' in the title will be download MinTrailerSize Added a minimum trailer size, this avoids t...Home Access Plus+: v3.2.6.0: v3.2.5.1 Release Change Log: Add lesson naming Fixed a bug in the help desk which was rendering the wrong URL for tickets Planning has started ...HTML Ruby: 6.20.0: All new concept, all new code. Because this release does not support complex ruby annotations, "Furigana Injector" is not supported by this release...HTML Ruby: 6.20.1: Fixed problem where ruby with closed tags but no rb tag will result in empty page Added support for complex ruby annotation (limited single ruby)...K8061.Managed: K8061.Managed: This is a pre-compilled K8061.Managed.DLL file release 1.0.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 2.1.0.0: Users of Kooboo CMS 2.0, please use the "Check updates" feature under System to upgrade New featuresWebDav support You can now use tools like w...Kooboo forum: Kooboo Forum Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo GoogleAnalytics: Kooboo GoogleAnalytics Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo wiki: Kooboo CMS Wiki module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Mavention: Mavention Simple SiteMapPath: Mavention Simple SiteMapPath is a custom control that renders breadcrumbs as an unordered list what makes it a perfect solution for breadcrumbs on ...MetaSharp: MetaSharp v0.3: MetaSharp v0.3 Roadmap: Oslo Independence Custom Grammar library Improved build environment dogfooding Project structure simplificationsRoTwee: RoTwee (10.0.0.7): New feature of this version is support for mouse wheel. You can rotate tweets rotating mouse wheel.silverlight control - stars with rounded corners: first step: These are the first examples.Silverlight MathParser: Silverlight MathParser 1.0: Implementation of mathematical expressions parser to compute and functions.SimpleGeo.NET: SimpleGeo.NET example website project: ConfigurationYou must change these three configuration values in AppSettings.config: Google Maps API key: for the maps on the test site. Get one he...StickyTweets: 0.6.0: Version 0.6.0 Code - PERFORMANCE Hook into Async WinInet to perform async requests without adding an additional thread Code - Verify that async r...System.Html: Version 1.3; fixed bugs and improved performance: This release incorporates bug fixes, a new normalize method proposed by RudolfHenning of Codeplex.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30410.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVFPX: FoxTabs 0.9.2: The following issues were addressed: 26744 24954 24767Visual Studio DSite: Advanced Guessing Number Game (Visual C++ 2008): A guessing number game made in visual c 2008.WpD - Wallpapers Downloader: WpD v0.1: My first release, I hope you enjoyMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsRawrnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.AutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterBlogEngine.NETBeanProxy

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• Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

  - by Mark Rackley

  I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding?  Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code.  Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance…   Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites.  Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid.  Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it.  :)  We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested).  Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software.  SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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• Stream Media and Live TV Across the Internet with Orb

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Looking for a way to stream your media collection across the Internet? Or perhaps watch and record TV remotely? Today we are going to look at how to do all that and more with Orb. Requirements Windows XP / Vista / 7 or Intel based Mac w/ OS X 10.5 or later. 1 GB RAM or more Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher / AMD Athlon 3200+ Broadband connections TV Tuner for streaming and recording live TV (optional) Note: Slower internet connections may result in stuttering during playback. Installation and Setup Download and install Orb on your home computer. (Download link below) You’ll want to take the defaults for the initial portion of the install. When we get to the Orb Account setup portion of the install is when we will have to enter information and make some decisions. Choose your language and click Next. We’ll need to create and user account and password. A valid email address is required as we’ll need to confirm the account later. Click Next.   Now you’ll want to choose your media sources. Orb will automatically look for folders that may contain media files. You can add or remove folders click on the (+) or (-) buttons. To remove a folder, click on it once to select it from the list and then click the minus (-) button. To add a folder, click the plus (+) button and browse for the folder. You can add local folders as well as shared folders from networked computers and USB attached storage. Note: Both the host computer running Orb and the networked computer will need to be running to access shared network folders remotely. When you’ve selected all your media files, click Next. Orb will proceed to index your media files… When the indexing is complete, click Next. Orb TV Setup Note: Streaming Live TV to Macs is not currently supported. If you have a TV tuner card connected to your PC, you can opt to configure Orb to stream live or recorded TV. Click Next  to configure TV. Or, choose Skip if you don’t wish to configure Orb for TV.   If you have a Digital tuner card, type in your Zip Code and click Get List to pull your channel listings. Select a TV provider from the list and click Next. If not, click Skip.   You can select or deselect any channels by checking or un-checking the box to each channel. Select Auto Scan to let Orb find more channels or disable the ones with no reception. Click Next when finished.   Next choose an analog provider, if necessary, and click Next.   Select “Yes” or “No” for a set top box and click Next. Just as we did with the Digital tuner, select or deselect any channels by checking or un-checking the box to each channel. Select Auto Scan to let Orb find more channels or disable the ones with no reception. Click Next when finished.   Now we’re finished with the setup. Click Close. Accessing your Media Remotely Media files are accessed through a web-based interface. Before we go any further, however, we’ll need to confirm our username and password. Check your inbox for an email from Orb Networks. Click the enclosed confirmation link. You’ll be prompted to enter the username and password you selected in your browser then click Next.   Your account will be confirmed. Now, we’re ready to enjoy our media remotely. To get started, point your browser to the MyCast website from your remote computer. (See link below) Enter your credentials and click Log In. Once logged in, you’ll be presented with the MyCast Home screen. By default you’ll see a handful of “channels” such as a TV program guide, random audio and photos, video favorites, and weather. You can add, remove, or customize channels. To add additional channels, click on Add Channels at the top right…   …and select from the dropdown list. To access your full media libraries, click Open Application at the top left and select from one of the options. Live and Recorded TV If you have a TV tuner card you configured for Orb, you’ll see your program guide on the TV / Webcams screen. To watch or record a show, click on the program listing to bring up a detail box. Then click the red button to record, or the green button to play. When recording a show, you’ll see a pulsating red icon at the top right of the listing in the program guide. If you want to watch Live TV, you may be prompted to choose your media player, depending on your browser and settings. Playback should begin shortly.   Note for Windows Media Center Users If you try to stream live TV in Orb while Windows Media Center is running on your PC, you’ll get an error message. Click the Stop MediaCenter button and then try again.   Audio On the Audio screen, you’ll find your music files indexed by genre, artist, and album. You can play a selection by clicking once and then clicking the green play button, or by simply double-clicking.   Playback will begin in the default media player for the streaming format.   Video Video works essentially the same as audio. Click on a selection and press the green play button, or double-click on the video title. Video playback will begin in the default media player for the streaming format.   Streaming Formats You can change the default streaming format in the control panel settings. To access the Control Panel, click on Open Applications  and select Control Panel. You can also click Settings at the top right.   Select General from the drop down list and then click on the Streaming Formats tab. You are provided four options. Flash, Windows Media, .SDP, and .PLS.   Creating Playlists To create playlists, drag and drop your media title to the playlist work area on the right, or click Add to playlist on the top menu. Click Save when finished.    Sharing your Media Orb allows you to share media playlists across the Internet with friends and family. There are a few ways to accomplish this. We’ll start by click the Share button at the bottom of the playlist work area after you’ve compiled your playlist. You’ll be prompted to choose a method by which to share your playlist. You’ll have the option to share your playlist publicly or privately. You can share publically through links, blogs, or on your Orb public profile.  By choosing the Public Profile option, Orb will automatically create a profile page for you with a URL like http://public.orb.com/username that anyone can easily access on the Internet. The private sharing option allows you to invite friends by email and requires recipients to register with Orb. You can also give your playlist a custom name, or accept the auto-generated title. Click OK when finished. Users who visit your public profile will be able to view and stream any of your shared playlists to their computer or supported device.   Portable Media Devices and Smartphones Orb can stream media to many portable devices and 3G phones. Streaming audio is supported on the iPhone and iPod Touch through the Safari browser. However, video and live TV streaming requires the Orb Live iPhone App.  Orb Live is available in the App store for $9.99. To stream media to your portable device, go to the MyCast website in your mobile browser and login. Browse for your media or playlist. Make a selection and play the media. Playback will begin. We found streaming music to both the Droid and the iPhone to work quite nicely. Video playback on the Droid, however, left a bit to be desired. The video looked good, but the audio tended to be out of sync. System Tray Control Panel By default Orb runs in the system tray on start up. To access the System Tray Control Panel, right-click on the Orb icon in the system tray and select Control Panel. Login with your Orb username and  password and click OK.   From here you can add or remove media sources, add manage accounts, change your password, and more. If you’d rather not run Orb on Startup, click the General icon.   Unselect the checkbox next to Start Orb when the system starts. Conclusion It may seem like a lot of steps, but getting Orb up and running isn’t terribly difficult. Orb is available for both Windows and Intel based Macs. It also supports streaming to many Game Consoles such as the Wii, PS3, and XBox 360. If you are running Windows 7 on multiple computers, you may want to check out our write-up on how to stream music and video over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12. Downloads Download Orb Logon to MyCast Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stream Music and Video Over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerStream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media PlayerShare Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 04, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 04, 2010New Projects23 Umbraco addons: 23 Umbraco addonsAdd-ons for EPiServer Relate+: In the Add-ons for EPiServer Relate+ you will find add-ons, extensions and modules that work together with EPiServer Relate+.Advanced Mail Merge (AMM) for Microsoft Office: Advanced Mail Merge for Microsoft Word 2007/2010, offers great extensable functionality: - Merge to document (PDF) - Merge to attachment - Use Out...Cenobith RLS Sample: Simple implementation of Row Level Security for Microsoft SQL ServerCodingWheels.DataTypes: DataTypes tries to make it easier for developers to have concrete typesafe objects for working with many common forms of data. Many times these dat...DigitArchive: Digit Archive makes it easy for the DIGIT magazine readers to find the correct software or movie bundled in the media along with the magazine. You'...dNet.DB: dNetDB is a .net framework that simplifies model and data access by providing a database independent object-based persistence, where objects are pe...Dynamic Application Framework: The Dynamic Application Framework provides a highly flexible environment for creating applications. Multiple UI and Execution Environments, along w...ECoG: ECoG toolkitFB Toolkit with Contracts: This is a research project where I have inserted code contracts into the Facebook Toolkit source code., version 3.1 beta. This delivers an efficien...GeneCMS: GeneCMS allows users to generate static HTML based websites by offering an ASP.NET editing front-end that can be run in the local machine. It is ta...HooIzDat: HooIzDat is game that asks, who the heck is that?! It's a two player game where your task is to guess your opponent's person before he or she guess...JingQiao.Interacting: JingQiao Interacting MessagingKanbanBoard: Visual task board for Kanban and Scrum.Learning CSharp: Just Learning CSharpMammoth: mammothMapWindow Mobile: MapWindow Mobile is mobile GIS Software which can run on windows mobile, developed in C# .NET Compact Framework. It provides basic GIS functionalit...Mindless Setback: Setback is a card game popular in New England. This project uses a combination of brute force and Monte Carlo methods to play Setback. This is an e...MSNCore(DirectUI) Element Viewer: MSNCore Element Viewer is an application designed to enumerate the elements with in applications built with MSNCore.dll and UXCore.dll. This appli...MSVN Team: bài tập thầy lườngNugget: Web Socket Server: A web socket server implemented in c#. The goal of the projects is to create an easy way to start using HTML5 web sockets in .NET web applications.oSoft ColorPicker Control for Visual Studio 2010: oSoft ColorPicker is an user control that can be used instead of the ColorDialog when you want to allow your users to select a color in a windows f...Prism Software Factory: The Prism Software Factory is a software factory for Visual Studio 2010 assisting developers in the process of building WPF & Silverlight applicati...Project Lion: Project lion is forum developed in Silverlight technology. Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix is an attempt to solve the problem of binary dependency management in large .NET solutions. It will achieve the goal using (amongst other thi...Rich Task List: Rich Task List is a tutorial project for DotNetNuke Module Development.SharePoint PowerRSS: Easy/Clean way to get SharePoint list data via more standard RSS feed. I found CleanRSS.aspx as part of SPRSS: Enhanced RSS Functionality for WSS ...SOAPI - StackOverflow API Generator: Generates, directly from the self documenting StackOverflow API specification, an end-to-end, fully documented API wrapper library with Visual Stu...SQL Script Application Utility: This C# project allows you to apply scripts to a database for table creation, data creation, etc. You can keep DDL in separate SQL scripts which c...Sql Server Reports Viewer: Sql Server Reports Viewer makes it easier to render Sql Server Reports without the need to setup a SSRS Server. This makes deployments a breeze. ...StorageHD: StorageHD system for large video filesUrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer is a WPF 4.0 client application to handle Magic The Gathering cards collections. You can manage expansions, blocks and all informatio...webrel: This tool executes simple relational algebra expressions. It is useful for learning of Database course. Javascript and xhtml is used to develop thi...World Wide Grab: World Wide Grab allows retrieval and integration of various semi-structured data sorces, expecially Web applications. It turns every available res...New Releases3FD - Framework For Fast Development (C++): Alpha 3: This release was compiled in Visual Studio Release mode. It means you can use it in whatever compiler you want. However, the compatibility with ano...Advanced Mail Merge (AMM) for Microsoft Office: Advanced MailMerge 2007.zip: Release 1.1.0.0Army Bodger: Bodger 3 Archetype Test: Ok so it's later and I've largely finished it. Right now the Space Wolves have their Troops written and one HQ unit. The equipment panel largely wo...AwesomiumDotNet: AwesomiumDotNet 1.6 beta: Preview of AwesomiumDotNet 1.6.Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.6: New features in this release: Greatly improved logging for INFO and DEBUG. Improved the getClassName function in ObjectUtils. Added the ability ...Cenobith RLS Sample: Sample App: Change connection strings in App.config and Web.config files.Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template: 00.00.02: A minor update from the original release with a few fixes including Localization and some updated documentation.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V25: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DEWD: DEWD for Umbraco v1.0: Beta release of the package. Functional feature set and fairly stable. Since the alpha: Validation on input fields Custom view controls Ability...DotNetNuke Developers Help File: DNNHelpSystem 05.04.02: Release of the developer core API help documentation of DotNetNuke in MSDN style format, both as .CHM stand alone file as well as a html website ba...Drive Backup: Drive Backup V.0604: This release includes the following fixes/features: * Fixed incompatibility with some USB drives (those marked as “fixed” by Windows) * Ad...Event Scavenger: Version 3.3 (Refresh): Archiving bit added to database plus archiving stored procedure updated. Rest of items just refreshed. Database set to version 3.3Expression Encoder Batch Processor: Expression Batch v0.3: Now set the newly-converted file's Created DateTime to equal the source file's. This helps keep your videos sorterd chronologically in media librar...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.6.1: The latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.6.1), with Mini-Menu bug fixes and 'Help' feature - all the instructions needed to use the software (If y...Genesis Smart Client Framework: Genesis v2.0 - Ruby User Experience Platform (UXP): This is the start of the rewrite of the entire framework. The rewrite will include support for XAML through WPF and Silverlight, WCF, Workflow Serv...Global: http requester tool: Added a brnad new console app for making http requests.GMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & Presentation: Hot Build: this is latest change-set build, unstable previewHERB.IQ: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 4: As of 6-23-10 @ 9:48ESTInfragistics Analytics Framework: Infragistics Analytics Framework 1.0: This project includes wrappers for the Infragistics controls that integrate with the recently launched Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. T...Innovative Games: Cube Mapper: Cube Mapper is a small tool that takes in six textures and outputs a cube map that is a combination of the six textures. Cube Mapper supports .tga...jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services: SPServices 0.5.6: This release is in an alpha state. Please only download it if you know what you are getting and are willing to test it. In any case, it's a bad ide...linq to jquery: jlinq v1.00 no doc: First public version of jlinq! no doc yet, soon too come!LinqSpecs: Version 1.0.1: Fabio Maulo has sent several patchs in order to make LinqSpecs to work with any linq provider other than in memory. Big KUDOS for him.mojoPortal: 2.3.4.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on ...Nugget: Web Socket Server: Initial POC release: The initial proof of concept release. To try it out, open the Sample App.sln, set the ChatServer project as the start-up project, start debugging ...oSoft ColorPicker Control for Visual Studio 2010: oSoft ColorPicker Control for VS 2010 Beta 1: Beta 1Refix - .NET dependency management: Refix v0.1.0.48 ALPHA: First preview version of Refix command-line tool.SharePoint 2010 CSV Bulk Term Set Importer: Bulk Term Set Importer: Initial ReleaseSOAPI - StackOverflow API Generator: SOAPI Wrappers: SOAPI-JS First release as SOAPI-JS, SOAPI-CS coming shortly. Tests and example includedSQL Compact Toolbox: Beta 0.8.1: Initial test release - mind the bumps. Requires Visual Studio 2010.Thumb nail creator and image resizer: ThumbnailCreator1.2: this release fixes and issue that was occuring when the control was used inside paged dataTS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.23.17.0: Changelog Added Properties "IsSpacer" and "SpacerInfo" to ChannelListEntry. "IsSpacer" allows you to check whether the channel is a spacer channel ...UI Accessibility Checker: UI Accessibility Checker v.2.0: We are excited to announce the release of AccChecker 2.0! In addition to numerous bug fixes and usability improvements, these major features have...webrel: webrel 1.0: webrel 1.0WindStyle SlugHelper for Windows Live Writer: 1.2.0.0: 增加：可以配置是否忽略已经包含slug的日志，请在插件选项中配置； 增加：插件图标； 更新：支持最新Windows Live Writer，版本号14.0.8117.416。Work Recorder - Hold on own time!: WorkRecorder 1.1: +Only one instance can run #Change histogram to pie chartMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)PHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeRawrIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationN2 CMSBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineMain projectMirror Testing System

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• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Choosing the Right Collection Class

