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• Setup and configure a MVC4 project for Cloud Service(web role) and SQL Azure

  - by MagnusKarlsson

  I aim at keeping this blog post updated and add related posts to it. Since there are a lot of these out there I link to others that has done kind of the same before me, kind of a blog-DRY pattern that I'm aiming for. I also keep all mistakes and misconceptions for others to see. As an example; if I hit a stacktrace I will google it if I don't directly figure out the reason for it. I will then probably take the most plausible result and try it out. If it fails because I misinterpreted the error I will not delete it from the log but keep it for future reference and for others to see. That way people that finds this blog can see multiple solutions for indexed stacktraces and I can better remember how to do stuff. To avoid my errors I recommend you to read through it all before going from start to finish.The steps:Setup project in VS2012. (msdn blog)Setup Azure Services (half of mpspartners.com blog)Setup connections strings and configuration files (msdn blog + notes)Export certificates.Create Azure package from vs2012 and deploy to staging (same steps as for production).Connections string error Set up the visual studio project:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/avkashchauhan/archive/2011/11/08/developing-asp-net-mvc4-based-windows-azure-web-role.aspx Then login in to Azure to setup the services:Stop following this guide at the "publish website" part since we'll be uploading a package.http://www.mpspartners.com/2012/09/ConfiguringandDeployinganMVC4applicationasaCloudServicewithAzureSQLandStorage/ When set up (connection strings for debug and release and all), follow this guide to set up the configuration files:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh369931.aspxTrying to package our application at this step will generate the following warning:3>MvcWebRole1(0,0): warning WAT170: The configuration setting 'Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString' is set up to use the local storage emulator for role 'MvcWebRole1' in configuration file 'ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg'. To access Windows Azure storage services, you must provide a valid Windows Azure storage connection string. Right click the web role under roles in solution manager and choose properties. Choose "Service configuration: Cloud". At "specify storage account credentials" we will copy/paste our account name and key from the Azure management platform.3.1 4. Right click Remote desktop Configuration and select certificate and export to file. We need to allow it in Portal manager.4.15 Now right click the cloud project and select package.5.1 Showing dialogue box. 5.2 Package success Now copy the path to the packaged file and go to management portal again. Click your web role and choose staging (or production). Upload. 5.3Tick the box about the single instance if that's what you want or you don't know what it means. Otherwise the following will happen (see image 4.6)5.4 Dialogue box When you have clicked the symbol for accept- button you will see the following screen with some green indicators down at the right corner. Click them if you want to see status.5.5 Information screen.5.6 "Failed to deploy application. The upload application has at least one role with only one instance. We recommend that you deploy at least two instances per role to ensure high availability in case one of the instances becomes unavailable. "To fix, go to step 5.4If you forgot to (or just didn't know you were supposed to) export your certificates. The following error will occur. Side note, the following thread suggests. To prevent: "Enable Remote Desktop for all roles" when right-clicking BIAB and choosing "Package". But in my case it was the not so present certificates. I fund the solution here.http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dotnetstocktradersampleapplication/thread/0e94c2b5-463f-4209-86b9-fc257e0678cd5.75.8 Success! 5.9 Nice URL n' all. (More on that at another blog post).6. If you try to login and getWhen this error occurs many web sites suggest this is because you need:http://nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.Providers.LocalDBOr : http://nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.ProvidersBut it can also be that you don't have the correct setup for converting connectionstrings between your web.config to your debug.web.config(or release.web.config, whichever your using).Run as suggested in the "ordinary project in your solution. Go to the management portal and click update.

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• Olympics data available for all on Windows Azure SQL Database and Power View