  - by James Michael Hare

  The .NET Base Class Library (BCL) has a wide array of collection classes at your disposal which make it easy to manage collections of objects. While it's great to have so many classes available, it can be daunting to choose the right collection to use for any given situation. As hard as it may be, choosing the right collection can be absolutely key to the performance and maintainability of your application! This post will look at breaking down any confusion between each collection and the situations in which they excel. We will be spending most of our time looking at the System.Collections.Generic namespace, which is the recommended set of collections. The Generic Collections: System.Collections.Generic namespace The generic collections were introduced in .NET 2.0 in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. This is the main body of collections you should tend to focus on first, as they will tend to suit 99% of your needs right up front. It is important to note that the generic collections are unsynchronized. This decision was made for performance reasons because depending on how you are using the collections its completely possible that synchronization may not be required or may be needed on a higher level than simple method-level synchronization. Furthermore, concurrent read access (all writes done at beginning and never again) is always safe, but for concurrent mixed access you should either synchronize the collection or use one of the concurrent collections. So let's look at each of the collections in turn and its various pros and cons, at the end we'll summarize with a table to help make it easier to compare and contrast the different collections. The Associative Collection Classes Associative collections store a value in the collection by providing a key that is used to add/remove/lookup the item. Hence, the container associates the value with the key. These collections are most useful when you need to lookup/manipulate a collection using a key value. For example, if you wanted to look up an order in a collection of orders by an order id, you might have an associative collection where they key is the order id and the value is the order. The Dictionary<TKey,TVale> is probably the most used associative container class. The Dictionary<TKey,TValue> is the fastest class for associative lookups/inserts/deletes because it uses a hash table under the covers. Because the keys are hashed, the key type should correctly implement GetHashCode() and Equals() appropriately or you should provide an external IEqualityComparer to the dictionary on construction. The insert/delete/lookup time of items in the dictionary is amortized constant time - O(1) - which means no matter how big the dictionary gets, the time it takes to find something remains relatively constant. This is highly desirable for high-speed lookups. The only downside is that the dictionary, by nature of using a hash table, is unordered, so you cannot easily traverse the items in a Dictionary in order. The SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue> is similar to the Dictionary<TKey,TValue> in usage but very different in implementation. The SortedDictionary<TKey,TValye> uses a binary tree under the covers to maintain the items in order by the key. As a consequence of sorting, the type used for the key must correctly implement IComparable<TKey> so that the keys can be correctly sorted. The sorted dictionary trades a little bit of lookup time for the ability to maintain the items in order, thus insert/delete/lookup times in a sorted dictionary are logarithmic - O(log n). Generally speaking, with logarithmic time, you can double the size of the collection and it only has to perform one extra comparison to find the item. Use the SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue> when you want fast lookups but also want to be able to maintain the collection in order by the key. The SortedList<TKey,TValue> is the other ordered associative container class in the generic containers. Once again SortedList<TKey,TValue>, like SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue>, uses a key to sort key-value pairs. Unlike SortedDictionary, however, items in a SortedList are stored as an ordered array of items. This means that insertions and deletions are linear - O(n) - because deleting or adding an item may involve shifting all items up or down in the list. Lookup time, however is O(log n) because the SortedList can use a binary search to find any item in the list by its key. So why would you ever want to do this? Well, the answer is that if you are going to load the SortedList up-front, the insertions will be slower, but because array indexing is faster than following object links, lookups are marginally faster than a SortedDictionary. Once again I'd use this in situations where you want fast lookups and want to maintain the collection in order by the key, and where insertions and deletions are rare. The Non-Associative Containers The other container classes are non-associative. They don't use keys to manipulate the collection but rely on the object itself being stored or some other means (such as index) to manipulate the collection. The List<T> is a basic contiguous storage container. Some people may call this a vector or dynamic array. Essentially it is an array of items that grow once its current capacity is exceeded. Because the items are stored contiguously as an array, you can access items in the List<T> by index very quickly. However inserting and removing in the beginning or middle of the List<T> are very costly because you must shift all the items up or down as you delete or insert respectively. However, adding and removing at the end of a List<T> is an amortized constant operation - O(1). Typically List<T> is the standard go-to collection when you don't have any other constraints, and typically we favor a List<T> even over arrays unless we are sure the size will remain absolutely fixed. The LinkedList<T> is a basic implementation of a doubly-linked list. This means that you can add or remove items in the middle of a linked list very quickly (because there's no items to move up or down in contiguous memory), but you also lose the ability to index items by position quickly. Most of the time we tend to favor List<T> over LinkedList<T> unless you are doing a lot of adding and removing from the collection, in which case a LinkedList<T> may make more sense. The HashSet<T> is an unordered collection of unique items. This means that the collection cannot have duplicates and no order is maintained. Logically, this is very similar to having a Dictionary<TKey,TValue> where the TKey and TValue both refer to the same object. This collection is very useful for maintaining a collection of items you wish to check membership against. For example, if you receive an order for a given vendor code, you may want to check to make sure the vendor code belongs to the set of vendor codes you handle. In these cases a HashSet<T> is useful for super-quick lookups where order is not important. Once again, like in Dictionary, the type T should have a valid implementation of GetHashCode() and Equals(), or you should provide an appropriate IEqualityComparer<T> to the HashSet<T> on construction. The SortedSet<T> is to HashSet<T> what the SortedDictionary<TKey,TValue> is to Dictionary<TKey,TValue>. That is, the SortedSet<T> is a binary tree where the key and value are the same object. This once again means that adding/removing/lookups are logarithmic - O(log n) - but you gain the ability to iterate over the items in order. For this collection to be effective, type T must implement IComparable<T> or you need to supply an external IComparer<T>. Finally, the Stack<T> and Queue<T> are two very specific collections that allow you to handle a sequential collection of objects in very specific ways. The Stack<T> is a last-in-first-out (LIFO) container where items are added and removed from the top of the stack. Typically this is useful in situations where you want to stack actions and then be able to undo those actions in reverse order as needed. The Queue<T> on the other hand is a first-in-first-out container which adds items at the end of the queue and removes items from the front. This is useful for situations where you need to process items in the order in which they came, such as a print spooler or waiting lines. So that's the basic collections. Let's summarize what we've learned in a quick reference table.  Collection Ordered? Contiguous Storage? Direct Access? Lookup Efficiency Manipulate Efficiency Notes Dictionary No Yes Via Key Key: O(1) O(1) Best for high performance lookups. SortedDictionary Yes No Via Key Key: O(log n) O(log n) Compromise of Dictionary speed and ordering, uses binary search tree. SortedList Yes Yes Via Key Key: O(log n) O(n) Very similar to SortedDictionary, except tree is implemented in an array, so has faster lookup on preloaded data, but slower loads. List No Yes Via Index Index: O(1) Value: O(n) O(n) Best for smaller lists where direct access required and no ordering. LinkedList No No No Value: O(n) O(1) Best for lists where inserting/deleting in middle is common and no direct access required. HashSet No Yes Via Key Key: O(1) O(1) Unique unordered collection, like a Dictionary except key and value are same object. SortedSet Yes No Via Key Key: O(log n) O(log n) Unique ordered collection, like SortedDictionary except key and value are same object. Stack No Yes Only Top Top: O(1) O(1)* Essentially same as List<T> except only process as LIFO Queue No Yes Only Front Front: O(1) O(1) Essentially same as List<T> except only process as FIFO   The Original Collections: System.Collections namespace The original collection classes are largely considered deprecated by developers and by Microsoft itself. In fact they indicate that for the most part you should always favor the generic or concurrent collections, and only use the original collections when you are dealing with legacy .NET code. Because these collections are out of vogue, let's just briefly mention the original collection and their generic equivalents: ArrayList A dynamic, contiguous collection of objects. Favor the generic collection List<T> instead. Hashtable Associative, unordered collection of key-value pairs of objects. Favor the generic collection Dictionary<TKey,TValue> instead. Queue First-in-first-out (FIFO) collection of objects. Favor the generic collection Queue<T> instead. SortedList Associative, ordered collection of key-value pairs of objects. Favor the generic collection SortedList<T> instead. Stack Last-in-first-out (LIFO) collection of objects. Favor the generic collection Stack<T> instead. In general, the older collections are non-type-safe and in some cases less performant than their generic counterparts. Once again, the only reason you should fall back on these older collections is for backward compatibility with legacy code and libraries only. The Concurrent Collections: System.Collections.Concurrent namespace The concurrent collections are new as of .NET 4.0 and are included in the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace. These collections are optimized for use in situations where multi-threaded read and write access of a collection is desired. The concurrent queue, stack, and dictionary work much as you'd expect. The bag and blocking collection are more unique. Below is the summary of each with a link to a blog post I did on each of them. ConcurrentQueue Thread-safe version of a queue (FIFO). For more information see: C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue ConcurrentStack Thread-safe version of a stack (LIFO). For more information see: C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentStack and ConcurrentQueue ConcurrentBag Thread-safe unordered collection of objects. Optimized for situations where a thread may be bother reader and writer. For more information see: C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection ConcurrentDictionary Thread-safe version of a dictionary. Optimized for multiple readers (allows multiple readers under same lock). For more information see C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentDictionary BlockingCollection Wrapper collection that implement producers & consumers paradigm. Readers can block until items are available to read. Writers can block until space is available to write (if bounded). For more information see C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection Summary The .NET BCL has lots of collections built in to help you store and manipulate collections of data. Understanding how these collections work and knowing in which situations each container is best is one of the key skills necessary to build more performant code. Choosing the wrong collection for the job can make your code much slower or even harder to maintain if you choose one that doesn’t perform as well or otherwise doesn’t exactly fit the situation. Remember to avoid the original collections and stick with the generic collections.  If you need concurrent access, you can use the generic collections if the data is read-only, or consider the concurrent collections for mixed-access if you are running on .NET 4.0 or higher.   Tweet Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Collecitons,Generic,Concurrent,Dictionary,List,Stack,Queue,SortedList,SortedDictionary,HashSet,SortedSet

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• Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

  - by sbwalker

  Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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• Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

  - by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com

    Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments.  In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE.  In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts.  First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources.  There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves.  Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters.  Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards.   After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server.  It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis.  It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules.  The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client.     Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL.  The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server.  Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users.  The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources.  For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL   Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01  Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01  Billed Qty  (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1       WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2,      sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from      Product T879 /* A05 Product */ ,      Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ ,      FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2   Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX.  However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory.  Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests.  This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher.   The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result.  The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request.  When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries.  That's the left to right flow in the diagram below.  When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases.   Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing.  This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole.  It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary.  For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well.  This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies.  It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next.  The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time.  This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases.  It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model.  This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions.  For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries.  Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM.  The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source.  In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape.  If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape.  If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release.  This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer.  For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics.  This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation.  It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users.  Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database.  The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer.  When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used.  These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources.  These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model.  Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns.  For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively.  (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM.  In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.)  Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users.  Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security.  The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users.  Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience.  Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables.  The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer.  In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers.  These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors).  There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis.  Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software.   The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept.  When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail.  We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model.  Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

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• Residual packages Ubuntu 12.04

  - by hydroxide

  I have an Asus Q500A with win8 and Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit; Linux kernel 3.8.0-32-generic. I have been having residual package issues which have been giving me trouble trying to reconfigure xserver-xorg-lts-raring. I tried removing all residual packages from synaptic but the following were not removed. Output of sudo dpkg -l | grep "^rc" rc gstreamer0.10-plugins-good:i386 0.10.31-1ubuntu1.2 GStreamer plugins from the "good" set rc libaa1:i386 1.4p5-39ubuntu1 ASCII art library rc libaio1:i386 0.3.109-2ubuntu1 Linux kernel AIO access library - shared library rc libao4:i386 1.1.0-1ubuntu2 Cross Platform Audio Output Library rc libasn1-8-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - ASN.1 library rc libasound2:i386 1.0.25-1ubuntu10.2 shared library for ALSA applications rc libasyncns0:i386 0.8-4 Asynchronous name service query library rc libatk1.0-0:i386 2.4.0-0ubuntu1 ATK accessibility toolkit rc libavahi-client3:i386 0.6.30-5ubuntu2 Avahi client library rc libavahi-common3:i386 0.6.30-5ubuntu2 Avahi common library rc libavc1394-0:i386 0.5.3-1ubuntu2 control IEEE 1394 audio/video devices rc libcaca0:i386 0.99.beta17-2.1ubuntu2 colour ASCII art library rc libcairo-gobject2:i386 1.10.2-6.1ubuntu3 The Cairo 2D vector graphics library (GObject library) rc libcairo2:i386 1.10.2-6.1ubuntu3 The Cairo 2D vector graphics library rc libcanberra-gtk0:i386 0.28-3ubuntu3 GTK+ helper for playing widget event sounds with libcanberra rc libcanberra0:i386 0.28-3ubuntu3 simple abstract interface for playing event sounds rc libcap2:i386 1:2.22-1ubuntu3 support for getting/setting POSIX.1e capabilities rc libcdparanoia0:i386 3.10.2+debian-10ubuntu1 audio extraction tool for sampling CDs (library) rc libcroco3:i386 0.6.5-1ubuntu0.1 Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) parsing and manipulation toolkit rc libcups2:i386 1.5.3-0ubuntu8 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - Core library rc libcupsimage2:i386 1.5.3-0ubuntu8 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - Raster image library rc libcurl3:i386 7.22.0-3ubuntu4.3 Multi-protocol file transfer library (OpenSSL) rc libdatrie1:i386 0.2.5-3 Double-array trie library rc libdbus-glib-1-2:i386 0.98-1ubuntu1.1 simple interprocess messaging system (GLib-based shared library) rc libdbusmenu-qt2:i386 0.9.2-0ubuntu1 Qt implementation of the DBusMenu protocol rc libdrm-nouveau2:i386 2.4.43-0ubuntu0.0.3 Userspace interface to nouveau-specific kernel DRM services -- runtime rc libdv4:i386 1.0.0-3ubuntu1 software library for DV format digital video (runtime lib) rc libesd0:i386 0.2.41-10build3 Enlightened Sound Daemon - Shared libraries rc libexif12:i386 0.6.20-2ubuntu0.1 library to parse EXIF files rc libexpat1:i386 2.0.1-7.2ubuntu1.1 XML parsing C library - runtime library rc libflac8:i386 1.2.1-6 Free Lossless Audio Codec - runtime C library rc libfontconfig1:i386 2.8.0-3ubuntu9.1 generic font configuration library - runtime rc libfreetype6:i386 2.4.8-1ubuntu2.1 FreeType 2 font engine, shared library files rc libgail18:i386 2.24.10-0ubuntu6 GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library -- shared libraries rc libgconf-2-4:i386 3.2.5-0ubuntu2 GNOME configuration database system (shared libraries) rc libgcrypt11:i386 1.5.0-3ubuntu0.2 LGPL Crypto library - runtime library rc libgd2-xpm:i386 2.0.36~rc1~dfsg-6ubuntu2 GD Graphics Library version 2 rc libgdbm3:i386 1.8.3-10 GNU dbm database routines (runtime version) rc libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 2.26.1-1 GDK Pixbuf library rc libgif4:i386 4.1.6-9ubuntu1 library for GIF images (library) rc libgl1-mesa-dri-lts-quantal:i386 9.0.3-0ubuntu0.4~precise1 free implementation of the OpenGL API -- DRI modules rc libgl1-mesa-dri-lts-raring:i386 9.1.4-0ubuntu0.1~precise2 free implementation of the OpenGL API -- DRI modules rc libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 8.0.4-0ubuntu0.6 free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX runtime rc libgl1-mesa-glx-lts-quantal:i386 9.0.3-0ubuntu0.4~precise1 free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX runtime rc libgl1-mesa-glx-lts-raring:i386 9.1.4-0ubuntu0.1~precise2 free implementation of the OpenGL API -- GLX runtime rc libglapi-mesa:i386 8.0.4-0ubuntu0.6 free implementation of the GL API -- shared library rc libglapi-mesa-lts-quantal:i386 9.0.3-0ubuntu0.4~precise1 free implementation of the GL API -- shared library rc libglapi-mesa-lts-raring:i386 9.1.4-0ubuntu0.1~precise2 free implementation of the GL API -- shared library rc libglu1-mesa:i386 8.0.4-0ubuntu0.6 Mesa OpenGL utility library (GLU) rc libgnome-keyring0:i386 3.2.2-2 GNOME keyring services library rc libgnutls26:i386 2.12.14-5ubuntu3.5 GNU TLS library - runtime library rc libgomp1:i386 4.6.3-1ubuntu5 GCC OpenMP (GOMP) support library rc libgpg-error0:i386 1.10-2ubuntu1 library for common error values and messages in GnuPG components rc libgphoto2-2:i386 2.4.13-1ubuntu1.2 gphoto2 digital camera library rc libgphoto2-port0:i386 2.4.13-1ubuntu1.2 gphoto2 digital camera port library rc libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - krb5 GSS-API Mechanism rc libgssapi3-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - GSSAPI support library rc libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0:i386 0.10.36-1ubuntu0.1 GStreamer libraries from the "base" set rc libgstreamer0.10-0:i386 0.10.36-1ubuntu1 Core GStreamer libraries and elements rc libgtk2.0-0:i386 2.24.10-0ubuntu6 GTK+ graphical user interface library rc libgudev-1.0-0:i386 1:175-0ubuntu9.4 GObject-based wrapper library for libudev rc libhcrypto4-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - crypto library rc libheimbase1-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - Base library rc libheimntlm0-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - NTLM support library rc libhx509-5-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - X509 support library rc libibus-1.0-0:i386 1.4.1-3ubuntu1 Intelligent Input Bus - shared library rc libice6:i386 2:1.0.7-2build1 X11 Inter-Client Exchange library rc libidn11:i386 1.23-2 GNU Libidn library, implementation of IETF IDN specifications rc libiec61883-0:i386 1.2.0-0.1ubuntu1 an partial implementation of IEC 61883 rc libieee1284-3:i386 0.2.11-10build1 cross-platform library for parallel port access rc libjack-jackd2-0:i386 1.9.8~dfsg.1-1ubuntu2 JACK Audio Connection Kit (libraries) rc libjasper1:i386 1.900.1-13 JasPer JPEG-2000 runtime library rc libjpeg-turbo8:i386 1.1.90+svn733-0ubuntu4.2 IJG JPEG compliant runtime library. rc libjson0:i386 0.9-1ubuntu1 JSON manipulation library - shared library rc libk5crypto3:i386 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - Crypto Library rc libkeyutils1:i386 1.5.2-2 Linux Key Management Utilities (library) rc libkrb5-26-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - libraries rc libkrb5-3:i386 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries rc libkrb5support0:i386 1.10+dfsg~beta1-2ubuntu0.3 MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - Support library rc liblcms1:i386 1.19.dfsg-1ubuntu3 Little CMS color management library rc libldap-2.4-2:i386 2.4.28-1.1ubuntu4.4 OpenLDAP libraries rc libllvm3.0:i386 3.0-4ubuntu1 Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), runtime library rc libllvm3.1:i386 3.1-2ubuntu1~12.04.1 Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), runtime library rc libllvm3.2:i386 3.2-2ubuntu5~precise1 Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), runtime library rc libltdl7:i386 2.4.2-1ubuntu1 A system independent dlopen wrapper for GNU libtool rc libmad0:i386 0.15.1b-7ubuntu1 MPEG audio decoder library rc libmikmod2:i386 3.1.12-2 Portable sound library rc libmng1:i386 1.0.10-3 Multiple-image Network Graphics library rc libmpg123-0:i386 1.12.1-3.2ubuntu1 MPEG layer 1/2/3 audio decoder -- runtime library rc libmysqlclient18:i386 5.5.32-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 MySQL database client library rc libnspr4:i386 4.9.5-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 NetScape Portable Runtime Library rc libnss3:i386 3.14.3-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 Network Security Service libraries rc libodbc1:i386 2.2.14p2-5ubuntu3 ODBC library for Unix rc libogg0:i386 1.2.2~dfsg-1ubuntu1 Ogg bitstream library rc libopenal1:i386 1:1.13-4ubuntu3 Software implementation of the OpenAL API (shared library) rc liborc-0.4-0:i386 1:0.4.16-1ubuntu2 Library of Optimized Inner Loops Runtime Compiler rc libosmesa6:i386 8.0.4-0ubuntu0.6 Mesa Off-screen rendering extension rc libp11-kit0:i386 0.12-2ubuntu1 Library for loading and coordinating access to PKCS#11 modules - runtime rc libpango1.0-0:i386 1.30.0-0ubuntu3.1 Layout and rendering of internationalized text rc libpixman-1-0:i386 0.24.4-1 pixel-manipulation library for X and cairo rc libproxy1:i386 0.4.7-0ubuntu4.1 automatic proxy configuration management library (shared) rc libpulse-mainloop-glib0:i386 1:1.1-0ubuntu15.4 PulseAudio client libraries (glib support) rc libpulse0:i386 1:1.1-0ubuntu15.4 PulseAudio client libraries rc libqt4-dbus:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 D-Bus module rc libqt4-declarative:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 Declarative module rc libqt4-designer:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 designer module rc libqt4-network:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 network module rc libqt4-opengl:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 OpenGL module rc libqt4-qt3support:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 3 compatibility library for Qt 4 rc libqt4-script:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 script module rc libqt4-scripttools:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 script tools module rc libqt4-sql:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 SQL module rc libqt4-svg:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 SVG module rc libqt4-test:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 test module rc libqt4-xml:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 XML module rc libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 XML patterns module rc libqtcore4:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 core module rc libqtgui4:i386 4:4.8.1-0ubuntu4.4 Qt 4 GUI module rc libqtwebkit4:i386 2.2.1-1ubuntu4 Web content engine library for Qt rc libraw1394-11:i386 2.0.7-1ubuntu1 library for direct access to IEEE 1394 bus (aka FireWire) rc libroken18-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - roken support library rc librsvg2-2:i386 2.36.1-0ubuntu1 SAX-based renderer library for SVG files (runtime) rc librtmp0:i386 2.4~20110711.gitc28f1bab-1 toolkit for RTMP streams (shared library) rc libsamplerate0:i386 0.1.8-4 Audio sample rate conversion library rc libsane:i386 1.0.22-7ubuntu1 API library for scanners rc libsasl2-2:i386 2.1.25.dfsg1-3ubuntu0.1 Cyrus SASL - authentication abstraction library rc libsdl-image1.2:i386 1.2.10-3 image loading library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 1.2 rc libsdl-mixer1.2:i386 1.2.11-7 Mixer library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 1.2, libraries rc libsdl-net1.2:i386 1.2.7-5 Network library for Simple DirectMedia Layer 1.2, libraries rc libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386 2.0.9-1.1ubuntu1 ttf library for Simple DirectMedia Layer with FreeType 2 support rc libsdl1.2debian:i386 1.2.14-6.4ubuntu3 Simple DirectMedia Layer rc libshout3:i386 2.2.2-7ubuntu1 MP3/Ogg Vorbis broadcast streaming library rc libsm6:i386 2:1.2.0-2build1 X11 Session Management library rc libsndfile1:i386 1.0.25-4 Library for reading/writing audio files rc libsoup-gnome2.4-1:i386 2.38.1-1 HTTP library implementation in C -- GNOME support library rc libsoup2.4-1:i386 2.38.1-1 HTTP library implementation in C -- Shared library rc libspeex1:i386 1.2~rc1-3ubuntu2 The Speex codec runtime library rc libspeexdsp1:i386 1.2~rc1-3ubuntu2 The Speex extended runtime library rc libsqlite3-0:i386 3.7.9-2ubuntu1.1 SQLite 3 shared library rc libssl0.9.8:i386 0.9.8o-7ubuntu3.1 SSL shared libraries rc libstdc++5:i386 1:3.3.6-25ubuntu1 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3 rc libstdc++6:i386 4.6.3-1ubuntu5 GNU Standard C++ Library v3 rc libtag1-vanilla:i386 1.7-1ubuntu5 audio meta-data library - vanilla flavour rc libtasn1-3:i386 2.10-1ubuntu1.1 Manage ASN.1 structures (runtime) rc libtdb1:i386 1.2.9-4 Trivial Database - shared library rc libthai0:i386 0.1.16-3 Thai language support library rc libtheora0:i386 1.1.1+dfsg.1-3ubuntu2 The Theora Video Compression Codec rc libtiff4:i386 3.9.5-2ubuntu1.5 Tag Image File Format (TIFF) library rc libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386 0~git20110809-2.1 Texture compression library for Mesa rc libunistring0:i386 0.9.3-5 Unicode string library for C rc libusb-0.1-4:i386 2:0.1.12-20 userspace USB programming library rc libv4l-0:i386 0.8.6-1ubuntu2 Collection of video4linux support libraries rc libv4lconvert0:i386 0.8.6-1ubuntu2 Video4linux frame format conversion library rc libvisual-0.4-0:i386 0.4.0-4 Audio visualization framework rc libvorbis0a:i386 1.3.2-1ubuntu3 The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec (Decoder library) rc libvorbisenc2:i386 1.3.2-1ubuntu3 The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec (Encoder library) rc libvorbisfile3:i386 1.3.2-1ubuntu3 The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec (High Level API) rc libwavpack1:i386 4.60.1-2 audio codec (lossy and lossless) - library rc libwind0-heimdal:i386 1.6~git20120311.dfsg.1-2ubuntu0.1 Heimdal Kerberos - stringprep implementation rc libwrap0:i386 7.6.q-21 Wietse Venema's TCP wrappers library rc libx11-6:i386 2:1.4.99.1-0ubuntu2.2 X11 client-side library rc libx11-xcb1:i386 2:1.4.99.1-0ubuntu2.2 Xlib/XCB interface library rc libxau6:i386 1:1.0.6-4 X11 authorisation library rc libxaw7:i386 2:1.0.9-3ubuntu1 X11 Athena Widget library rc libxcb-dri2-0:i386 1.8.1-1ubuntu0.2 X C Binding, dri2 extension rc libxcb-glx0:i386 1.8.1-1ubuntu0.2 X C Binding, glx extension rc libxcb-render0:i386 1.8.1-1ubuntu0.2 X C Binding, render extension rc libxcb-shm0:i386 1.8.1-1ubuntu0.2 X C Binding, shm extension rc libxcb1:i386 1.8.1-1ubuntu0.2 X C Binding rc libxcomposite1:i386 1:0.4.3-2build1 X11 Composite extension library rc libxcursor1:i386 1:1.1.12-1ubuntu0.1 X cursor management library rc libxdamage1:i386 1:1.1.3-2build1 X11 damaged region extension library rc libxdmcp6:i386 1:1.1.0-4 X11 Display Manager Control Protocol library rc libxext6:i386 2:1.3.0-3ubuntu0.1 X11 miscellaneous extension library rc libxfixes3:i386 1:5.0-4ubuntu4.1 X11 miscellaneous 'fixes' extension library rc libxft2:i386 2.2.0-3ubuntu2 FreeType-based font drawing library for X rc libxi6:i386 2:1.6.0-0ubuntu2.1 X11 Input extension library rc libxinerama1:i386 2:1.1.1-3ubuntu0.1 X11 Xinerama extension library rc libxml2:i386 2.7.8.dfsg-5.1ubuntu4.6 GNOME XML library rc libxmu6:i386 2:1.1.0-3 X11 miscellaneous utility library rc libxp6:i386 1:1.0.1-2ubuntu0.12.04.1 X Printing Extension (Xprint) client library rc libxpm4:i386 1:3.5.9-4 X11 pixmap library rc libxrandr2:i386 2:1.3.2-2ubuntu0.2 X11 RandR extension library rc libxrender1:i386 1:0.9.6-2ubuntu0.1 X Rendering Extension client library rc libxslt1.1:i386 1.1.26-8ubuntu1.3 XSLT 1.0 processing library - runtime library rc libxss1:i386 1:1.2.1-2 X11 Screen Saver extension library rc libxt6:i386 1:1.1.1-2ubuntu0.1 X11 toolkit intrinsics library rc libxtst6:i386 2:1.2.0-4ubuntu0.1 X11 Testing -- Record extension library rc libxv1:i386 2:1.0.6-2ubuntu0.1 X11 Video extension library rc libxxf86vm1:i386 1:1.1.1-2ubuntu0.1 X11 XFree86 video mode extension library rc odbcinst1debian2:i386 2.2.14p2-5ubuntu3 Support library for accessing odbc ini files rc skype-bin:i386 4.2.0.11-0ubuntu0.12.04.2 client for Skype VOIP and instant messaging service - binary files rc sni-qt:i386 0.2.5-0ubuntu3 indicator support for Qt rc wine-compholio:i386 1.7.4~ubuntu12.04.1 The Compholio Edition is a special build of the popular Wine software rc xaw3dg:i386 1.5+E-18.1ubuntu1 Xaw3d widget set

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• How to mount a blu-ray drive?

  - by Stephan Schielke

  Maybe it is for the best to close this question. This has nothing to do with a bluray drive in general anymore. Probably a hardware defect. I will try to test it with a windows system and different cables again... Thx so far. I have a bluray/dvd/cdrom drive with SATA. Ubuntu wont find it under /dev/sd wodim --devices wodim: Overview of accessible drives (1 found) : ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 dev='/dev/sg2' rwrw-- : 'HL-DT-ST' 'BDDVDRW CH08LS10' ------------------------------------------------------------------------- cdrecord -scanbus scsibus2: 2,0,0 200) 'HL-DT-ST' 'BDDVDRW CH08LS10' '2.00' Removable CD-ROM fdisk dont even lists it. Ubuntu only automounts blank DVDs, but neither CDROM nor Blurays. I also changed the sata slot, sata cable and the power cable. The drive works with a windows system. This happens when I try to mount: sudo mount -t auto /dev/scd0 /media/bluray mount: you must specify the filesystem type I tried all filesystems there are. I also installed makemkv. It finds the drive but not the disc. Here is my /dev ls -al /dev total 12 drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4420 2011-11-25 19:36 . drwxr-xr-x 28 root root 4096 2011-11-25 07:12 .. crw------- 1 root root 10, 235 2011-11-25 19:28 autofs -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 630 2011-11-25 19:28 .blkid.tab -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 630 2011-11-25 19:28 .blkid.tab.old drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 700 2011-11-25 19:27 block drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 100 2011-11-25 19:27 bsg crw------- 1 root root 10, 234 2011-11-25 19:28 btrfs-control drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 2011-11-25 19:27 bus drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3820 2011-11-25 19:28 char crw------- 1 root root 5, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 console lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 2011-11-25 19:28 core -> /proc/kcore drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 2011-11-25 19:28 cpu crw------- 1 root root 10, 60 2011-11-25 19:28 cpu_dma_latency drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 140 2011-11-25 19:27 disk crw------- 1 root root 10, 61 2011-11-25 19:28 ecryptfs crw-rw---- 1 root video 29, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 fb0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2011-11-25 19:28 fd -> /proc/self/fd crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 7 2011-11-25 19:28 full crw-rw-rw- 1 root fuse 10, 229 2011-11-25 19:28 fuse crw------- 1 root root 251, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 hidraw0 crw------- 1 root root 251, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 hidraw1 crw------- 1 root root 10, 228 2011-11-25 19:28 hpet lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2011-11-25 19:27 .initramfs -> /run/initramfs drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 220 2011-11-25 19:28 input crw------- 1 root root 1, 11 2011-11-25 19:28 kmsg srw-rw-rw- 1 root root 0 2011-11-25 19:28 log brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 loop0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 loop1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 loop2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 loop3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 4 2011-11-25 19:28 loop4 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 loop5 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 6 2011-11-25 19:28 loop6 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 7 2011-11-25 19:28 loop7 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 2011-11-25 19:27 mapper crw------- 1 root root 10, 227 2011-11-25 19:28 mcelog crw-r----- 1 root kmem 1, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 mem drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 2011-11-25 19:27 net crw------- 1 root root 10, 59 2011-11-25 19:28 network_latency crw------- 1 root root 10, 58 2011-11-25 19:28 network_throughput crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 null crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 nvidia0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 195, 255 2011-11-25 19:28 nvidiactl crw------- 1 root root 1, 12 2011-11-25 19:28 oldmem crw-r----- 1 root kmem 1, 4 2011-11-25 19:28 port crw------- 1 root root 108, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 ppp crw------- 1 root root 10, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 psaux crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 2 2011-11-25 20:00 ptmx drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2011-11-25 19:27 pts brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 ram0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 ram1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 10 2011-11-25 19:28 ram10 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 11 2011-11-25 19:28 ram11 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 12 2011-11-25 19:28 ram12 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 13 2011-11-25 19:28 ram13 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 14 2011-11-25 19:28 ram14 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 15 2011-11-25 19:28 ram15 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 ram2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 ram3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 4 2011-11-25 19:28 ram4 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 ram5 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 6 2011-11-25 19:28 ram6 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 7 2011-11-25 19:28 ram7 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 8 2011-11-25 19:28 ram8 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 1, 9 2011-11-25 19:28 ram9 crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 2011-11-25 19:28 random crw-rw-r--+ 1 root root 10, 62 2011-11-25 19:28 rfkill lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2011-11-25 19:28 rtc -> rtc0 crw------- 1 root root 254, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 rtc0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2011-11-25 19:38 scd0 -> sr0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 sda brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 sda1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 sda2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 sda3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 sda5 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 6 2011-11-25 19:28 sda6 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 16 2011-11-25 19:28 sdb brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 17 2011-11-25 19:28 sdb1 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 sg0 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 sg1 crw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 21, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 sg2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2011-11-25 19:28 shm -> /run/shm crw------- 1 root root 10, 231 2011-11-25 19:28 snapshot drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 280 2011-11-25 19:28 snd brw-rw----+ 1 root cdrom 11, 0 2011-11-25 19:38 sr0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-11-25 19:28 stderr -> /proc/self/fd/2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-11-25 19:28 stdin -> /proc/self/fd/0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2011-11-25 19:28 stdout -> /proc/self/fd/1 crw-rw-rw- 1 root tty 5, 0 2011-11-25 19:35 tty crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 tty0 crw------- 1 root root 4, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 tty1 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 10 2011-11-25 19:28 tty10 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 11 2011-11-25 19:28 tty11 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 12 2011-11-25 19:28 tty12 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 13 2011-11-25 19:28 tty13 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 14 2011-11-25 19:28 tty14 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 15 2011-11-25 19:28 tty15 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 16 2011-11-25 19:28 tty16 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 17 2011-11-25 19:28 tty17 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 18 2011-11-25 19:28 tty18 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 19 2011-11-25 19:28 tty19 crw------- 1 root root 4, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 tty2 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 20 2011-11-25 19:28 tty20 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 21 2011-11-25 19:28 tty21 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 22 2011-11-25 19:28 tty22 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 23 2011-11-25 19:28 tty23 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 24 2011-11-25 19:28 tty24 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 25 2011-11-25 19:28 tty25 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 26 2011-11-25 19:28 tty26 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 27 2011-11-25 19:28 tty27 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 28 2011-11-25 19:28 tty28 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 29 2011-11-25 19:28 tty29 crw------- 1 root root 4, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 tty3 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 30 2011-11-25 19:28 tty30 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 31 2011-11-25 19:28 tty31 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 32 2011-11-25 19:28 tty32 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 33 2011-11-25 19:28 tty33 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 34 2011-11-25 19:28 tty34 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 35 2011-11-25 19:28 tty35 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 36 2011-11-25 19:28 tty36 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 37 2011-11-25 19:28 tty37 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 38 2011-11-25 19:28 tty38 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 39 2011-11-25 19:28 tty39 crw------- 1 root root 4, 4 2011-11-25 19:28 tty4 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 40 2011-11-25 19:28 tty40 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 41 2011-11-25 19:28 tty41 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 42 2011-11-25 19:28 tty42 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 43 2011-11-25 19:28 tty43 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 44 2011-11-25 19:28 tty44 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 45 2011-11-25 19:28 tty45 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 46 2011-11-25 19:28 tty46 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 47 2011-11-25 19:28 tty47 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 48 2011-11-25 19:28 tty48 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 49 2011-11-25 19:28 tty49 crw------- 1 root root 4, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 tty5 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 50 2011-11-25 19:28 tty50 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 51 2011-11-25 19:28 tty51 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 52 2011-11-25 19:28 tty52 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 53 2011-11-25 19:28 tty53 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 54 2011-11-25 19:28 tty54 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 55 2011-11-25 19:28 tty55 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 56 2011-11-25 19:28 tty56 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 57 2011-11-25 19:28 tty57 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 58 2011-11-25 19:28 tty58 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 59 2011-11-25 19:28 tty59 crw------- 1 root root 4, 6 2011-11-25 19:28 tty6 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 60 2011-11-25 19:28 tty60 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 61 2011-11-25 19:28 tty61 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 62 2011-11-25 19:28 tty62 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 63 2011-11-25 19:28 tty63 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 7 2011-11-25 19:28 tty7 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 8 2011-11-25 19:28 tty8 crw--w---- 1 root tty 4, 9 2011-11-25 19:28 tty9 crw------- 1 root root 5, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyprintk crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 64 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS0 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 65 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS1 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 74 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS10 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 75 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS11 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 76 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS12 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 77 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS13 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 78 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS14 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 79 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS15 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 80 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS16 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 81 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS17 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 82 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS18 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 83 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS19 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 66 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS2 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 84 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS20 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 85 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS21 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 86 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS22 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 87 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS23 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 88 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS24 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 89 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS25 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 90 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS26 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 91 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS27 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 92 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS28 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 93 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS29 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 67 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS3 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 94 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS30 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 95 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS31 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 68 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS4 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 69 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS5 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 70 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS6 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 71 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS7 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 72 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS8 crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 4, 73 2011-11-25 19:28 ttyS9 d rwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 2011-11-25 19:28 .udev crw-r----- 1 root root 10, 223 2011-11-25 19:28 uinput crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 9 2011-11-25 19:28 urandom drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 60 2011-11-25 19:27 usb crw------- 1 root root 252, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon0 crw------- 1 root root 252, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon1 crw------- 1 root root 252, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon2 crw------- 1 root root 252, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon3 crw------- 1 root root 252, 4 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon4 crw------- 1 root root 252, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon5 crw------- 1 root root 252, 6 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon6 crw------- 1 root root 252, 7 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon7 crw------- 1 root root 252, 8 2011-11-25 19:28 usbmon8 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 80 2011-11-25 19:28 v4l crw------- 1 root root 10, 57 2011-11-25 19:28 vboxdrv crw------- 1 root root 10, 56 2011-11-25 19:28 vboxnetctl drwxr-x--- 4 root vboxusers 80 2011-11-25 19:28 vboxusb crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 1 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs1 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 2 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs2 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 3 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs3 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 4 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs4 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs5 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 6 2011-11-25 19:28 vcs6 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 128 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 129 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa1 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 130 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa2 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 131 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa3 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 132 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa4 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 133 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa5 crw-rw---- 1 root tty 7, 134 2011-11-25 19:28 vcsa6 crw------- 1 root root 10, 63 2011-11-25 19:28 vga_arbiter crw-rw----+ 1 root video 81, 0 2011-11-25 19:28 video0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 5 2011-11-25 19:28 zero sg_scan -i gives me: sudo sg_scan -i /dev/sg0: scsi0 channel=0 id=0 lun=0 [em] ATA ST31000524NS SN12 [rmb=0 cmdq=0 pqual=0 pdev=0x0] /dev/sg1: scsi0 channel=0 id=1 lun=0 [em] ATA WDC WD15EADS-00S 01.0 [rmb=0 cmdq=0 pqual=0 pdev=0x0] /dev/sg2: scsi2 channel=0 id=0 lun=0 [em] HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW CH08LS10 2.00 [rmb=1 cmdq=0 pqual=0 pdev=0x5] sg_map gives me: /dev/sg0 /dev/sda /dev/sg1 /dev/sdb /dev/sg2 /dev/scd0 lsscsi -l gives me: [0:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31000524NS SN12 /dev/sda state=running queue_depth=1 scsi_level=6 type=0 device_blocked=0 timeout=30 [0:0:1:0] disk ATA WDC WD15EADS-00S 01.0 /dev/sdb state=running queue_depth=1 scsi_level=6 type=0 device_blocked=0 timeout=30 [2:0:0:0] cd/dvd HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW CH08LS10 2.00 /dev/sr0 state=running queue_depth=1 scsi_level=6 type=5 device_blocked=0 timeout=30 my udf mod is: filename: /lib/modules/3.0.0-14-generic/kernel/fs/udf/udf.ko license: GPL description: Universal Disk Format Filesystem author: Ben Fennema srcversion: 6ABDE012374D96B9685B8E5 depends: crc-itu-t vermagic: 3.0.0-14-generic SMP mod_unload modversions Do I need special drivers or mods enabled? Do I need to change some BIOS settings? edit: Somehow I am now able to fire the mount command without any filesystem errors, but now I get: mount: no medium found on /dev/sr0