  - by jamiet

  Are you looking around for some decent test data for your BI demos? Well, if so, Microsoft have provided some data about all medals won at the Olympics Games (1900 to 2008) at OlympicsData workbook - Excel, SSIS, Azure sample; it provides analysis over athletes, countries, medal type, sport, discipline and various other dimensions. The data has been provided in an Excel workbook along with instructions on how to load the data into a Windows Azure SQL Database using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Frankly though, the rigmarole of standing up your own Windows Azure SQL Database ok, SQL Azure database, is both costly (SQL Azure isn’t free) and time consuming (the provided instructions aren’t exactly an idiot’s guide and getting SSIS to work properly with Excel isn’t a barrel of laughs either). To ease the pain for all you BI folks out there that simply want to party on the data I have loaded it all into the SQL Azure database that I use for hosting AdventureWorks on Azure. You can read more about AdventureWorks on Azure below however I’ll summarise here by saying it is a SQL Azure database provided for the use of the SQL Server community and which is supported by voluntary donations. To view the data the credentials you need are: Server mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net  Database AdventureWorks2012 User sqlfamily Password sqlf@m1ly Type those into SSMS and away you go, the data is provided in four tables [olympics].[Sport], [olympics].[Discipline], [olympics].[Event] & [olympics].[Medalist]: I figured this would be a good candidate for a Power View report so I fired up Excel 2013 and built such a report to slice’n’dice through the data – here are some screenshots that should give you a flavour of what is available: A view of all the available data Where do all the gymastics medals go? Which countries do top ten all-time medal winners come from? You get the idea. There is masses of information here and if you have Excel 2013 handy Power View provides a quick and easy way of surfing through it. To save you the bother of setting up the Power View report yourself you can have the one that I took these screenshots from, it is available on my SkyDrive at OlympicsAnalysis.xlsx so just hit the link and download to play to your heart’s content. Party on, people! As I said above the data is hosted on a SQL Azure database that I use for hosting “AdventureWorks on Azure” which I first announced in March 2013 at AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure. I’ll repeat the pertinent parts of that blog post here: I am pleased to announce that as of today … [AdventureWorks2012] now resides on SQL Azure and is available for anyone, absolutely anyone, to connect to and use for their own means. This database is free for you to use but SQL Azure is of course not free so before I give you the credentials please lend me your ears eyes for a short while longer. AdventureWorks on Azure is being provided for the SQL Server community to use and so I am hoping that that same community will rally around to support this effort by making a voluntary donation to support the upkeep which, going on current pricing, is going to be $119.88 per year. If you would like to contribute to keep AdventureWorks on Azure up and running for that full year please donate via PayPal to [email protected] Any amount, no matter how small, will help. If those 50+ people that retweeted me beforehand all contributed $2 then that would just about be enough to keep this up for a year. If the community contributes more than we need then there are a number of additional things that could be done: Host additional databases (Northwind anyone??) Host in more datacentres (this first one is in Western Europe) Make a charitable donation That last one, a charitable donation, is something I would really like to do. The SQL Community have proved before that they can make a significant contribution to charitable orgnisations through purchasing the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book and I harbour hopes that AdventureWorks on Azure can continue in that vein. So please, if you think AdventureWorks on Azure is something that is worth supporting please make a contribution. I’d like to emphasize that last point. If my hosting this Olympics data is useful to you please support this initiative by donating. Thanks in advance. @Jamiet

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• New spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly 6.0 provides statistics for prioritizing bug fixes

  - by Jason Crease

  One problem developers face is how to prioritize the many voices providing input into software bugs. If there is something wrong with a function that is the darling of a particular user, he or she tends to want action - now! The developer's dilemma is how to ascertain that the problem is major or minor, and when it should be addressed. Now there is a new spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly that provides exactly that information in an objective manner. This might upset those used to getting their way by being the loudest or pushiest, but ultimately it will ensure that the biggest problems get the priority they deserve. Here's how it works: Feature Usage Reporting (FUR) in SmartAssembly 6.0 provides a wealth of data about how your software is used by its end-users, but in the SmartAssembly UI the data isn't mined to its full extent. The new Excel spreadsheet for FUR extracts statistics from that data and presents them in easy-to-understand forms. I developed the spreadsheet feature in Microsoft Excel, using a fair amount of VBA. The spreadsheet connects directly to the database which stores the feature-usage data, and shows a wide variety of statistics and tables extracted from that data.  You want to know what percentage of users have used the 'Export as XML' button?  No problem.  How popular is v5.3 is compared to v5.1?  There's graphs for that. You need to know whether you have more users in Russia or Brazil? There's a big pie chart for that. I recently witnessed the spreadsheet in use here at Red Gate Software. My bug is exposed as minor While testing new features in .NET Reflector, I found a usability bug in the Refresh button and filed it in the Red Gate bug-tracking system. The bug was labelled "V.NEXT MINOR," which means it would be fixed in the next point release. Although I'm a professional tester, I'm not much different than most software users when they discover a bug that affects them personally: I wanted it fixed immediately. There was an ulterior motive at play here, of course. I would get to see my colleagues put the spreadsheet to work. The Reflector team loaded up the spreadsheet to view the feature-usage statistics that SmartAssembly collected for the refresh button. The resulting statistics showed that only 8% of users have ever pressed the Refresh button, and only 2.6% of sessions involve pressing the button. When Refresh is used, it's only pressed on average 1.6 times a session, with a maximum of 8 times during a session. This was in stark contrast to what I was doing as a conscientious tester: pressing it dozens of times per session. The spreadsheet provides evidence that my bug was a minor one. On to more serious things Based on the solid evidence uncovered by the spreadsheet, the Reflector team concluded that my experience does not represent that of the vast majority of Reflector's recorded users. The Reflector team had ample data to send me back to my desk and keep the bug classified as "V.NEXT MINOR." The team then went back to fixing more serious bugs. If I'm in the shoes of the user, I might not be thoroughly happy, but I cannot deny that the evidence clearly placed me in a very small minority. Next time I'm hoping the spreadsheet will prove that my bug is more important. Find out more about Feature-Usage Reporting here. The spreadsheet is available for free download here.

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• Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well.  To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees  and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped.  Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR.  Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM.  Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and  gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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• BizTalk&ndash;Mapping repeating EDI segments using a Table Looping functoid

  - by Bill Osuch

  BizTalk’s HIPAA X12 schemas have several repeating date/time segments in them, where the XML winds up looking something like this: <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>232</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120301</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>233</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120302</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> The corresponding EDI segments would look like this: DTM*232*20120301~ DTM*233*20120302~ The DateTimeQualifier element indicates whether it’s the start date or end date – 232 for start, 233 for end. So in this example (an X12 835) we’re saying the statement starts on 3/1/2012 and ends on 3/2/2012. When you’re mapping from some other data format, many times your start and end dates will be within the same node, like this: <StatementDates> <Begin>20120301</Begin> <End>20120302</End> </StatementDates> So how do you map from that and create two repeating segments in your destination map? You could connect both the <Begin> and <End> nodes to a looping functoid, and connect its output to <DTM_StatementDate>, then connect both <Begin> and <End> to <DTM_StatementDate> … this would give you two repeating segments, each with the correct date, but how to add the correct qualifier? The answer is the Table Looping Functoid! To test this, let’s create a simplified schema that just contains the date fields we’re mapping. First, create your input schema: And your output schema: Now create a map that uses these two schemas, and drag a Table Looping functoid onto it. The first input parameter configures the scope (or how many times the records will loop), so drag a link from the StatementDates node over to the functoid. Yes, StatementDates only appears once, so this would make it seem like it would only loop once, but you’ll see in just a minute. The second parameter in the functoid is the number of columns in the output table. We want to fill two fields, so just set this to 2. Now drag the Begin and End nodes over to the functoid. Finally, we want to add the constant values for DateTimeQualifier, so add a value of 232 and another of 233. When all your inputs are configured, it should look like this: Now we’ll configure the output table. Click on the Table Looping Grid, and configure it to look like this: Microsoft’s description of this functoid says “The Table Looping functoid repeats with the looping record it is connected to. Within each iteration, it loops once per row in the table looping grid, producing multiple output loops.” So here we will loop (# of <StatementDates> nodes) * (Rows in the table), or 2 times. Drag two Table Extractor functoids onto the map; these are what are going to pull the data we want out of the table. The first input to each of these will be the output of the TableLooping functoid, and the second input will be the row number to pull from. So the functoid connected to <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> will look like this: Connect these two functoids to the two nodes we want to populate, and connect another output from the Table Looping functoid to the <DTM_StatementDate> record. You should have a map that looks something like this: Create some sample xml, use it as the TestMap Input Instance, and you should get a result like the XML at the top of this post. Technorati Tags: BizTalk, EDI, Mapping

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• Making AI jump on a spot effectively

  - by Pasquale Sada

  How to calculate, in 3D environment, the closest point, from which an AI character can jump onto a platform? Setup I have an initial velocity V(Vx,Vy,VZ) and a spot where the character stands still at S(Sx,Sy,Sz). What I'm trying to achieve is a successful jump on a spot E(Ex,Ey,Ez) where you have clicked on(only lower or higher spot, because I've in place a simple steering behavior for even terrains). There are no obstacles around. I've implemented a formula that can make him jump in a precise way on a spot but you need to declare an angle: the problem arise when the selected spot is straight above your head. It' pretty lame that the char hang there and can reach a thing that is 1cm above is head. I'll share the code I'm using: Vector3 dir = target - transform.position; // get target direction float h = dir.y; // get height difference dir.y = 0; // retain only the horizontal direction float dist = dir.magnitude ; // get horizontal distance float a = angle * Mathf.Deg2Rad; // convert angle to radians dir.y = dist * Mathf.Tan(a); // set dir to the elevation angle dist += h / Mathf.Tan(a); // correct for small height differences // calculate the velocity magnitude float vel = Mathf.Sqrt(dist * Physics.gravity.magnitude / Mathf.Sin(2 *a)); return vel * dir.normalized; Ended up using the lowest angle (20 degree) and checking for collision on the trajectory. If found any increase the angle. Here some code (to improve the code maybe must stop the check at the highest point of the curve): Vector3 BallisticVel(Vector3 target, float angle) { Vector3 dir = target - transform.position; // get target direction float h = dir.y; // get height difference dir.y = 0; // retain only the horizontal direction float dist = dir.magnitude ; // get horizontal distance float a = angle * Mathf.Deg2Rad; // convert angle to radians dir.y = dist * Mathf.Tan(a); // set dir to the elevation angle dist += h / Mathf.Tan(a); // correct for small height differences // calculate the velocity magnitude float vel = Mathf.Sqrt(dist * Physics.gravity.magnitude / Mathf.Sin(2 * a)); return vel * dir.normalized; } Vector3 TrajectoryPoint(Vector3 startingPosition, Vector3 startingVelocity, float n ) { float t = 1/60 ; // seconds per time step Vector3 stepVelocity = t * startingVelocity; // m/s Vector3 stepGravity = t * t * Physics.gravity; // m/s/s return startingPosition + n * stepVelocity + 0.5f * (n*n+n) * stepGravity; } bool CheckTrajectory(Vector3 startingPosition,Vector3 target, float angle_jump) { Debug.Log("checking"); if(angle_jump < 80f) { Debug.Log("if"); Vector3 startingVelocity = BallisticVel(target, angle_jump); for (int i = 0; i < 180; i++) { //Debug.Log(i); Vector3 trajectoryPosition = TrajectoryPoint( startingPosition, startingVelocity, i ); if(Physics.Raycast(trajectoryPosition,Vector3.forward,safeDistance)) { angle_jump += 10; break; // restart loop with the new angle } else continue; } return true; JumpVelocity = BallisticVel(target, angle_jump); } return false; }