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 27, 2010New ProjectsActive Directory User Properties Change: A complete application in VS 2005 and VB.NET, for Request Request in User Details in Active Directory, with flow to HR and then to IT for approval ...AVR Terminal: A Windows application for connecting to an AVR via RS232 serial or USB-to-COM FTDI ports. Works on Arduino, Bare Bones Board, and any custom board...Battle Droids: AVR-based Network Combat!: A Battle Droid is an AVR® microcontroller running the BattleDroid firmware. This firmware turns your AVR into a lean, mean, fighting machine, and ...Camp Foundation: Camp Foundationchakma: chakma is a question - answer based web application to make people get questions from anybody around the world and being able to answer them. c...Document.Editor: Document.Editor is a multitab text editor for Windows. It includes plain and rich text format support, multi tab interface so you can edit multiple...Dot Net Marche Music Store Demo Application: This is a demo application that the DotNetMarche user gorup (www.dotnetmarche.org) use to make experiments and prepare demos for our workshopselivators: a monitor which enables the user to view the movement of the elivators in a buildingExtended SSIS Package Execute: The SSIS package execute task is flawed as it does not support passing variables. Here we have a custom task that will pass items in a dataflow as...File tools: File toolsFileExplorer.NET: FileExplorer.NET is a .net usercontrol which tries to mimic the Windows FileExplorer treeview.Kazuku: ASP.NET MVC 2 Content Management SystemKSharp Ajax Control Toolkit Library: Built ontop of the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit, this library offers enhanced versions of the controls found in the Ajax Control Toolkit....Nitrous - An Aspx ViewEngine for ASP.NET MVC: Near drop-in replacement ASP.NET ViewEngine for MVC.Open Data Protocol - Client Libraries: This is an Open Source release of the .NET and Silverlight Client Libraries for the Open Data Protocol (OData). For more information on odata, see ...ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff: BI.SmartDiff is a helper to connect the functionality of BIDS Helper – SmartDiff to TortoiseSVN. BIDS Helper – SmartDiff helps you to get more read...RicciWebSiteSystem: soon websiteSynapse:Silverlight A Simple Silverlight Framework: Synapse:Silverlight is a simplified framework for Silverlight. It's purpose is to help developers and designers produce basic LOB solutions that do...TestProjectMB: Testing Team Foundation ServerThoughtWorks Cruise Notification Interceptor: Cruise notification interceptorThreadSafeControls: ThreadSafeControls is a C# project that greatly simplifies the process of transitioning Windows Forms applications to a multithreaded environment b...Unscrambler: Unscrambler is a multitouch WPF word game built with MVVM Light in order to show how to use the touch maniupation and inertia features included in ...Web Utilities: web utilitiesNew Releases7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.7.1 Stable: Bug Solved : Presence of junction.exe is wrongly referred to 7z.exeAVR Terminal: AVR Terminal v0.2: Here is an Alpha-almost-BETA release of the AVR Terminal. That being said, I use it almost daily and it shouldn't break anything on your system, b...Bistro FSharp Extensions: 0.9.7.0: This is the VS 2010 release of BistroFS extensions. This release focused on usability, adding key functionality such as resource aliasing and secur...Bojinx: Bojinx Dialog Management V1.0: Stable release of the Bojinx Dialog Management library.BOWIE: BOWIE 2010: This new version works on Outlook 2007/2010 and TFS 2008/2010 RTM. Details about all features in this version on the Home Page : http://bowie.code...Catharsis: Catharsis 2.5 on catarsa.com: The Catharsis framework has finally its own portal http://catarsa.com Example - documented steps to create Web-Application http://catarsa.com/Arti...Colorful Expression: Expression Blend 3: Alpha Version, Read Issues and Installing! Colorful Expression is an add-in for Expression Blend and Expression Design that brings you the Adobe K...Colorful Expression: Expression Blend 4: Read Issues and Installing! Colorful Expression is an add-in for Expression Blend and Expression Design that brings you the Adobe Kuler and ColorLo...Courier: Version 1.0: This release includes integration with the Reactive Framework for more elegant message handling and allowing more succinct client code. Full suite...CRM 4.0 Contract Utilities: Release 1.0: Project Description List of Contract Utilities (i.e. custom workflow actions) 1. Change contract status from Active to Draft 2. Copy Contract (with...Document.Editor: 0.9.0: Whats New?: New icon set Bug fix'sDotNetNuke® Blog: 04.00.00: Minimum Required DNN Version: 4.06.02General Code organization * Converted project to .NET 3.5 * Converted solution to Visual Stud...EPiAbstractions: EPiAbstractions 1.2: Updated for EPiServer CMS 6. Only features abstractions for EPiServer CMS. For abstractions for EPiServer.Common and EPiServer.Community use versio...Fluent ViewModel Configuration for WPF (MVVM): FluentViewModel Alpha2: Added support for view model validation using FluentValidation (http://fluentvalidation.codeplex.com/) Fixed exception from Blend while in design...GArphics: Beta v0.9: Beta v0.9. Practically all of the planned features have been implemented and are available to the users. For the version 1.0 mainly just some minor...HTML Ruby: 6.22.2.1: Fixed a bug where HTML Ruby's options window will generate entries in the error log when applying option changes (regression from 6.21.8)HTML Ruby: 6.22.3: Add/remove stop spacing event listener as needed for possible fix to 4620iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3768 Beta 3b: Beta 3 requires iTunes 9.1.0.79 or later A Librarian status panel showing active and queued Librarian scanners. This will be hidden behind the "bi...LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2.3: Version 3.2.3Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in W...Maintainance Schedule: Maintenance Scheduler: The first Alpha release of the project.NetSockets: NetSockets (1.2): The NetSockets library (DLL)NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.2: NSIS Autorun 0.1.1 This release includes source code, application binary, and example materials.OpenSceneGraph glsl samples: OsgGlslSamples Win32 binaries: Project binary release for Windows. The effects shown are: Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, DoF with alpha channel, Fire effects, HDR, Light Ma...ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff: ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff 0.6.1: First public versionpatterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Code Drop 4 - Content Complete: This release includes documentation and all code samples intended for this first guide. As before, this code release builds on the previous one an...Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver: Custom Solver Package: This is the custom solvers packaged together. To use simply include the dll in your project and add [assembly: PexCustomArithmeticSolver] to your P...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn v08 x86: New FeatureFrom this version forward, PokeIn will define a way between the main page and client side automaticly based to security level. Add "pub...Proxi [Proxy Interface]: Proxi Release 1.0.0.426: Proxi Release 1.0.0.426QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.3: This release includes recurring quests! Now you can set a quest to uncomplete itself every X minutes, hours, or days! And the quests still retain t...Rensea Image Viewer: RIV 0.4.5: RIV Fix Version. You would need .NET Framework 4.0 to make it run RIVU Improved Version. With separated RIV up-loader, to upload images to Renjian...SCC Switch Provider: Provides a GUI to Switch Source Code Control Provi: Transferred from GotDotNet Workplace. Initial public Release. Downloaded ~922 times from original post.sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.7a (Alpha): + Fixed: XOR text encoding + Fixed: adding timed rewards missing values + Fixed: occupations in clone()Synapse:Silverlight A Simple Silverlight Framework: Synapse Silverlight Alpha Release: Initial Road-map is being defined.ThoughtWorks Cruise Notification Interceptor: 1.0.0: Initial release.UDC indexes parser: UDC indexex parser Beta 2: Добавлена возможность работать с распределением определителей как если бы генератор был бы LALR(2) То что осталось: Если текстовое дополнение начи...Unscrambler: Release 1.0: Here's the first release of Unscrambler.WinXound: WinXound 3.3.0 Beta 2 for Mac OsX: New: Code Repository (for UDO and personal code) New: Format Code - Added the ability to format only the selected text of the code New: Explore...WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.2.2: - Fixed issue some users were having when the application is minimised.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationParticle Plot PivotBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterN2 CMSDotNetZip Library

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• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 26, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 26, 2010New Projects.NET settings class generator T4 templates: A couple of T4 templates to generate a Settings class for your .NET project. Allows you to define your application settings in an XML file and have...AlphaPagedList: AlphaPagedList makes it easier for .Net developers to write paging code. Based on PagedList it allows you to take any List<T> and split it based on...C# Projects: C# ProjectsChitme: Aenean feugiat pharetra enim rhoncus viverra. In at nunc nec sem varius bibendum. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam fringilla facilisis massa et eleife...CloudCache - Distributed Cache Tier with Azure: Cloudcache makes it easier for you to manage and deploy a distributed caching tier to Windows Azure. Included is a web-dashboard in MVC 2.0, Memcac...Composer: Composer is an extensible Compositional Architecture framework, providing a set of functionality such as Inversion of Control container (IoC), Depe...Data Connection Suite: Data Connection Suite is a set of easy to use data connection string builder dialogs & controls ready to be integrated in any .NET application.DatabaseHandler: Database HandlerEPiServer Blog Page Provider: A example page provider implementation for EPiServer that supports external blog sources for pages, Blogger and WordPress supported out of the box ...Extended MessageBox: ExtendedMessageBox makes it easier to display messages from your Windows applications. Based on the built-in .NET MessageBox class functionality, i...FluentPath: FluentPath implements a modern wrapper around System.IO, using modern patterns such as fluent APIs and Lambdas. By using FluentPath instead of Syst...Halcyone : Silverlight without pain: Halcyone is application framework for Silverlight that should make live of developers easier =)IlluminaRT: Real-time renderingme2: Mista Engine 2MessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: This is really simple lib project for use RTL in MessegeBox class. This just for short code and default option for RTL.MS Word Automation Service: A MS Word Automation service that comsumes a Word template and combines with XML to produce a word document. Currently in production. Must add some...SharePoint - Site Request InfoPath Form Template: This template allow portal user to enter initial information for requesting of creating a new SharePoint site. TextFlow - Text Editor: TextFlow is a fast and light text editor that simplifies day-to-day tasks. You can create letters and documents through TextFlow. It also includes ...TiledLib: A library for using Tiled (http://mapeditor.org) levels in XNA Game Studio projects. Includes a content pipeline extension and runtime library.wcf learning 2010: myWCFprojectsNew Releases.NET settings class generator T4 templates: Example 1: An example project containing the T4 templates and associated files. SingleSite - generate settings for a single site MultiSite - generate setting...AccessibilityChecker: Accessibility Checker V0.1: SharePoint Accessibility Checker V0.1AlphaPagedList: AlphaPagedList v0.9: Initial release of AlphaPagedListASP.Net RIA Controls: Version 1.1 Beta: New XHTML compliant version with alternative content support if no plugin installed.Business & System Analysis Templates and Best Practices: R 00: You may find out here the structured on my own materials from from Luxoft ReqLabs 2009 + short presentation about System Analysis and Modelling. Th...CloudCache - Distributed Cache Tier with Azure: v1.0.0.0: First release! More information at http://blog.shutupandcode.net/?p=935CycleMania Starter Kit EAP - ASP.NET 4 Problem - Design - Solution: Cyclemania 0.08.39: implemented client side functions on remainder of account pagesDevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 3d: Alpha 3d is a general bug fix -tweaking pagination, navigation, packaging, file system storage, page validation, security, locals, and linked views.Digital Media Processing Project 1: Image Processor: Image Processor 1.01: Supports opening files through Windows Explorer or by drag and drop.Extended MessageBox: ExtendedMessageBox Runtime Version 1.2: Initial releaseExtended MessageBox: SourceCode for Version 1.2: Initial SourceCodeFluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml, debug and release version) Showcase Application Samples Foundation (T...FluentPath: FluentPath Beta: The Beta release of FluentPath.HaterAide ORM: HaterAide ORM 1.5: This version is a, more or less, rewrite of the code base. Also many new features have been added in this release: 1) Foreign keys are now added to...iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3735 Beta: V1.2 allows you to synchronize one or more iTunes playlists to a USB MP3 player. This continues the evolution yet maintains the minimalistic appro...LogWin-Logging Your Computer Activities: LogWin-Logging your computer activities: This program is logging your computer activities and display them as table and pie chart. It is made by native C , HTML Dialog and Google Chart API.MessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: MessegeBoxRTL-1.0.0.0_BIN: My First upload.. This is binary release only. Have fun.MessegeBox RightToLeft Lib: MessegeBoxRTL-1.0.0.0_SRC: My first upload.. This is source code with binary. Have fun.MS Word Automation Service: Alpha: In production already, but who cares. It works.MultiMenu ASP.NET Cascading Menu WebControl: MultiMenu 2.6 ASP.NET Menu: Fixed problems that prevented the menu from working with the XHTML DocTypes Added support for IE 7-8 Added XmlLoading and XmlLoaded events Ad...netgod: LanyoWebBrowser: Lanyo ERP ClientnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.: nopCommerce 1.50: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/ReleaseNotes.aspx).Open NFe: Open NFe v1.9.7: Fontes do DANFe 1.9.7 Trim na conversão TXT para XMLpatterns & practices - Smart Client Guidance: Smart Client Software Factory 2010 Beta Source: The Smart Client Software Factory 2010 provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite smart cl...Physics Helper for Silverlight, WPF, Blend, and Farseer: PhysicsHelper 3.0.0.5 Alpha: This release supports Windows Phone 7 Series Development, along with the Silverlight 3 and WPF support. It requires Visual Studio 2010, plus the Wi...Protein Insight: ProteinInsight V2.0.1: Protein Insight is protein structure visualization system. Visualization rendering engine is based on native C and Direct3D, plug-in is based on CL...PSFGeneric: ERP / CRM business management and administration: PSFGeneric 1.4.0.9000 Manual and power-ups ASNIA: PSFGeneric 1.4.0.9000 Tareas 2.1.0 MySQL Persistente 1.0.3 TM-U220 40 col. Driver 1.0.0 Gestor Contable Básico 1.1.2.1 Cafetería 1.1.6 Catalogo 1....QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.2: Primary new feature: Import/Export Quest Log. Deleting anything will cause an automatic export prior to deletion, automatically backing up your log...Reusable Library: V1.0.5: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developer.Reusable Library Demo: Reusable Library Demo v1.0.3: A demonstration of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerSharePoint - Site Request InfoPath Form Template: SharePoint - Site Request InfoPath Form Template: This template allow portal user to enter initial information for requesting of creating a new SharePoint site To install: 1. Run the SiteRequest.m...Silverlight Gantt Chart: Silverlight Gantt Chart 1.2: Updates include ability to add GanttNodeSections that allow for multiple GanttItems in a single row.Spiral Architecture Driven Development (SADD): SADD v.1.0: This is the First complete Release with the NEW materials now all in English ! 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This download is for prebuilt DLLs and a demo project. For the full source code, use the Source Code tab to download the...UnGrouper: Current build: This is a preview build. Hide and show the main window with winkey+a. IMPORTANT NOTE: You must close all applications before launching this build ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30325.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF Metal: WCFMetal 0.3.0.0: WCFMetal 0.3.0.0Copyright © 2010 John Leitch Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Summary By utilizing LINQ to SQL gene...Web Log Analyzer: Release Indihiang 1.0: For installation and how to use, please read Indihiang portal: http://wiki.indihiang.com What's New in Indihiang 1.0 ? check http://geeks.netindone...異世界の新着動画: Ver. 10-03-25: ニコ生仕様に対応Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineFacebook Developer ToolkitLINQ to TwitterFluent Ribbon Control SuiteTable2ClassNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcel

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• Solaris: What comes next?