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• Roles / Profiles / Perspectives in NetBeans IDE 7.1

  - by Geertjan

  With a check out of main-silver from yesterday, I'm able to use the brand new "role" attribute in @TopComponent.Registration, as you can see below, in the bit in bold: @ConvertAsProperties(dtd = "-//org.role.demo.ui//Admin//EN", autostore = false) @TopComponent.Description(preferredID = "AdminTopComponent", //iconBase="SET/PATH/TO/ICON/HERE", persistenceType = TopComponent.PERSISTENCE_ALWAYS) @TopComponent.Registration(mode = "editor", openAtStartup = true, role="admin") public final class AdminTopComponent extends TopComponent { And here's a window for general users of the application, with the "role" attribute set to "user": @ConvertAsProperties(dtd = "-//org.role.demo.ui//User//EN", autostore = false) @TopComponent.Description(preferredID = "UserTopComponent", //iconBase="SET/PATH/TO/ICON/HERE", persistenceType = TopComponent.PERSISTENCE_ALWAYS) @TopComponent.Registration(mode = "explorer", openAtStartup = true, role="user") public final class UserTopComponent extends TopComponent { So, I have two windows. One is assigned to the "admin" role, the other to the "user" role. In the "ModuleInstall" class, I add a "WindowSystemListener" and set "user" as the application's role: public class Installer extends ModuleInstall implements WindowSystemListener { @Override public void restored() { WindowManager.getDefault().addWindowSystemListener(this); } @Override public void beforeLoad(WindowSystemEvent event) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("user"); WindowManager.getDefault().removeWindowSystemListener(this); } @Override public void afterLoad(WindowSystemEvent event) { } @Override public void beforeSave(WindowSystemEvent event) { } @Override public void afterSave(WindowSystemEvent event) { } } So, when the application starts, the "UserTopComponent" is shown, not the "AdminTopComponent". Next, I have two Actions, for switching between the two roles, as shown below: @ActionID(category = "Window", id = "org.role.demo.ui.SwitchToAdminAction") @ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_SwitchToAdminAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Window", position = 250) }) @Messages("CTL_SwitchToAdminAction=Switch To Admin") public final class SwitchToAdminAction extends AbstractAction { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("admin"); } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return !WindowManager.getDefault().getRole().equals("admin"); } } @ActionID(category = "Window", id = "org.role.demo.ui.SwitchToUserAction") @ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_SwitchToUserAction") @ActionReferences({ @ActionReference(path = "Menu/Window", position = 250) }) @Messages("CTL_SwitchToUserAction=Switch To User") public final class SwitchToUserAction extends AbstractAction { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { WindowManager.getDefault().setRole("user"); } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { return !WindowManager.getDefault().getRole().equals("user"); } } When I select one of the above actions, the role changes, and the other window is shown. I could, of course, add a Login dialog to the "SwitchToAdminAction", so that authentication is required in order to switch to the "admin" role. Now, let's say I am now in the "user" role. So, the "UserTopComponent" shown above is now opened. I decide to also open another window, the Properties window, as below... ...and, when I am in the "admin" role, when the "AdminTopComponent" is open, I decide to also open the Output window, as below... Now, when I switch from one role to the other, the additional window/s I opened will also be opened, together with the explicit members of the currently selected role. And, the main window position and size are also persisted across roles. When I look in the "build" folder of my project in development, I see two different Windows2Local folders, one per role, automatically created by the fact that there is something to be persisted for a particular role, e.g., when a switch to a different role is done: And, with that, we now clearly have roles/profiles/perspectives in NetBeans Platform applications from NetBeans Platform 7.1 onwards.

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• Comparing Apples and Pairs