  - by alanc

  As you probably know by now, a few months ago, we released Solaris 11 after years of development. That of course means we now need to figure out what comes next - if Solaris 11 is “The First Cloud OS”, then what do we need to make future releases of Solaris be, to be modern and competitive when they're released? So we've been having planning and brainstorming meetings, and I've captured some notes here from just one of those we held a couple weeks ago with a number of the Silicon Valley based engineers. Now before someone sees an idea here and calls their product rep wanting to know what's up, please be warned what follows are rough ideas, and as I'll discuss later, none of them have any committment, schedule, working code, or even plan for integration in any possible future product at this time. (Please don't make me force you to read the full Oracle future product disclaimer here, you should know it by heart already from the front of every Oracle product slide deck.) To start with, we did some background research, looking at ideas from other Oracle groups, and competitive OS'es. We examined what was hot in the technology arena and where the interesting startups were heading. We then looked at Solaris to see where we could apply those ideas. Making Network Admins into Socially Networking Admins We all know an admin who has grumbled about being the only one stuck late at work to fix a problem on the server, or having to work the weekend alone to do scheduled maintenance. But admins are humans (at least most are), and crave companionship and community with their fellow humans. And even when they're alone in the server room, they're never far from a network connection, allowing access to the wide world of wonders on the Internet. Our solution here is not building a new social network - there's enough of those already, and Oracle even has its own Oracle Mix social network already. What we proposed is integrating Solaris features to help engage our system admins with these social networks, building community and bringing them recognition in the workplace, using achievement recognition systems as found in many popular gaming platforms. For instance, if you had a Facebook account, and a group of admin friends there, you could register it with our Social Network Utility For Facebook, and then your friends might see: Alan earned the achievement Critically Patched (April 2012) for patching all his servers. Matt is only at 50% - encourage him to complete this achievement today! To avoid any undue risk of advertising who has unpatched servers that are easier targets for hackers to break into, this information would be tightly protected via Facebook's world-renowned privacy settings to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. A related form of gamification we considered was replacing simple certfications with role-playing-game-style Experience Levels. Instead of just knowing an admin passed a test establishing a given level of competency, these would provide recruiters with a more detailed level of how much real-world experience an admin has. Achievements such as the one above would feed into it, but larger numbers of experience points would be gained by tougher or more critical tasks - such as recovering a down system, or migrating a service to a new platform. (As long as it was an Oracle platform of course - migrating to an HP or IBM platform would cause the admin to lose points with us.) Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a good way to prevent (if you will) “gaming” the system. For instance, a disgruntled admin might decide to start ignoring warnings from FMA that a part is beginning to fail or skip preventative maintenance, in the hopes that they'd cause a catastrophic failure to earn more points for bolstering their resume as they look for a job elsewhere, and not worrying about the effect on your business of a mission critical server going down. More Z's for ZFS Our suggested new feature for ZFS was inspired by the worlds most successful Z-startup of all time: Zynga. Using the Social Network Utility For Facebook described above, we'd tie it in with ZFS monitoring to help you out when you find yourself in a jam needing more disk space than you have, and can't wait a month to get a purchase order through channels to buy more. Instead with the click of a button you could post to your group: Alan can't find any space in his server farm! Can you help? Friends could loan you some space on their connected servers for a few weeks, knowing that you'd return the favor when needed. ZFS would create a new filesystem for your use on their system, and securely share it with your system using Kerberized NFS. If none of your friends have space, then you could buy temporary use space in small increments at affordable rates right there in Facebook, using your Facebook credits, and then file an expense report later, after the urgent need has passed. Universal Single Sign On One thing all the engineers agreed on was that we still had far too many "Single" sign ons to deal with in our daily work. On the web, every web site used to have its own password database, forcing us to hope we could remember what login name was still available on each site when we signed up, and which unique password we came up with to avoid having to disclose our other passwords to a new site. In recent years, the web services world has finally been reducing the number of logins we have to manage, with many services allowing you to login using your identity from Google, Twitter or Facebook. So we proposed following their lead, introducing PAM modules for web services - no more would you have to type in whatever login name IT assigned and try to remember the password you chose the last time password aging forced you to change it - you'd simply choose which web service you wanted to authenticate against, and would login to your Solaris account upon reciept of a cookie from their identity service. Pinning notes to the cloud We also all noted that we all have our own pile of notes we keep in our daily work - in text files in our home directory, in notebooks we carry around, on white boards in offices and common areas, on sticky notes on our monitors, or on scraps of paper pinned to our bulletin boards. The contents of the notes vary, some are things just for us, some are useful for our groups, some we would share with the world. For instance, when our group moved to a new building a couple years ago, we had a white board in the hallway listing all the NIS & DNS servers, subnets, and other network configuration information we needed to set up our Solaris machines after the move. Similarly, as Solaris 11 was finishing and we were all learning the new network configuration commands, we shared notes in wikis and e-mails with our fellow engineers. Users may also remember one of the popular features of Sun's old BigAdmin site was a section for sharing scripts and tips such as these. Meanwhile, the online "pin board" at Pinterest is taking the web by storm. So we thought, why not mash those up to solve this problem? We proposed a new BigAddPin site where users could “pin” notes, command snippets, configuration information, and so on. For instance, once they had worked out the ideal Automated Installation manifest for their app server, they could pin it up to share with the rest of their group, or choose to make it public as an example for the world. Localized data, such as our group's notes on the servers for our subnet, could be shared only to users connecting from that subnet. And notes that they didn't want others to see at all could be marked private, such as the list of phone numbers to call for late night pizza delivery to the machine room, the birthdays and anniversaries they can never remember but would be sleeping on the couch if they forgot, or the list of automatically generated completely random, impossible to remember root passwords to all their servers. For greater integration with Solaris, we'd put support right into the command shells — redirect output to a pinned note, set your path to include pinned notes as scripts you can run, or bring up your recent shell history and pin a set of commands to save for the next time you need to remember how to do that operation. Location service for Solaris servers A longer term plan would involve convincing the hardware design groups to put GPS locators with wireless transmitters in future server designs. This would help both admins and service personnel trying to find servers in todays massive data centers, and could feed into location presence apps to help show potential customers that while they may not see many Solaris machines on the desktop any more, they are all around. For instance, while walking down Wall Street it might show “There are over 2000 Solaris computers in this block.” [Note: this proposal was made before the recent media coverage of a location service aggregrator app with less noble intentions, and in hindsight, we failed to consider what happens when such data similarly falls into the wrong hands. We certainly wouldn't want our app to be misinterpreted as “There are over $20 million dollars of SPARC servers in this building, waiting for you to steal them.” so it's probably best it was rejected.] Harnessing the power of the GPU for Security Most modern OS'es make use of the widespread availability of high powered GPU hardware in today's computers, with desktop environments requiring 3-D graphics acceleration, whether in Ubuntu Unity, GNOME Shell on Fedora, or Aero Glass on Windows, but we haven't yet made Solaris fully take advantage of this, beyond our basic offering of Compiz on the desktop. Meanwhile, more businesses are interested in increasing security by using biometric authentication, but must also comply with laws in many countries preventing discrimination against employees with physical limations such as missing eyes or fingers, not to mention the lost productivity when employees can't login due to tinted contacts throwing off a retina scan or a paper cut changing their fingerprint appearance until it heals. Fortunately, the two groups considering these problems put their heads together and found a common solution, using 3D technology to enable authentication using the one body part all users are guaranteed to have - pam_phrenology.so, a new PAM module that uses an array USB attached web cams (or just one if the user is willing to spin their chair during login) to take pictures of the users head from all angles, create a 3D model and compare it to the one in the authentication database. While Mythbusters has shown how easy it can be to fool common fingerprint scanners, we have not yet seen any evidence that people can impersonate the shape of another user's cranium, no matter how long they spend beating their head against the wall to reshape it. This could possibly be extended to group users, using modern versions of some of the older phrenological studies, such as giving all users with long grey beards access to the System Architect role, or automatically placing users with pointy spikes in their hair into an easy use mode. Unfortunately, there are still some unsolved technical challenges we haven't figured out how to overcome. Currently, a visit to the hair salon causes your existing authentication to expire, and some users have found that shaving their heads is the only way to avoid bad hair days becoming bad login days. Reaction to these ideas After gathering all our notes on these ideas from the engineering brainstorming meeting, we took them in to present to our management. Unfortunately, most of their reaction cannot be printed here, and they chose not to accept any of these ideas as they were, but they did have some feedback for us to consider as they sent us back to the drawing board. They strongly suggested our ideas would be better presented if we weren't trying to decipher ink blotches that had been smeared by the condensation when we put our pint glasses on the napkins we were taking notes on, and to that end let us know they would not be approving any more engineering offsites in Irish themed pubs on the Friday of a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. (Hopefully they mean that situation specifically and aren't going to deny the funding for travel to this year's X.Org Developer's Conference just because it happens to be in Bavaria and ending on the Friday of the weekend Oktoberfest starts.) They recommended our research techniques could be improved over just sitting around reading blogs and checking our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts, such as considering input from alternate viewpoints on topics such as gamification. They also mentioned that Oracle hadn't fully adopted some of Sun's common practices and we might have to try harder to get those to be accepted now that we are one unified company. So as I said at the beginning, don't pester your sales rep just yet for any of these, since they didn't get approved, but if you have better ideas, pass them on and maybe they'll get into our next batch of planning.

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• Detecting HTML5/CSS3 Features using Modernizr

  - by dwahlin

  HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies such as canvas and web sockets bring a lot of useful new features to the table that can take Web applications to the next level. These new technologies allow applications to be built using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript allowing them to be viewed on a variety of form factors including tablets and phones. Although HTML5 features offer a lot of promise, it’s not realistic to develop applications using the latest technologies without worrying about supporting older browsers in the process. If history has taught us anything it’s that old browsers stick around for years and years which means developers have to deal with backward compatibility issues. This is especially true when deploying applications to the Internet that target the general public. This begs the question, “How do you move forward with HTML5 and CSS3 technologies while gracefully handling unsupported features in older browsers?” Although you can write code by hand to detect different HTML5 and CSS3 features, it’s not always straightforward. For example, to check for canvas support you need to write code similar to the following:   <script> window.onload = function () { if (canvasSupported()) { alert('canvas supported'); } }; function canvasSupported() { var canvas = document.createElement('canvas'); return (canvas.getContext && canvas.getContext('2d')); } </script> If you want to check for local storage support the following check can be made. It’s more involved than it should be due to a bug in older versions of Firefox. <script> window.onload = function () { if (localStorageSupported()) { alert('local storage supported'); } }; function localStorageSupported() { try { return ('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] != null); } catch(e) {} return false; } </script> Looking through the previous examples you can see that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to checking browsers for HTML5 and CSS3 features. It takes a lot of work to test every possible scenario and every version of a given browser. Fortunately, you don’t have to resort to writing custom code to test what HTML5/CSS3 features a given browser supports. By using a script library called Modernizr you can add checks for different HTML5/CSS3 features into your pages with a minimal amount of code on your part. Let’s take a look at some of the key features Modernizr offers.   Getting Started with Modernizr The first time I heard the name “Modernizr” I thought it “modernized” older browsers by added missing functionality. In reality, Modernizr doesn’t actually handle adding missing features or “modernizing” older browsers. The Modernizr website states, “The name Modernizr actually stems from the goal of modernizing our development practices (and ourselves)”. Because it relies on feature detection rather than browser sniffing (a common technique used in the past – that never worked that great), Modernizr definitely provides a more modern way to test features that a browser supports and can even handle loading additional scripts called shims or polyfills that fill in holes that older browsers may have. It’s a great tool to have in your arsenal if you’re a web developer. Modernizr is available at http://modernizr.com. Two different types of scripts are available including a development script and custom production script. To generate a production script, the site provides a custom script generation tool rather than providing a single script that has everything under the sun for HTML5/CSS3 feature detection. Using the script generation tool you can pick the specific test functionality that you need and ignore everything that you don’t need. That way the script is kept as small as possible. An example of the custom script download screen is shown next. Notice that specific CSS3, HTML5, and related feature tests can be selected. Once you’ve downloaded your custom script you can add it into your web page using the standard <script> element and you’re ready to start using Modernizr. <script src="Scripts/Modernizr.js" type="text/javascript"></script>   Modernizr and the HTML Element Once you’ve add a script reference to Modernizr in a page it’ll go to work for you immediately. In fact, by adding the script several different CSS classes will be added to the page’s <html> element at runtime. These classes define what features the browser supports and what features it doesn’t support. Features that aren’t supported get a class name of “no-FeatureName”, for example “no-flexbox”. Features that are supported get a CSS class name based on the feature such as “canvas” or “websockets”. An example of classes added when running a page in Chrome is shown next:   <html class=" js flexbox canvas canvastext webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage websqldatabase indexeddb hashchange history draganddrop websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize borderimage borderradius boxshadow textshadow opacity cssanimations csscolumns cssgradients cssreflections csstransforms csstransforms3d csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage webworkers applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths"> Here’s an example of what the <html> element looks like at runtime with Internet Explorer 9:   <html class=" js no-flexbox canvas canvastext no-webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage no-websqldatabase no-indexeddb hashchange no-history draganddrop no-websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize no-borderimage borderradius boxshadow no-textshadow opacity no-cssanimations no-csscolumns no-cssgradients no-cssreflections csstransforms no-csstransforms3d no-csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage no-webworkers no-applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths">   When using Modernizr it’s a common practice to define an <html> element in your page with a no-js class added as shown next:   <html class="no-js">   You’ll see starter projects such as HTML5 Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com) or Initializr (http://initializr.com) follow this approach (see my previous post for more information on HTML5 Boilerplate). By adding the no-js class it’s easy to tell if a browser has JavaScript enabled or not. If JavaScript is disabled then no-js will stay on the <html> element. If JavaScript is enabled, no-js will be removed by Modernizr and a js class will be added along with other classes that define supported/unsupported features. Working with HTML5 and CSS3 Features You can use the CSS classes added to the <html> element directly in your CSS files to determine what style properties to use based upon the features supported by a given browser. For example, the following CSS can be used to render a box shadow for browsers that support that feature and a simple border for browsers that don’t support the feature: .boxshadow #MyContainer { border: none; -webkit-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; -moz-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; } .no-boxshadow #MyContainer { border: 2px solid black; }   If a browser supports box-shadows the boxshadow CSS class will be added to the <html> element by Modernizr. It can then be associated with a given element. This example associates the boxshadow class with a div with an id of MyContainer. If the browser doesn’t support box shadows then the no-boxshadow class will be added to the <html> element and it can be used to render a standard border around the div. This provides a great way to leverage new CSS3 features in supported browsers while providing a graceful fallback for older browsers. In addition to using the CSS classes that Modernizr provides on the <html> element, you also use a global Modernizr object that’s created. This object exposes different properties that can be used to detect the availability of specific HTML5 or CSS3 features. For example, the following code can be used to detect canvas and local storage support. You can see that the code is much simpler than the code shown at the beginning of this post. It also has the added benefit of being tested by a large community of web developers around the world running a variety of browsers.   $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.canvas) { //Add canvas code } if (Modernizr.localstorage) { //Add local storage code } }); The global Modernizr object can also be used to test for the presence of CSS3 features. The following code shows how to test support for border-radius and CSS transforms:   $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.borderradius) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('borderRadiusStyle'); } if (Modernizr.csstransforms) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('transformsStyle'); } });   Several other CSS3 feature tests can be performed such as support for opacity, rgba, text-shadow, CSS animations, CSS transitions, multiple backgrounds, and more. A complete list of supported HTML5 and CSS3 tests that Modernizr supports can be found at http://www.modernizr.com/docs.   Loading Scripts using Modernizr In cases where a browser doesn’t support a specific feature you can either provide a graceful fallback or load a shim/polyfill script to fill in missing functionality where appropriate (more information about shims/polyfills can be found at https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills). Modernizr has a built-in script loader that can be used to test for a feature and then load a script if the feature isn’t available. The script loader is built-into Modernizr and is also available as a standalone yepnope script (http://yepnopejs.com). It’s extremely easy to get started using the script loader and it can really simplify the process of loading scripts based on the availability of a particular browser feature. To load scripts dynamically you can use Modernizr’s load() function which accepts properties defining the feature to test (test property), the script to load if the test succeeds (yep property), the script to load if the test fails (nope property), and a script to load regardless of if the test succeeds or fails (both property). An example of using load() with these properties is show next: Modernizr.load({ test: Modernizr.canvas, yep: 'html5CanvasAvailable.js’, nope: 'excanvas.js’, both: 'myCustomScript.js' }); In this example Modernizr is used to not only load scripts but also to test for the presence of the canvas feature. If the target browser supports the HTML5 canvas then the html5CanvasAvailable.js script will be loaded along with the myCustomScript.js script (use of the yep property in this example is a bit contrived – it was added simply to demonstrate how the property can be used in the load() function). Otherwise, a polyfill script named excanvas.js will be loaded to add missing canvas functionality for Internet Explorer versions prior to 9. Once excanvas.js is loaded the myCustomScript.js script will be loaded. Because Modernizr handles loading scripts, you can also use it in creative ways. For example, you can use it to load local scripts when a 3rd party Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as one provided by Google or Microsoft is unavailable for whatever reason. The Modernizr documentation provides the following example that demonstrates the process for providing a local fallback for jQuery when a CDN is down:   Modernizr.load([ { load: '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.js', complete: function () { if (!window.jQuery) { Modernizr.load('js/libs/jquery-1.6.4.min.js'); } } }, { // This will wait for the fallback to load and // execute if it needs to. load: 'needs-jQuery.js' } ]); This code attempts to load jQuery from the Google CDN first. Once the script is downloaded (or if it fails) the function associated with complete will be called. The function checks to make sure that the jQuery object is available and if it’s not Modernizr is used to load a local jQuery script. After all of that occurs a script named needs-jQuery.js will be loaded. Conclusion If you’re building applications that use some of the latest and greatest features available in HTML5 and CSS3 then Modernizr is an essential tool. By using it you can reduce the amount of custom code required to test for browser features and provide graceful fallbacks or even load shim/polyfill scripts for older browsers to help fill in missing functionality. 