  - by Tony Davis

  A recent study, High Costs and Negative Value of Pair Programming, by Capers Jones, pulls no punches in its assessment of the costs-to- benefits ratio of pair programming, two programmers working together, at a single computer, rather than separately. He implies that pair programming is a method rushed into production on a wave of enthusiasm for Agile or Extreme Programming, without any real regard for its effectiveness. Despite admitting that his data represented a far from complete study of the economics of pair programming, his conclusions were stark: it was 2.5 times more expensive, resulted in a 15% drop in productivity, and offered no significant quality benefits. The author provides a more scientific analysis than Jon Evans’ Pair Programming Considered Harmful, but the theme is the same. In terms of upfront-coding costs, pair programming is surely more expensive. The claim of productivity loss is dubious and contested by other studies. The third claim, though, did surprise me. The author’s data suggests that if both the pair and the individual programmers employ static code analysis and testing, then there is no measurable difference in the resulting code quality, in terms of defects per function point. In other words, pair programming incurs a massive extra cost for no tangible return in investment. There were, inevitably, many criticisms of his data and his conclusions, a few of which are persuasive. Firstly, that the driver/observer model of pair programming, on which the study bases its findings, is far from the most effective. For example, many find Ping-Pong pairing, based on use of test-driven development, far more productive. Secondly, that it doesn’t distinguish between “expert” and “novice” pair programmers– that is, independently of other programming skills, how skilled was an individual at pair programming. Thirdly, that his measure of quality is too narrow. This point rings true, certainly at Red Gate, where developers don’t pair program all the time, but use the method in short bursts, while tackling a tricky problem and needing a fresh perspective on the best approach, or more in-depth knowledge in a particular domain. All of them argue that pair programming, and collective code ownership, offers significant rewards, if not in terms of immediate “bug reduction”, then in removing the likelihood of single points of failure, and improving the overall quality and longer-term adaptability/maintainability of the design. There is also a massive learning benefit for both participants. One developer told me how he once worked in the same team over consecutive summers, the first time with no pair programming and the second time pair-programming two-thirds of the time, and described the increased rate of learning the second time as “phenomenal”. There are a great many theories on how we should develop software (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.), but woefully little scientific research in their effectiveness. For a group that spends so much time crunching other people’s data, I wonder if developers spend enough time crunching data about themselves. Capers Jones’ data may be incomplete, but should cause a pause for thought, especially for any large IT departments, supporting commerce and industry, who are considering pair programming. It certainly shouldn’t discourage teams from exploring new ways of developing software, as long as they also think about how to gather hard data to gauge their effectiveness.

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• How can I gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

  - by ruslan

  One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting?

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• Building Tag Cloud Declarative ADF Component

  - by Arunkumar Ramamoorthy

  When building a website, there could a requirement to add a tag cloud to let the users know the popular tags (or terms) used in the site. In this blog, we would build a simple declarative component to be used as tag cloud in the page. To start with, we would first create the declarative component, which could display the tag cloud. We will do that by creating a new custom application from the new gallery. Give a name for the app and the project and from the new gallery, let us create a new ADF Declarative Component We need to specify the name for the declarative component, attributes in it etc. as follows For displaying the tags as cloud, we need to pass the content to this component. So, we will create an attribute to hold the values for the tag. Let us name it as "value" and make it as java.lang.String  type. Once after this, to hold the component, we need to create a tag library. This can be done by clicking on the Add Tag Library button. Clicking on OK buttons in all the open dialogs would create a declarative component for us. Now, we need to display the tag cloud based on the value passed to the component. To do that, we assume that the value is a Tree Binding and has two attributes in it, say "Name" and "Weight". To make a tag cloud, we would put together the "Name" in a loop and set it's font size based on the "Weight". After putting our logic to work, here is how the source look Attributes added to the declarative components can be retrieved by using #{attrs.<attribute_name>}. Now, we need to deploy this project as ADF Library Jar file, so that this can be distributed to the consuming applications. We'll select ADF Library Jar as type and create the profile. We would be getting the jar file after deployment. To test the functionality, we could create a simple Fusion Web Application. To add our custom component to the consuming application, we can create a file system connection pointing to the location where the jar file is and add it or, add through the project properties of the ViewController project. Now, our custom component has been added to the consuming application. We could test that by creating a VO in the model project with a query like, select 'Faces' as Name,25 as Weight from dual union all select 'ADF', 15 from dual  union all select 'ADFdi', 30 from dual union all select 'BC4J', 20 from dual union all select 'EJB', 40 from dual union all select 'WS', 35 from dual Add this VO to the AppModule, so that it would be exposed to the data control. Then, we could create a jspx page, and add a tree binding to the VO created. We can now see our Tag Cloud declarative component is available in the component palette.  It can be inserted from the component palette to our page and set it's value property to CollectionModel of the tree binding created. Now that we've created the Declarative component and added that to our page successfully, we can run the page to see how it looks. As per the query, the Tags are displayed in different fonts, based on their weight.

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• XNA Multiplayer Games and Networking