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 19, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 19, 2012Popular ReleasesZXMAK2: Version 2.6.1.8: - fix download links with badly formatted content-disposition - little refactoring for AY8910 code - added Sprinter emulation pluginGhostBuster: GhostBuster Setup (91520): Added WMI based RestorePoint support Removed test code from program.cs Improved counting. Changed color of ghosted but unfiltered devices. Changed HwEntries into an ObservableCollection. Added Properties Form. Added Properties MenuItem to Context Menu. Added Hide Unfiltered Devices to Context Menu. If you like this tool, leave me a note, rate this project or write a review or Donate to Ghostbuster. Donate to GhostbusterProject Tracy: Tracy 2.1 Stable (2.1.4): 2.1.4 ???：?dll?????Bin??? ??AppData??????ACCESS 2007?SQL Server2008??、??、????????: DataPie_V3.2: V3.2, 2012?5?19? ????ORACLE??????。AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.0795: Welcome to the Beta release of AvalonDock 2.0 After 4 months of hard work I'm ready to upload the beta version of AvalonDock 2.0. This new version boosts a lot of new features and now is stable enough to be deployed in production scenarios. For this reason I encourage everyone is using AD 1.3 or earlier to upgrade soon to this new version. The final version is scheduled for the end of June. What is included in Beta: 1) Stability! thanks to all users contribution I’ve corrected a lot of issues...myCollections: Version 2.1.0.0: New in this version : Improved UI New Metro Skin Improved Performance Added Proxy Settings New Music and Books Artist detail Lot of Bug FixingfastJSON: v1.9.8: v1.9.8 - added DeepCopy(obj) and DeepCopy<T>(obj) - refactored code to JSONParameters and removed the JSON overloads - added support to serialize anonymous types (deserialize is not possible at the moment) - bug fix $types output with non object rootAspxCommerce: AspxCommerce1.1: AspxCommerce - 'Flexible and easy eCommerce platform' offers a complete e-Commerce solution that allows you to build and run your fully functional online store in minutes. You can create your storefront; manage the products through categories and subcategories, accept payments through credit cards and ship the ordered products to the customers. We have everything set up for you, so that you can only focus on building your own online store. Note: To login as a superuser, the username and pass...SiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.1.1616.403): BUG FIX Hide save button when Titles or Descriptions element is selectedMapWindow 6 Desktop GIS: MapWindow 6.1.2: Looking for a .Net GIS Map Application?MapWindow 6 Desktop GIS is an open source desktop GIS for Microsoft Windows that is built upon the DotSpatial Library. This release requires .Net 4 (Client Profile). Are you a software developer?Instead of downloading MapWindow for development purposes, get started with with the DotSpatial template. The extensions you create from the template can be loaded in MapWindow.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.2: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Tutorials are available. Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components ...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection 2.2.1 (WinRT supported): Added ManagedScopeLifecycle. Increase performance. Added support for resolve 'params'.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.52: Make preprocessor comment-statements nestable; add the ///#IFNDEF statement. (Discussion #355785) Don't throw an error for old-school JScript event handlers, and don't rename them if they aren't global functions.DotNetNuke® Events: 06.00.00: This is a serious release of Events. DNN 6 form pattern - We have take the full route towards DNN6: most notably the incorporation of the DNN6 form pattern with streamlined UX/UI. We have also tried to change all formatting to a div based structure. A daunting task, since the Events module contains a lot of forms. Roger has done a splendid job by going through all the forms in great detail, replacing all table style layouts into the new DNN6 div class="dnnForm XXX" type of layout with chang...LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.12.5.15: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionThis release is fixing one but nasty bug. Two functions XOR and XNOR when used with 3 or more inputs were incorrectly evaluating their results. If you have a circuit that is using these functions...Image Popup Module dotnetnuke: Image Pop-up In HTML Module Source: Image Pop-up In HTML Module is a module to show pop ups Please Follow the steps to use this module 1 Install the module and drop on your page where you want to show the pop up 2 In your HTML module editor add the token "{imagepopup}" 3 In your HTML module editor add class="popup-img" in your images which you want to show in popup.FileZilla Server Config File Editor: FileZillaConfig 1.0.0.1: Sorry for not including the config file with the previous release. It was a "lost in translation" when I was moving my local repository to CodePlex repository. Sorry for the rookie mistake.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.25: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Client Profile, and Windows 8. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet! Follow @JoeMayo.BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.6: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info BlogEngine.NET Hosting - 3 months free! Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.2: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.2 (1)　Web???????、????????·????????? (2)　Web???????、?????????? COMSPEC PATHEXT WINDIR SERVERADDR SERVERPORT DOCUMENTROOT SERVERADMIN REMOTE_PORT HTTPACCEPTCHRSET HTTPACCEPTLANGUAGE HTTPACCEPTEXCODINGNew ProjectsAsset Tracking: Bespoke inhouse solution for managing asset's within the organisation.Chsword Project: Chsword project is a collection of .net project.conjee: Conjee UI DesignDealKhuyenMaiV2.com: d? án web cu?i kì nhóm g2Devtm.ServiceModel: ServiceFactory The library provides easy access to all your services through the helper ServiceFactory. This way to consume your services requires absolutely no place the call to service in a block (try / finally) because all proxies provided by the helper "ServiceFactory" are dynamically generated for the contract as a parameter. This block is built into the code provided for each method.Dream Runtime Analyzer: Dream Runtime Analyzer is a tool made to help Furcadia dreamweavers test their dreams for bandwidth usage and optimize their dragonspeak performance. It allows you to see which DragonSpeak lines were transmitted the most and thus tell you which areas need to be optimized.DynamicsNAV Protocol Handler: Target of this project is to develop DYNAMICSNAV protocol handler which will solve problems of side-by-side installation of many NAV versions on one PC. Today only one version could be handled through the hyperlinks. from.js: Powerful and High-speed LINQ implementation for JavaScriptFurcadia Installer Browser: A program that can access files within a Furcadia installer and allow the user to open them from within the install package, extract some or all the files inside the package, check data integrity of each file and compare the content of two installers.Furcadia Map Normalizer: Furcadia Map Normalizer is a small tool that helps recover a damaged Furcadia map after a live-edit bug. It restores out-of-range elements within back to zero.Homework: TSU students in action :DHRASP: human resourcesiseebooks: this is book s website for self developmentITORG CMS: ITORG Simple Content Managment System ASP.NET MVC 3Kinesthesia (Kinect-based MIDI controller): A simple yet highly configurable Kinect-based MIDI controller with MIDI playback, gesture recognition and voice control.LameBT: A .NET Bluetooth 2.0 stack (HOST and ACL only) based on LibUSB, supporting multiple USB bluetooth dongles.pongISEN: projet de l'ISEN pongRadminPassword: ????????? ??? ??????????????? ????? ??????? ? ????????? ????????? ?????????? ?????????? ?? Radmin. A program to automatically enter the passwords in the famous PC remote control software Radmin.RicciWebSiteSystem: soon websiteScripted Deployment of a System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Secondary Site: In System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, you can no longer deploy a secondary site server using Setup (wizard or scripted). Instead, you must use the Configuration Manager console to create a new secondary site. This is less than ideal if you want to deploy several secondary sites or want to automate the process for any other reason. This project provides a script that will allow you to install a new System Center 2012 Configuration Manager secondary site server without using the Con...Snapshot: Snap is a screen and desktop capture application that automatically uploads your screen captures to a remote image host and leaves you their direct links.SOA based Open Source E-Commerce System: This project will be a new Ecommerce System, based on service oriented architecture.Symphony Framework: The Symphony Framework is a set of classes and capabilities that are designed to assist the Synergy/DE developer enhance the power of the Synergy .NET development environment and migrate their traditional Synergy/DE applications to a Windows Presentation Foundation desktop user experience.testddgit0518201201: ghtestddtfs0518201201: ertesttom05072012git01: fsdfdstesttom05182012git01: fdstesttom05182012hg01: Summarytesttom05182012tfs01: fdsfdsfdsVisualCron - web client: VisualCron, www.visualcron.com, is an advanced scheduler and automation tool. VisualCron has a WinForms interface built on the VisualCron API. This projects is a proof of concept web client built upon the VisualCron API. The project was originally built by VisualCron developers as a test to provide a realtime/responsive web client.

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• Taking web sites offline for demonstration

  While working in software development in general, and in web development for a couple of customers it is quite common that it is necessary to provide a test bed where the client is able to get an image, or better said, a feeling for the visions and ideas you are talking about. Usually here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. we set up a demo web site on one of our staging servers, and provide credentials to the customer to access and review our progress and work ad hoc. This gives us the highest flexibility on both sides, as the test bed is simply online and available 24/7. We can update the structure, the UI and data at any time, and the client is able to view it as it suits best for her/him. Limited or lack of online connectivity But what is going to happen when your client is not capable to be online - no matter for what reasons; here are some more obvious ones: No internet connection (permanently or temporarily) Expensive connection, ie. mobile data package, stay at a hotel, etc. Presentation devices at an exhibition, ie. using tablets or iPads Being abroad for a certain time, and only occasionally online No network coverage, especially on mobile Bad infrastructure, like ie. in Third World countries Providing a catalogue on CD or USB pen drive Anyway, it doesn't matter really. We should be able to provide a solution for the circumstances of our customers. Presentation during an exhibition Recently, we had the following request from a customer: Is it possible to let us have a desktop version of ResortWork.co.uk that we can use for demo purposes at the forthcoming Ski Shows? It would allow us to let stand visitors browse the sites on an iPad to view jobs and training directory course listings. Yes, sure we can do that. Eventually, you might think why don't they simply use 3G enabled iPads for that purpose? As stated above, there might be several reasons for that - low coverage, expensive data packages, etc. Anyway, it is not a question on how to circumvent the request but to deliver a solution to that. Possible solutions... or not? We already did offline websites earlier, and even established complete mirrors of one or two web sites on our systems. There are actually several possibilities to handle this kind of request, and it mainly depends on the system or device where the offline site should be available on. Here, it is clearly expressed that we have to address this on an Apple iPad, well actually, I think that they'd like to use multiple devices during their exhibitions. Following is an overview of possible solutions depending on the technology or device in use, and how it can be done: Replication of source files and database The above mentioned web site is running on ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. In case that a laptop or slate runs a Windows OS, the easiest way would be to take a snapshot of the source files and database, and transfer them as local installation to those Windows machines. This approach would be fully operational on the local machine. Saving pages for offline usage This is actually a quite tedious job but still practicable for small web sites Tool based approach to 'harvest' the web site There quite some tools in the wild that could handle this job, namely wget, httrack, web copier, etc. Screenshots bundled as PDF document Not really... ;-) Creating screencast or video Simply navigate through your website and record your desktop session. Actually, we are using this kind of approach to track down difficult problems in order to see and understand exactly what the user was doing to cause an error. Of course, this list isn't complete and I'd love to get more of your ideas in the comments section below the article. Preparations for offline browsing The original website is dynamically and data-driven by ASP.NET, and looks like this: As we have to put the result onto iPads we are going to choose the tool-based approach to 'download' the whole web site for offline usage. Again, depending on the complexity of your web site you might have to check which of the applications produces the best results for you. My usual choice is to use wget but in this case, we run into problems related to the rewriting of hyperlinks. As a consequence of that we opted for using HTTrack. HTTrack comes in different flavours, like console application but also as either GUI (WinHTTrack on Windows) or Web client (WebHTTrack on Linux/Unix/BSD). Here's a brief description taken from the original website about HTTrack: HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. And there is an extensive documentation for all options and switches online. General recommendation is to go through the HTTrack Users Guide By Fred Cohen. It covers all the initial steps you need to get up and running. Be aware that it will take quite some time to get all the necessary resources down to your machine. Actually, for our customer we run the tool directly on their web server to avoid unnecessary traffic and bandwidth. After a couple of runs and some additional fine-tuning - explicit inclusion or exclusion of various external linked web sites - we finally had a more or less complete offline version available. A very handsome feature of HTTrack is the error/warning log after completing the download. It contains some detailed information about errors that appeared on the pages and the links within the pages that have been processed. Error: "Bad Request" (400) at link www.resortwork.co.uk/job-details_Ski_hire:tech_or_mgr_or_driver_37854.aspx (from www.resortwork.co.uk/Jobs_A_to_Z.aspx)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/images/applynow.png (from www.247recruit.net/css/global.css)Error: "Not Found" (404) at link www.247recruit.net/activate.html (from www.247recruit.net/247recruit_tefl_jobs_network.html) In our situation, we took the records of HTTP 400/404 errors and passed them to the web development department. Improvements are to be expected soon. ;-) Quality assurance on the full-featured desktop Unfortunately, the generated output of HTTrack was still incomplete but luckily there were only images missing. Being directly on the web server we simply copied the missing images from the original source folder into our offline version. After that, we created an archive and transferred the file securely to our local workspace for further review and checks. From that point on, it wasn't necessary to get any more files from the original web server, and we could focus ourselves completely on the process of browsing and navigating through the offline version to isolate visual differences and functional problems. As said, the original web site runs on ASP.NET Web Forms and uses Postback calls for interaction like search, pagination and partly for navigation. This is the main field of improving the offline experience. Of course, same as for standard web development it is advised to test with various browsers, and strangely we discovered that the offline version looked pretty good on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but not in Internet Explorer. A quick look at the HTML source shed some light on this, and there are conditional CSS inclusions based on the user agent. HTTrack is not acting as Internet Explorer and so we didn't have the necessary overrides for this browser. Not problematic after all in our case, but you might have to pay attention to this and get the IE-specific files explicitly. And while having a view at the source code, we also found out that HTTrack actually modifies the generated HTML output. In several occasions we discovered that <div> elements were converted into <table> constructs for no obvious reason; even nested structures. Search 'e'nd destroy - sed (or Notepad++) to the rescue During our intensive root cause analysis for a couple of HTML/CSS problems that needed some extra attention it is very helpful to be familiar with any editor that allows search and replace over multiple files like, ie. sed - stream editor for filtering and transforming text on Linux or my personal favourite Notepad++ on Windows. This allowed us to quickly fix a lot of anchors with onclick attributes and Javascript code that was addressed to ASP.NET files instead of their generated HTML counterparts, like so: grep -lr -e '.aspx' * | xargs sed -e 's/.aspx/.html?/g' The additional question mark after the HTML extension helps to separate the query string from the actual target and solved all our missing hyperlinks very fast. The same can be done in Notepad++ on Windows, too. Just use the 'Replace in files' feature and you are settled. Especially, in combination with Regular Expressions (regex). Landscape of browsers Okay, after several runs of HTML/CSS code analysis, searching and replacing some strings in a pool of more than 4.000 files, we finally had a very good match of an offline browsing experience in Firefox and Chrome on Linux. Next, we transferred that modified set of files to a Windows 8 machine for review on Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer 7 to 10, and a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.7 to check the output on Safari and again on Chrome. Besides IE, for reasons already mentioned above, the results were identical. And last but not least it was about to check web site on tablets. Please continue to read on the following articles: Taking web sites offline for demonstration on Galaxy Tablet Taking web sites offline for demonstration on iPad

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• Ubuntu 12.04 does not see windows already install on my computer (dual installation)