  - by JoshReuben

  ·        XNA communication must by default be lightweight – if you are syncing game state between players from the Game.Update method, you must minimize traffic. That game loop may be firing 60 times a second and player 5 needs to know if his tank has collided with any player 3 and the angle of that gun turret. There are no WCF ServiceContract / DataContract niceties here, but at the same time the XNA networking stack simplifies the details. The payload must be simplistic - just an ordered set of numbers that you would map to meaningful enum values upon deserialization.   Overview ·        XNA allows you to create and join multiplayer game sessions, to manage game state across clients, and to interact with the friends list ·        Dependency on Gamer Services - to receive notifications such as sign-in status changes and game invitations ·        two types of online multiplayer games: system link game sessions (LAN) and LIVE sessions (WAN). ·        Minimum dev requirements: 1 Xbox 360 console + Creators Club membership to test network code - run 1 instance of game on Xbox 360, and 1 on a Windows-based computer   Network Sessions ·        A network session is made up of players in a game + up to 8 arbitrary integer properties describing the session ·        create custom enums – (e.g. GameMode, SkillLevel) as keys in NetworkSessionProperties collection ·        Player state: lobby, in-play   Session Types ·        local session - for split-screen gaming - requires no network traffic. ·        system link session - connects multiple gaming machines over a local subnet. ·        Xbox LIVE multiplayer session - occurs on the Internet. Ranked or unranked   Session Updates ·        NetworkSession class Update method - must be called once per frame. ·        performs the following actions: o   Sends the network packets. o   Changes the session state. o   Raises the managed events for any significant state changes. o   Returns the incoming packet data. ·        synchronize the session à packet-received and state-change events à no threading issues   Session Config ·        Session host - gaming machine that creates the session. XNA handles host migration ·        NetworkSession properties: AllowJoinInProgress , AllowHostMigration ·        NetworkSession groups: AllGamers, LocalGamers, RemoteGamers   Subscribe to NetworkSession events ·        GamerJoined ·        GamerLeft ·        GameStarted ·        GameEnded – use to return to lobby ·        SessionEnded – use to return to title screen   Create a Session session = NetworkSession.Create(         NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,         maximumLocalPlayers,         maximumGamers,         privateGamerSlots,         sessionProperties );   Start a Session if (session.IsHost) {     if (session.IsEveryoneReady)     {        session.StartGame();        foreach (var gamer in SignedInGamer.SignedInGamers)        {             gamer.Presence.PresenceMode =                 GamerPresenceMode.InCombat;   Find a Network Session AvailableNetworkSessionCollection availableSessions = NetworkSession.Find(     NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,       maximumLocalPlayers,     networkSessionProperties); availableSessions.AllowJoinInProgress = true;   Join a Network Session NetworkSession session = NetworkSession.Join(     availableSessions[selectedSessionIndex]);   Sending Network Data var packetWriter = new PacketWriter(); foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Get the tank associated with this player.     Tank myTank = gamer.Tag as Tank;     // Write the data.     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Position);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TankRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TurretRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.IsFiring);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Health);       // Send it to everyone.     gamer.SendData(packetWriter, SendDataOptions.None);     }   Receiving Network Data foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Keep reading while packets are available.     while (gamer.IsDataAvailable)     {         NetworkGamer sender;          // Read a single packet.         gamer.ReceiveData(packetReader, out sender);          if (!sender.IsLocal)         {             // Get the tank associated with this packet.             Tank remoteTank = sender.Tag as Tank;              // Read the data and apply it to the tank.             remoteTank.Position = packetReader.ReadVector2();             …   End a Session if (session.AllGamers.Count == 1)         {             session.EndGame();             session.Update();         }   Performance •        Aim to minimize payload, reliable in order messages •        Send Data Options: o   Unreliable, out of order -(SendDataOptions.None) o   Unreliable, in order (SendDataOptions.InOrder) o   Reliable, out of order (SendDataOptions.Reliable) o   Reliable, in order (SendDataOptions.ReliableInOrder) o   Chat data (SendDataOptions.Chat) •        Simulate: NetworkSession.SimulatedLatency , NetworkSession.SimulatedPacketLoss •        Voice support – NetworkGamer properties: HasVoice ,IsTalking , IsMutedByLocalUser

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• JOGL2 test compiles, but doesn't execute - help?

  - by Chuchinyi

  I have a problem with JOGL2. My JOGL2Template.java compiles fine, but executing it results in the following error: D:\java\java\jogl>javac JOGL2Template.java <== compile ok D:\java\java\jogl>java JOGL2Template <== execute error Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError at javax.media.opengl.GLProfile.<clinit>(GLProfile.java:1176) at JOGL2Template.<init>(JOGL2Template.java:24) at JOGL2Template.main(JOGL2Template.java:57) Caused by: java.lang.SecurityException: no certificate for gluegen-rt.dll in D:\ java\lib\gluegen-rt-natives-windows-i586.jar at com.jogamp.common.util.JarUtil.validateCertificate(JarUtil.java:350) at com.jogamp.common.util.JarUtil.validateCertificates(JarUtil.java:324) at com.jogamp.common.util.cache.TempJarCache.validateCertificates(TempJa rCache.java:328) at com.jogamp.common.util.cache.TempJarCache.bootstrapNativeLib(TempJarC ache.java:283) at com.jogamp.common.os.Platform$3.run(Platform.java:308) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at com.jogamp.common.os.Platform.loadGlueGenRTImpl(Platform.java:298) at com.jogamp.common.os.Platform.<clinit>(Platform.java:207) ... 3 more Here is the JOGL2Template.java source code: import java.awt.Dimension; import java.awt.Frame; import java.awt.event.WindowAdapter; import java.awt.event.WindowEvent; import javax.media.opengl.GLAutoDrawable; import javax.media.opengl.GLCapabilities; import javax.media.opengl.GLEventListener; import javax.media.opengl.GLProfile; import javax.media.opengl.awt.GLCanvas; import com.jogamp.opengl.util.FPSAnimator; import javax.swing.JFrame; /* * JOGL 2.0 Program Template For AWT applications */ public class JOGL2Template extends JFrame implements GLEventListener { private static final int CANVAS_WIDTH = 640; // Width of the drawable private static final int CANVAS_HEIGHT = 480; // Height of the drawable private static final int FPS = 60; // Animator's target frames per second // Constructor to create profile, caps, drawable, animator, and initialize Frame public JOGL2Template() { // Get the default OpenGL profile that best reflect your running platform. GLProfile glp = GLProfile.getDefault(); // Specifies a set of OpenGL capabilities, based on your profile. GLCapabilities caps = new GLCapabilities(glp); // Allocate a GLDrawable, based on your OpenGL capabilities. GLCanvas canvas = new GLCanvas(caps); canvas.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(CANVAS_WIDTH, CANVAS_HEIGHT)); canvas.addGLEventListener(this); // Create a animator that drives canvas' display() at 60 fps. final FPSAnimator animator = new FPSAnimator(canvas, FPS); addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() { // For the close button @Override public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) { // Use a dedicate thread to run the stop() to ensure that the // animator stops before program exits. new Thread() { @Override public void run() { animator.stop(); System.exit(0); } }.start(); } }); add(canvas); pack(); setTitle("OpenGL 2 Test"); setVisible(true); animator.start(); // Start the animator } public static void main(String[] args) { new JOGL2Template(); } @Override public void init(GLAutoDrawable drawable) { // Your OpenGL codes to perform one-time initialization tasks // such as setting up of lights and display lists. } @Override public void display(GLAutoDrawable drawable) { // Your OpenGL graphic rendering codes for each refresh. } @Override public void reshape(GLAutoDrawable drawable, int x, int y, int w, int h) { // Your OpenGL codes to set up the view port, projection mode and view volume. } @Override public void dispose(GLAutoDrawable drawable) { // Hardly used. } } Any ideas what might be the cause of these errors?

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• Security Access Control With Solaris Virtualization

  - by Thierry Manfe-Oracle

  Numerous Solaris customers consolidate multiple applications or servers on a single platform. The resulting configuration consists of many environments hosted on a single infrastructure and security constraints sometimes exist between these environments. Recently, a customer consolidated many virtual machines belonging to both their Intranet and Extranet on a pair of SPARC Solaris servers interconnected through Infiniband. Virtual Machines were mapped to Solaris Zones and one security constraint was to prevent SSH connections between the Intranet and the Extranet. This case study gives us the opportunity to understand how the Oracle Solaris Network Virtualization Technology —a.k.a. Project Crossbow— can be used to control outbound traffic from Solaris Zones. Solaris Zones from both the Intranet and Extranet use an Infiniband network to access a ZFS Storage Appliance that exports NFS shares. Solaris global zones on both SPARC servers mount iSCSI LU exported by the Storage Appliance.  Non-global zones are installed on these iSCSI LU. With no security hardening, if an Extranet zone gets compromised, the attacker could try to use the Storage Appliance as a gateway to the Intranet zones, or even worse, to the global zones as all the zones are reachable from this node. One solution consists in using Solaris Network Virtualization Technology to stop outbound SSH traffic from the Solaris Zones. The virtualized network stack provides per-network link flows. A flow classifies network traffic on a specific link. As an example, on the network link used by a Solaris Zone to connect to the Infiniband, a flow can be created for TCP traffic on port 22, thereby a flow for the ssh traffic. A bandwidth can be specified for that flow and, if set to zero, the traffic is blocked. Last but not least, flows are created from the global zone, which means that even with root privileges in a Solaris zone an attacker cannot disable or delete a flow. With the flow approach, the outbound traffic of a Solaris zone is controlled from outside the zone. Schema 1 describes the new network setting once the security has been put in place. Here are the instructions to create a Crossbow flow as used in Schema 1 : (GZ)# zoneadm -z zonename halt ...halts the Solaris Zone. (GZ)# flowadm add-flow -l iblink -a transport=TCP,remote_port=22 -p maxbw=0 sshFilter  ...creates a flow on the IB partition "iblink" used by the zone to connect to the Infiniband.  This IB partition can be identified by intersecting the output of the commands 'zonecfg -z zonename info net' and 'dladm show-part'.  The flow is created on port 22, for the TCP traffic with a zero maximum bandwidth.  The name given to the flow is "sshFilter". (GZ)# zoneadm -z zonename boot  ...restarts the Solaris zone now that the flow is in place.Solaris Zones and Solaris Network Virtualization enable SSH access control on Infiniband (and on Ethernet) without the extra cost of a firewall. With this approach, no change is required on the Infiniband switch. All the security enforcements are put in place at the Solaris level, minimizing the impact on the overall infrastructure. The Crossbow flows come in addition to many other security controls available with Oracle Solaris such as IPFilter and Role Based Access Control, and that can be used to tackle security challenges.