  - by jacinta

  I was trying to install the ubuntu 12.4 along side windows 7 on my new HP Pavilion 64k desktop with windows 7 computer but Ubuntu said that ( This computer has no detected operating system) and some one said (I suggest you chkdsk your Windows partition. I also suggest you resize the NTFS in WIndows then install Ubuntu to the free space.) Therefore I did (To shrink a simple or spanned volume using the Windows interface In Disk Management, right-click the simple or spanned volume you want to shrink. Click Shrink Volume…. Follow the instructions on your screen.) Then When I try to install ubuntu 12.4 after doing this, I received the same error. I was going to undo what I did but I see that I lose 1g when I do that so now what do I do? it says I can do a new simple volume and maybe then the space will no longer be unallocated. Please help me. I think I have a bad cd (ubuntu 12.4) cause from my research I see that I am not suppose to get a screen saying that (The computer has no detected operating system) I think this is a bad cd and I hope I did not mess up my computer. Please help. .................................................................................... O k I think I am following what you said about how to edit my question irrational john. I did chkdsk as you and actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) told me to AND ALSO did a lot of other things before I found out how to chkdsk. No problems. Thank you. Then I put back the space (extended) I took from system. I still was only able to put back 15 and not 16 so it is up to 99mb not back to 100mb. Then I shrank HP (C) as you told me, to 10 13,240 mb which is (12.93gb Unallocated). I did not change it into NTSF by doing the (New Simple Volume Action) I just left it. Then I tried to install UBUNTU 12.04 live CD amd64 and it gave me the results it was sometimes giving me before which is result (THAT Ubuntu) does not tell me weather I have or have not an already installed windows7. It just goes to a window that would have showed me information on what I have and on the bottom (DEVICE FOR BOOT LOADER INSTALLATION /dev/sda ) and the option to go BACK, QUIT, or INSTALL. (I think it is the INSTALLATION TYPE window). Therefore I do what I have been doing and I QUIT. What do I do now? Sorry that it seems like I cannot do anything on my own. On the Youtube video how to install ubuntu dual-boot alongside windows UBUNTU is installed so easy. The installation option page gives 3 options including dual instillation and the disk even lets you use a slider to slide to the size of the partition size you want. Yet my UBUNTU live cd is a mess and I checked it as one of you guys told me and got back information that it is good. Oh well this guy says you should press a control key to tell which device you are using to install ubuntu before the screen comes up. I guess cause it is old. This page also shows you easy stuff that do not show up on my cd. how to dual-boot UBUNTU and windows 7 P.S.. I saw this on the windows 7 website windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Formatting-disks-and-drives-frequently-asked-questions CREATE A BOOT PARTITION I HAD TO LEAVE OUT THE HTTP STUFF CAUSE I AM ONLY ALLOWED 2 ON A PAGE IT SAID To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. AND THIS ON ANOTHER PAGE. Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions Hard disks, the primary storage devices on your computer, need to be formatted before you can use them. When you format a disk, you configure it with a file system so that Windows can store information on the disk. Hard disks in new computers running Windows are already formatted. If you buy an additional hard disk to expand the storage of your computer, you might need to format it. Storage devices such as USB flash drives and flash memory cards usually come preformatted by the manufacturer, so you probably won't need to format them. CDs and DVDs, on the other hand, use different formats from hard disks and removable storage devices. For information about formatting CDs and DVDs, see Which CD or DVD format should I use? Warning Warning Formatting erases any existing files on a hard disk. If you format a hard disk that has files on it, the files will be deleted. WHAT I DID WAS I GOT TO COMPUTER MANAGEMENT SECTION THEN I CLICKED ON DRIVE HP(C) (it put stripes on to show it is selected) Then I click on ACTION selected ALL TASKS AND THEN selected SHRINK VOLUME and then chose how much space from what it was giving me that I wanted. (12.93gb) AND THAT WAS ALL I DID. THEN I TRIED TO INSTALL UBUNTU i NEVER GOT THE 3RD SCREEN THAT IS IN THE VIDEO I INCLUDED (THE YOUTUBE WITH THE ENGLISH GUY) INSTALLATION TYPE I ALSO DID NOT GET THE 4TH SCREEN THAT ALLOWS YOU TO SELECT PARTITION SIZE what i got next was the 2nd INSTILLATION TYPE window shown on the (LINUX BS DOS.COM) PAGE THAT I INCLUDED and it showed no information about any drives (no drives /partition or stuff was shown) only the Boot Loader statement and the dev/sda bar and that's why i did not press install but chose to QUIT. SORRY I JUST NOW SAW YOUR ANSWER IRRATIONAL JOHN. I SHRANK HP(C) BY 12.93GB MY UNALLOCATED SPACE IS NOW 12.93GB HP(C) = 907.17gb NTSF...YOU ARE CORRECT WITH EVERYTHING YOU SAID This is what i read on (http://)windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-boot-partition I am only allowed 2 links Create a boot partition You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps. A boot partition is a partition that contains the files for the Windows operating system. If you want to install a second operating system on your computer (called a dual-boot or multiboot configuration), you need to create another partition on the hard disk, and then install the additional operating system on the new partition. Your hard disk would then have one system partition and two boot partitions. (A system partition is the partition that contains the hardware-related files. These tell the computer where to look to start Windows.) To create a partition on a basic disk, there must be unallocated disk space on your hard disk. With Disk Management, you can create a maximum of three primary partitions on a hard disk. You can create extended partitions, which include logical drives within them, if you need more partitions on the disk. Picture of disk space in Computer ManagementUnallocated disk space If there is no unallocated space, you will either need to create space by shrinking or deleting an existing partition or by using a third-party partitioning tool to repartition your hard disk. For more information, see Can I repartition my hard disk? To create a boot partition Warning Warning If you are installing different versions of Windows, you must install the earliest version first. If you don't do this, your computer may become inoperable. Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Security, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management.? Administrator permission required If you're prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next. Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next. Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next. In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following: If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next. To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information about formatting, see Formatting disks and drives: frequently asked questions. Review your choices, and then click Finish. I did what you told me @irrational john and this is the screen shot. I ENTERED ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober computer did not respond so I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get -y remove dmraid computer responded with Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: dmraid 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. After this operation, 141 kB disk space will be freed. (Reading database ... 147515 files and directories currently installed.) Removing dmraid ... update-initramfs is disabled since running on read-only media Processing triggers for man-db ... I entered ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo os-prober Computer Responded with /dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain /dev/sda3:Windows Recovery Environment (loader):Windows1:chain ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ............... @obsessiveFOSS I don't know what is a Grub menu and I do not know what is the Ubuntu boot option The answer you gave to me was correct. This one {This apparently removes the dmraid metadata. After doing that, you can use the desktop icon Install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to start the Ubuntu installer. This time the Installation Type window should contain the option to Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7.} This is what I decided to do. I did not see the rest of your help 'till now. Never the less. I think the best thing for me to do now is to get a cheap used laptop and either do a dual installation or just install Ubuntu on to it. This way if I have any issues that I cannot solve like the one I had here, at least I will still have a usable computer to work on and to use to get answers with because I am not an expert like the people on this forum. Thanks a lot I will try to keep learning and do research enough to some day help someone else.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 14, 2012Popular ReleasesActipro WPF Controls Contrib: v2012.1: Updated to target WPF Studio 2012.1 Changes target framework to .NET 4.0, uses native WPF 4.0 DataGrid, and Prism 4.1.FileZilla Server Config File Editor: FileZillaConfig 1.0.0.1: Sorry for not including the config file with the previous release. It was a "lost in translation" when I was moving my local repository to CodePlex repository. Sorry for the rookie mistake.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.25: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Client Profile, and Windows 8. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet! Follow @JoeMayo.GAC Explorer: GACExplorer_x86_Setup: Version 1.0BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.6: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info BlogEngine.NET Hosting - 3 months free! Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here!! Click Here for More Info Cheap ASP.NET Hosting - $4.95/Month - Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.2: 2012.05.07 Ver5.6.2 (1)　Web???????、????????·????????? (2)　Web???????、?????????? COMSPEC PATHEXT WINDIR SERVERADDR SERVERPORT DOCUMENTROOT SERVERADMIN REMOTE_PORT HTTPACCEPTCHRSET HTTPACCEPTLANGUAGE HTTPACCEPTEXCODINGGardens Point Parser Generator: Gardens Point Parser Generator version 1.5.0: ChangesVersion 1.5.0 contains a number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly. The default encoding of the *.y file is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The /report option has been improved, as has the automaton tracing facility. New facilities are included that allow multiple parsers to share a common token type. A complete change-log is available as a separate documentation file. The source project has been upgraded to Visual...Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.0: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.0 contains a small number of changes. Error messages are now MSBuild and VS-friendly by default. The default encoding for lex input files is Unicode, with an automatic fallback to the previous raw-byte interpretation. The distribution also contains helper code for symbol pushback by GPPG parsers. A complete changelog is available as a separate documenta...Kinect Quiz Engine: update for sdk v1.0: updated to the new sdkMedia Companion: Media Companion 3.502b: It has been a slow week, but this release addresses a couple of recent bugs: Movies Multi-part Movies - Existing .nfo files that differed in name from the first part, were missed and scraped again. Trailers - MC attempted to scrape info for existing trailers. TV Shows Show Scraping - shows available only in the non-default language would not show up in the main browser. The correct language can now be selected using the TV Show Selector for a single show. General Will no longer prompt for ...NewLife XCode ??????: XCode v8.5.2012.0508、XCoder v4.7.2012.0320: X????： 1，????For .Net 4.0?? XCoder????： 1，???????，????X????，?????? XCode????： 1，Insert/Update/Delete???????????????，???SQL???? 2，IEntityOperate?????? 3，????????IEntityTree 4，????????????????? 5，?????????? 6，??????????????Google Book Downloader: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0: Google Books Downloader Lite 1.0Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.5 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.5 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports Cpython, IronPython, Jython and Pypy • Python editor with advanced member, signature intellisense and refactoring • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging...AD Gallery: AD Gallery 1.2.7: NewsFixed a bug which caused the current thumbnail not to be highlighted Added a hook to take complete control over how descriptions are handled, take a look under Documentation for more info Added removeAllImages()51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.4.8: One Click Install from NuGet Data ChangesIncludes 42 new browser properties in both the Lite and Premium data sets. Premium Data includes many new devices including Nokia Lumia 900, BlackBerry 9220 and HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range and Samsung Galaxy S III. Lite data includes devices released in January 2012. Changes to Version 2.1.4.81. The IsFirstTime method of the RedirectModule will now return the same value when called multiple times for the same request. This was prevent...Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection ver 2.2 (WinRT supported): Added NamedParameterAttribute, OptionalParameterAttribute. Added behaviors ICycleDependencyBehavior, IResolveUnregisteredTypeBehavior. Added WinRT support. Added support for NET 4.5. Added support for MVC 4.NShape - .Net Diagramming Framework for Industrial Applications: NShape 2.0.1: Changes in 2.0.1:Bugfixes: IRepository.Insert(Shape shape) and IRepository.Insert(IEnumerable<Shape> shapes) no longer insert shape connections. Several context menu items did display although the required permission was not granted Display did not reset the visible and active layers when changing the diagram NullReferenceException when pressing Del key and no shape was selected Changed Behavior: LayerCollection.Find("") no longer throws an exception. Improvements: Display does not rese...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.11.6: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...sb0t: sb0t 4.64: New commands added: #scribble <url> #adminscribble on #adminscribble offJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5: New feature - Added ItemIsReference, ItemReferenceLoopHandling, ItemTypeNameHandling, ItemConverterType to JsonPropertyAttribute New feature - Added ItemRequired to JsonObjectAttribute New feature - Added Path to JsonWriterException Change - Improved deserializer call stack memory usage Change - Moved the PDB files out of the NuGet package into a symbols package Fix - Fixed infinite loop from an input error when reading an array and error handling is enabled Fix - Fixed base objec...New Projects[ACID]IMVU Cache Cleaner: A IMVU Cache cleaner simple as that just with some major tweaks to the code is all giving it more power then most[ACID]IMVU Modder: IMVU Software Modder for adding and removing features from IMVUs official ClientAmarok Framework Library: This framework library is an attempt to take advantage of the actor/agent programming model for standalone desktop applications. Most of the concepts are inspired by the actor model, Microsoft Robotics CCR and the TPL Dataflow library.amking: private...Bradaz Utilities: This is just a collection of some of my Utility classes i use within my Open Source ProjectsChris's Blog examples code: This project contains code examples from blog post I write. My blog can be found at http://chriscpetersonblog.blogspot.com/Culinary web site: Project for web site that will collect and display culinary receiptsdaboost: A Visual Studio add-in designed to auto-generate boilerplate data access code. Ever work with a lot of stored procedures? Ever work with displaying data returned by those stored procedures to a stock web forms pages. If so, please take a look at DaBoost. It will save you alot of typing and mis-spelled paramater names. FtLinq: The "Faster-than-Light integrated language query" library provides LINQ-to-enumerable queries that are pretty much as fast as regular 'foreach' statements.Jokeri: MVVM Silverlight Multiplayer Card Game hosted in Facebook. LSX?????: ????????，????Permutations with CUDA and OpenCL: Finding massive permutations on GPU with CUDA and OpenCLScon SDK: SDK for using the scon SB022S USB Servo Controller board available at http://sconcon.com/index.htmlscpEdit: scpEdit is a full feature text editor focused on data searching, extraction and transformation rather then focused on code editing. It makes extensive use of regular expressions, support VBscript macros and a lot more. For now, the interface is only available in french. Translators are welcome. scpEdit est un éditeur texte professionnel principalement caractérisé par des fonctionnalités avancées de recherche, d'extraction et de transformation de texte tirant pleinement profit de la puissan...Selection sort: HelloSkyline: The team is working hard to create a new way to made thingsSOAGame maker: This project is still undergoing extensive testing and tweaking as well as re-Edting as well. So changes may occur as this software is released to the public, however. This is designed to be a "Shell" project, meaning the UI is done. But the coding still remains to be seen.SokobanSolver: Simple Sokoban Editor+Solver+Game. Written in Java+Eclipse+SWT.SPListViewFilter: The SharePoint List search / filter WebPartStochasticSimulation: A stochastic simulator for chemical reactions with low copy numberString Extensions: The String Extensions project aims to provide a more complete String type experience by adding extension methods (including overloads of existing methods) providing commonly required functionality in a well-tested and well-documented fashion.Suucha Expression: Suucha Expression??????????(?????)??(????)??????，??????????：SuuchaMemberExpression（?????）、SuuchaConstantExpression（?????）、SuuchaBinaryExprssion（?????，?????????，????、??、In、Like?），??????IQueryable?Where??。VoxelEngine: Minecraft style terrain engine in SlimDX, C# XNA 4.0Web API For Swedish Soccer: A Web API For accessing information on the Swedish Soccer LeagueWhois Client .NET: This is .NET Class library of WHOIS client (with sample web site).xlcanvas: silverlight 5 xna canvas draw 2d or 3d obj use xna api in silverlight 5

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• The Changing Face of PASS

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 06, 2012Popular ReleasesVidCoder: 1.4.2 Beta: Added Modulus dropdown to Loose anamorphic choice. Fixed a problem where the incorrect scaling would be chosen and pick the wrong aspect ratio. Fixed issue where old window objects would stick around and continue to respond to property change events We now clear locked width/height values when switching to loose or strict anamorphic. Fixed problems with Custom Anamorphic and display width specification. Fixed text in number box incorrectly being shown in gray in some circumstances.RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.02: changes NEW: Added Support Big Naturals Only forum NEW: Added Setting to enable/disable "Show last download image"patterns & 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).Configuration Manager 2012 Automation: Beta Code (v0.1): Beta codeWinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.2: 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 AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...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) -- warning for SDK below: WARNING!!! There is a known issue with the SDK installer that may prevent you from installing. We are working on the issue and will update the SDK as soon as we have a fix. Thank you. 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 suppo...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.1: 2.3.1All new Remote Client Server architecture. Reccomended Download. The Remote Client Installation is OPTIONAL, you can extract the files from the zip archive into a local folder and run MCEBuddy.GUI directly. 2.2.15 was the last standalone release. Changelog for 2.3.1 (32bit and 64bit) 1. All remote MCEBuddy Client Server architecture (GUI runs remotely/independently from engine now) 2. Fixed bug in Audio Offset 3. Added support for remote MediaInfo (right click on file in queue to get ...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5: Support for session upload to website. Support for theme change through general settings. Time played counter will now also display a count for days. Tome of secrets are no longer logged as items.NTCPMSG: V1.2.0.0: Allocate an identify cableid for each single connection cable. * Server can asend to specified cableid directly.Team Foundation Server Word Add-in: Version 1.0.12.0622: Welcome to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Word Add-in Supported Environments Microsoft Office Word 2007 and 2010 X86 (32-bit) Team Foundation Server 2010 Object Model TFS 2010, 2012 and TFS Service supported, using TFS OM / Explorer 2010. Quality-Bar Details Tool has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Tool has been through an independent technical and quality review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issues / Bugs WI#43553 - The Acceptance criteria is not pu...Viva Music Player: Viva Music Player v0.6.7: Initial release.Korean String Extension for .NET: ?? ??? ??? ????(v0.2.3.0): ? ?? ?? ?? ???? - string.KExtract() ?? ???? - string.AppendJosa(...) AppendJosa(...)? ?? ???? KAppendJosa(...)? ??? ?????UMD????? - PC?: UMDEditor?????V2.7: ??：http://jianyun.org/archives/948.html =============================================================================== UMD??? ???? =============================================================================== 2.7.0 (2012-10-3) ???????“UMD???.exe”??“UMDEditor.exe” ?????????；????????，??????。??????，????！ ??64????，??????????????bug ?????????????，???? ???????????????? ???????????????，??????????bug ------------------------------------------------------- ?? reg.bat ????????????。 ????，??????txt/u...Untangler: Untangler 1.0.0: Add a missing file from first releaseDirectX Tool Kit: October 2012: October 2, 2012 Added ScreenGrab module Added CreateGeoSphere for drawing a geodesic sphere Put DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader into the DirectX C++ namespace Renamed project files for better naming consistency Updated WICTextureLoader for Windows 8 96bpp floating-point formats Win32 desktop projects updated to use Windows Vista (0x0600) rather than Windows 7 (0x0601) APIs Tweaked SpriteBatch.cpp to workaround ARM NEON compiler codegen bugCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1002.3): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.3.1002.3 What's New: Multi-language support for Labels/Tooltips for custom buttons and groups Support for base language other than English (1033) Connect dialog will not require organization name for ADFS / IFD connections Automatic creation of missing labels for all provisioned languages Minor connection issues fixed Notes: Before saving the ribbon to CRM server, editor will check Ribbon XML for any missing <Title> elements inside existing <LocLabel> elements...SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...WallSwitch: WallSwitch 1.0.6: Version 1.0.6 Changes: Added hotkeys to perform a variety of operations (next/previous image, pause, clear history, etc.) Added color effects for grayscale, sepia and intense color. Various fixes.Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20New ProjectsBackup Mirth To TFS: You're a developer managing a handful of Mirth Connect HL7 integration servers. You want to ensure that your servers are under change control.Capability Mapping Tool: Capability Mapping Tool provides an intuitive interface to input and prepare reports about the capabilities in university programs and their development also prCRM 2011 Global Quick Search: This CRM 2011 Silverlight WebResource will facilitate User to do Quick Search on multiple CRM Entities and results will be shown on single pageDatabaseUtil: Useful database utilities. Currently only for Entity Framework 4.DevTxt Blog Engine: The blog engine I use.Distrib(uted) Processing Grid: Distrib is a simple yet powerful distributed processing system.Download Organizer: Download Organizer is a Windows service developed in C# on .NET 4 to monitor your downloads folder and move inbound files to various locations on your PC.Example for Tutorial: Lorem IpsumExternal scripts plugin for nopCommerce: This plugin allows you to add any script to any page of your nopCommerce websiteGLMET Next Generation: A user of GLMET/MLT and want to use again? This is right for YOU! A great Folder Locker just for only you!Håvard Fjær: Code I make that might be useful to others. Mostly C#, .NET, NETMF and Gadgeteer stuff. IdentifyUI - An automation tool to identify objects: IdentifyUI - An automation tool to identify objects It works only on windows operating system. It has been tested on Windows XP. iFinity Google Analytics for DotNetNuke: The iFinity Google Analytics module is a simple way to implement Google Analytics tracking for your DotNetNuke website, but also contains advanced features.Labmodel: Modelling of flow around islandMachineSLATStatusCheck: This helps to check the SLAT capability of a machine, so that it can run hyper-v client or not.OneNote HTML Export: The OneNote HTML Export tool allows HTML export of an entire OneNote notebookPreactor Power Tools: The Preactor Power Tools are a collection of tools to enhance the functionality of Preactor.qlevel: sadasdasdroucheng: C# Hello worldSBB - Serial Browser Bridge: Stelle eingehende Daten von einer seriellen Schnittstellen in einem Browser zur Verfügung.Sendine Net: - Sendine.NET ??????????? Socket ???? - ???????????????? - ????(Router)???? - ??????????（IProtocolParser） - ????（Multi-Core）?? - ????????? - ???????Service Sheet for SharePoint: Creates ServiceSheet for each employee and customer that contains the data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in relation to the done Services by each Consultant.SharePoint Bulk Uploader: This is client SharePoint tool that can upload a bulk of files to SharePoint document library using SharePoint Client Object Model. sharepoint foundation 2013 persian language pack: SharePoint 2013 Persian Language Pack . this project started for create a language pack for SharePoint 2013 for supporting Persian Language Pack , this project SharePoint Managed Metadata Navigator: Use SharePoint Managed Metadata Navigator to browse, explore, create, update, delete, export and import MMD Groups, Termsets, and Terms for SharePoint 2010.SharePoint Site template for PRINCE2: PRINCE2 is a Project Management Guidance from UK OGC. This project aims to provide a SharePoint site template for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013Simple Code Gen: This project will generate c# generated files from SQL server databaseTiwanaku Book Builder: Web application for the development and construction of publication formats, including ePub, docBook, etc.Tris: The all new Tris 2.0 appWalkingGraph: Test

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, August 21, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, August 21, 2014Popular ReleasesOutlook 2013 Backup Add-In: Outlook Backup Add-In 1.3: Changelog for new version: Added button in config-window to reset the last backup-time (this will trigger the backup after closing outlook) Minimum interval set to 0 (backup at each closing of outlook) Catch exception when data store entry is corrupt Added two parameters (prefix and suffix) to automatically rename the backup file Updated VSTO-Runtime to 10.0.50325 Upgraded project to Visual Studio 2013 Added optional command to run after backup (e.g. pack backup files, ...) Add...File Explorer for WPF: FileExplorer3_20August2014: Please see Aug14 Update.ODBC Connect: v1.0: ODBC Connect executables for both 32bit and 64bit ODBC data sourcesMSSQL Deployment Tool: Microsoft SQL Deploy Tool v1.3.1: MicrosoftSqlDeployTool: v1.3.1.38348 What's changed? Update namespace and assembly name. Bug fixing.SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool: SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool v2.1: Layout improvements Bug fixes Stores auth method and user name Moved experimental settings to Advanced boxCtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.2.2.41183 Alpha: This alpha of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer provides some preliminary Oculus Rift DK2 support. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-2-2-41183-alpha Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life.HDD Guardian: HDD Guardian 0.6.1: New: package now include smartctl 6.3; Removed: standard notification e-mail. Now you have to set your mail server to send e-mail alerts; Bugfix: USB detection error; custom e-mail server settings issue; bottom panel displays a wrong ATA error count.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.62: changes NEW: Added Support for 'MadImage.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgSpot.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgClick.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'Imaaage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Image-Bugs.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Pictomania.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgDap.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'FileSpit.com' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.me' linksExchange Database Recovery With and Without Log Files is Possible: Exchange Recovery Application: This Exchange Recovery Software comes with free trial edition which helps users to inspect the working capability of the recovery process. Download free demo version and repair inaccessible mailboxes from EDB file without any obstructions.MongoRepository: MongoRepository 1.6.6: Installing using NuGet (recommended)MongoRepository is now a NuGet package for your convenience. Step-by-step instructions can be found in Installing MongoRepository using NuGet Installing using BinariesYou can also choose to download the binaries instead of using NuGet. There are 2 downloads: mongorepository_full.x.x.x contains all binaries required (MongoRepository and the 10gen C# driver) mongorepository.x.x.x contains only the MongoRepository binary Make sure you reference MongoReposit...Cryptography Enumerations JavaScript Shell: Cryptography Enumerations JavaScript Shell 1.0.0: First ReleaseMagick.NET: Magick.NET 7.0.0.0001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 7-Beta.CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.2: This release adds the following new features and bug fixes from CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.1: Added support for CMake 3.0. Added support for word completion. Added IntelliSense support for the CMAKEHOSTSYSTEM_INFORMATION command. Fixed syntax highlighting for tokens beginning with escape sequences. Fixed issue uninstalling CMake Tools for Visual Studio after Visual Studio has been uninstalled.GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay: GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay 1.1: Overview1.1 is the second 'stable' release of the GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay. This version includes just a couple of very minor features and some minor bug fixes. For details regarding installation, setup, and general use, see Documentation. Note: If you were using a previous version, you will probably want to copy over the following user settings files: GW2PAO.DungeonSettings.xml GW2PAO.EventSettings.xml GW2PAO.WvWSettings.xml GW2PAO.ZoneCompletionSettings.xml New FeaturesAdded new "No...Fluentx: Fluentx v1.5.3: Added few more extension methods.fastJSON: v2.1.2: 2.1.2 - bug fix circular referencesJPush.NET: JPush Server SDK 1.2.1 (For JPush V3): Assembly: 1.2.1.24728 JPush REST API Version: v3 JPush Documentation Reference .NET framework: v4.0 or above. Sample: class: JPushClientV3 2014 Augest 15th.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.043.008 Release 1: Changed ship/station names to use new DisplayName instead of Beacon/Antenna. Fixed issue with updated SE binaries 01.043.018 using new Voxel Material definitions.Google .Net API: Drive.Sample: Google .NET Client API – Drive.SampleInstructions for the Google .NET Client API – Drive.Sample</h2> http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/?repo=samples#hg%2FDrive.SampleBrowse Source, or main file http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/Drive.Sample/Program.cs?repo=samplesProgram.cs <h3>1. Checkout Instructions</h3> <p><b>Prerequisites:</b> Install Visual Studio, and <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>.</p> ...FineUI - jQuery / ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.1.1: -??Form??????????????（???-5929）。 -?TemplateField??ExpandOnDoubleClick、ExpandOnEnter、ExpandToSelectRow????（LZOM-5932）。 -BodyPadding???????，??“5”“5 10”，???????????“5px”“5px 10px”。 -??TriggerBox?EnableEdit=false????，??????????????（Jango_Jing-5450）。 -???????????DataKeyNames???????????（yygy-6002）。 -????????????????????????（Gnid-6018）。 -??PageManager???AutoSizePanelID????，??????????????????（yygy-6008）。 -?FState???????????????，????????????????（????-5925）。 -??????OnClientClick???return?????????（FineU...New ProjectsAesonFramework: Aeson FrameworkBullet for Windows: Bullet is used to simulate collision detection, soft and rigid body dynamics. This is an early version of Bullet with support for Windows and Windows Phone.CC-Homework: This is a collection of homework projects completed during coder camps.Integrating Exchange Server 2010 Mail Attachments with SharePoint 2013 via C#.: Integrating Exchange Server 2010 Mail Attachments with SharePoint 2013 via C#.Mosquito.ViewModel: A minimal MVVM library aimed at removing the pain of implementing ViewModels.OWL API for .NET: An open source project that port the java OWLAPI to .Net. It uses IKVM and contains scripts to compile the OWLAPI libraries and Java reasoners with Samples.PCStoreManager: Progetto integrativo corso programmazione ad oggettiStockEr: Spa application for stocks analysis.SysLog Server: This is a free Syslog server for windows.UnixtimeHelpers: This project minimalistic assembly contains unixtime converters. Converting DateTime to unixtime (double type respresent) and vice versa.Winner - Scommessa vincente: Winner permette di visualizzare le quote dei prossimi maggiori incontri sportivi e di compilare una schedina con una o più scommesse.

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• Detecting HTML5/CSS3 Features using Modernizr

  - by dwahlin

  HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies such as canvas and web sockets bring a lot of useful new features to the table that can take Web applications to the next level. These new technologies allow applications to be built using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript allowing them to be viewed on a variety of form factors including tablets and phones. Although HTML5 features offer a lot of promise, it’s not realistic to develop applications using the latest technologies without worrying about supporting older browsers in the process. If history has taught us anything it’s that old browsers stick around for years and years which means developers have to deal with backward compatibility issues. This is especially true when deploying applications to the Internet that target the general public. This begs the question, “How do you move forward with HTML5 and CSS3 technologies while gracefully handling unsupported features in older browsers?” Although you can write code by hand to detect different HTML5 and CSS3 features, it’s not always straightforward. For example, to check for canvas support you need to write code similar to the following:   <script> window.onload = function () { if (canvasSupported()) { alert('canvas supported'); } }; function canvasSupported() { var canvas = document.createElement('canvas'); return (canvas.getContext && canvas.getContext('2d')); } </script> If you want to check for local storage support the following check can be made. It’s more involved than it should be due to a bug in older versions of Firefox. <script> window.onload = function () { if (localStorageSupported()) { alert('local storage supported'); } }; function localStorageSupported() { try { return ('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] != null); } catch(e) {} return false; } </script> Looking through the previous examples you can see that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to checking browsers for HTML5 and CSS3 features. It takes a lot of work to test every possible scenario and every version of a given browser. Fortunately, you don’t have to resort to writing custom code to test what HTML5/CSS3 features a given browser supports. By using a script library called Modernizr you can add checks for different HTML5/CSS3 features into your pages with a minimal amount of code on your part. Let’s take a look at some of the key features Modernizr offers.   Getting Started with Modernizr The first time I heard the name “Modernizr” I thought it “modernized” older browsers by added missing functionality. In reality, Modernizr doesn’t actually handle adding missing features or “modernizing” older browsers. The Modernizr website states, “The name Modernizr actually stems from the goal of modernizing our development practices (and ourselves)”. Because it relies on feature detection rather than browser sniffing (a common technique used in the past – that never worked that great), Modernizr definitely provides a more modern way to test features that a browser supports and can even handle loading additional scripts called shims or polyfills that fill in holes that older browsers may have. It’s a great tool to have in your arsenal if you’re a web developer. Modernizr is available at http://modernizr.com. Two different types of scripts are available including a development script and custom production script. To generate a production script, the site provides a custom script generation tool rather than providing a single script that has everything under the sun for HTML5/CSS3 feature detection. Using the script generation tool you can pick the specific test functionality that you need and ignore everything that you don’t need. That way the script is kept as small as possible. An example of the custom script download screen is shown next. Notice that specific CSS3, HTML5, and related feature tests can be selected. Once you’ve downloaded your custom script you can add it into your web page using the standard <script> element and you’re ready to start using Modernizr. <script src="Scripts/Modernizr.js" type="text/javascript"></script>   Modernizr and the HTML Element Once you’ve add a script reference to Modernizr in a page it’ll go to work for you immediately. In fact, by adding the script several different CSS classes will be added to the page’s <html> element at runtime. These classes define what features the browser supports and what features it doesn’t support. Features that aren’t supported get a class name of “no-FeatureName”, for example “no-flexbox”. Features that are supported get a CSS class name based on the feature such as “canvas” or “websockets”. An example of classes added when running a page in Chrome is shown next:   <html class=" js flexbox canvas canvastext webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage websqldatabase indexeddb hashchange history draganddrop websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize borderimage borderradius boxshadow textshadow opacity cssanimations csscolumns cssgradients cssreflections csstransforms csstransforms3d csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage webworkers applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths"> Here’s an example of what the <html> element looks like at runtime with Internet Explorer 9:   <html class=" js no-flexbox canvas canvastext no-webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage no-websqldatabase no-indexeddb hashchange no-history draganddrop no-websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize no-borderimage borderradius boxshadow no-textshadow opacity no-cssanimations no-csscolumns no-cssgradients no-cssreflections csstransforms no-csstransforms3d no-csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage no-webworkers no-applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths">   When using Modernizr it’s a common practice to define an <html> element in your page with a no-js class added as shown next:   <html class="no-js">   You’ll see starter projects such as HTML5 Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com) or Initializr (http://initializr.com) follow this approach (see my previous post for more information on HTML5 Boilerplate). By adding the no-js class it’s easy to tell if a browser has JavaScript enabled or not. If JavaScript is disabled then no-js will stay on the <html> element. If JavaScript is enabled, no-js will be removed by Modernizr and a js class will be added along with other classes that define supported/unsupported features. Working with HTML5 and CSS3 Features You can use the CSS classes added to the <html> element directly in your CSS files to determine what style properties to use based upon the features supported by a given browser. For example, the following CSS can be used to render a box shadow for browsers that support that feature and a simple border for browsers that don’t support the feature: .boxshadow #MyContainer { border: none; -webkit-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; -moz-box-shadow: #666 1px 1px 1px; } .no-boxshadow #MyContainer { border: 2px solid black; }   If a browser supports box-shadows the boxshadow CSS class will be added to the <html> element by Modernizr. It can then be associated with a given element. This example associates the boxshadow class with a div with an id of MyContainer. If the browser doesn’t support box shadows then the no-boxshadow class will be added to the <html> element and it can be used to render a standard border around the div. This provides a great way to leverage new CSS3 features in supported browsers while providing a graceful fallback for older browsers. In addition to using the CSS classes that Modernizr provides on the <html> element, you also use a global Modernizr object that’s created. This object exposes different properties that can be used to detect the availability of specific HTML5 or CSS3 features. For example, the following code can be used to detect canvas and local storage support. You can see that the code is much simpler than the code shown at the beginning of this post. It also has the added benefit of being tested by a large community of web developers around the world running a variety of browsers.   $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.canvas) { //Add canvas code } if (Modernizr.localstorage) { //Add local storage code } }); The global Modernizr object can also be used to test for the presence of CSS3 features. The following code shows how to test support for border-radius and CSS transforms:   $(document).ready(function () { if (Modernizr.borderradius) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('borderRadiusStyle'); } if (Modernizr.csstransforms) { $('#MyDiv').addClass('transformsStyle'); } });   Several other CSS3 feature tests can be performed such as support for opacity, rgba, text-shadow, CSS animations, CSS transitions, multiple backgrounds, and more. A complete list of supported HTML5 and CSS3 tests that Modernizr supports can be found at http://www.modernizr.com/docs.   Loading Scripts using Modernizr In cases where a browser doesn’t support a specific feature you can either provide a graceful fallback or load a shim/polyfill script to fill in missing functionality where appropriate (more information about shims/polyfills can be found at https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills). Modernizr has a built-in script loader that can be used to test for a feature and then load a script if the feature isn’t available. The script loader is built-into Modernizr and is also available as a standalone yepnope script (http://yepnopejs.com). It’s extremely easy to get started using the script loader and it can really simplify the process of loading scripts based on the availability of a particular browser feature. To load scripts dynamically you can use Modernizr’s load() function which accepts properties defining the feature to test (test property), the script to load if the test succeeds (yep property), the script to load if the test fails (nope property), and a script to load regardless of if the test succeeds or fails (both property). An example of using load() with these properties is show next: Modernizr.load({ test: Modernizr.canvas, yep: 'html5CanvasAvailable.js’, nope: 'excanvas.js’, both: 'myCustomScript.js' }); In this example Modernizr is used to not only load scripts but also to test for the presence of the canvas feature. If the target browser supports the HTML5 canvas then the html5CanvasAvailable.js script will be loaded along with the myCustomScript.js script (use of the yep property in this example is a bit contrived – it was added simply to demonstrate how the property can be used in the load() function). Otherwise, a polyfill script named excanvas.js will be loaded to add missing canvas functionality for Internet Explorer versions prior to 9. Once excanvas.js is loaded the myCustomScript.js script will be loaded. Because Modernizr handles loading scripts, you can also use it in creative ways. For example, you can use it to load local scripts when a 3rd party Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as one provided by Google or Microsoft is unavailable for whatever reason. The Modernizr documentation provides the following example that demonstrates the process for providing a local fallback for jQuery when a CDN is down:   Modernizr.load([ { load: '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.js', complete: function () { if (!window.jQuery) { Modernizr.load('js/libs/jquery-1.6.4.min.js'); } } }, { // This will wait for the fallback to load and // execute if it needs to. load: 'needs-jQuery.js' } ]); This code attempts to load jQuery from the Google CDN first. Once the script is downloaded (or if it fails) the function associated with complete will be called. The function checks to make sure that the jQuery object is available and if it’s not Modernizr is used to load a local jQuery script. After all of that occurs a script named needs-jQuery.js will be loaded. Conclusion If you’re building applications that use some of the latest and greatest features available in HTML5 and CSS3 then Modernizr is an essential tool. By using it you can reduce the amount of custom code required to test for browser features and provide graceful fallbacks or even load shim/polyfill scripts for older browsers to help fill in missing functionality. 

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