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• Using Recursive SQL and XML trick to PIVOT(OK, concat) a "Document Folder Structure Relationship" table, works like MySQL GROUP_CONCAT

  - by Kevin Shyr

  I'm in the process of building out a Data Warehouse and encountered this issue along the way.In the environment, there is a table that stores all the folders with the individual level.  For example, if a document is created here:{App Path}\Level 1\Level 2\Level 3\{document}, then the DocumentFolder table would look like this:IDID_ParentFolderName1NULLLevel 121Level 232Level 3To my understanding, the table was built so that:Each proposal can have multiple documents stored at various locationsDifferent users working on the proposal will have different access level to the folder; if one user is assigned access to a folder level, she/he can see all the sub folders and their content.Now we understand from an application point of view why this table was built this way.  But you can quickly see the pain this causes the report writer to show a document link on the report.  I wasn't surprised to find the report query had 5 self outer joins, which is at the mercy of nobody creating a document that is buried 6 levels deep, and not to mention the degradation in performance.With the help of 2 posts (at the end of this post), I was able to come up with this solution:Use recursive SQL to build out the folder pathUse SQL XML trick to concat the strings.Code (a reminder, I built this code in a stored procedure.  If you copy the syntax into a simple query window and execute, you'll get an incorrect syntax error) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} -- Get all folders and group them by the original DocumentFolderID in PTSDocument table;WITH DocFoldersByDocFolderID(PTSDocumentFolderID_Original, PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent, sDocumentFolder, nLevel)AS (-- first member      SELECT 'PTSDocumentFolderID_Original' = d1.PTSDocumentFolderID            , PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent            , 'sDocumentFolder' = sName            , 'nLevel' = CONVERT(INT, 1000000)      FROM (SELECT DISTINCT PTSDocumentFolderID                  FROM dbo.PTSDocument_DY WITH(READPAST)            ) AS d1            INNER JOIN dbo.PTSDocumentFolder_DY AS df1 WITH(READPAST)                  ON d1.PTSDocumentFolderID = df1.PTSDocumentFolderID      UNION ALL      -- recursive      SELECT ddf1.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original            , df1.PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent            , 'sDocumentFolder' = df1.sName            , 'nLevel' = ddf1.nLevel - 1      FROM dbo.PTSDocumentFolder_DY AS df1 WITH(READPAST)            INNER JOIN DocFoldersByDocFolderID AS ddf1                  ON df1.PTSDocumentFolderID = ddf1.PTSDocumentFolderID_Parent)-- Flatten out folder path, DocFolderSingleByDocFolderID(PTSDocumentFolderID_Original, sDocumentFolder)AS (SELECT dfbdf.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original            , 'sDocumentFolder' = STUFF((SELECT '\' + sDocumentFolder                                         FROM DocFoldersByDocFolderID                                         WHERE (PTSDocumentFolderID_Original = dfbdf.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original)                                         ORDER BY PTSDocumentFolderID_Original, nLevel                                         FOR XML PATH ('')),1,1,'')      FROM DocFoldersByDocFolderID AS dfbdf      GROUP BY dfbdf.PTSDocumentFolderID_Original) And voila, I use the second CTE to join back to my original query (which is now a CTE for Source as we can now use MERGE to do INSERT and UPDATE at the same time).Each part of this solution would not solve the problem by itself because:If I don't use recursion, I cannot build out the path properly.  If I use the XML trick only, then I don't have the originating folder ID info that I need to link to the document.If I don't use the XML trick, then I don't have one row per document to show in the report.I could conceivably do this in the report function, but I'd rather not deal with the beginning or ending backslash and how to attach the document name.PIVOT doesn't do strings and UNPIVOT runs into the same problem as the above.I'm excited that each version of SQL server provides us new tools to solve old problems and/or enables us to solve problems in a more elegant wayThe 2 posts that helped me along:Recursive Queries Using Common Table ExpressionHow to use GROUP BY to concatenate strings in SQL server?

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• Best approach to depth streaming via existing codec

  - by Kevin

  I'm working on a development system (and game) intended for games set mostly in static third-person views. We produce our scenery by CG and photographic techniques. Our background art is rendered off-line by a production-grade renderer. To allow the runtime imagery to properly interact with the background art, I wrote a program to convert from depth output by Mental Ray into a texture, and a pixel shader to draw a quad such that the Z data comes from the texture. This technique is working out very well, but now we've decided that some of the camera angle changes between scenes should be animated. The animation itself is straightforward to produce from our CG models. We intend to encode it to some HD video codec such as H.264. The problem is that in order to maintain our runtime imagery on the screen, the depth buffer will need to be loaded for each video frame. Due to the bandwidth, the video's depth data will need to be compressed efficiently. I've looked into methods for performing temporal compression of depth info and found an interesting research paper here: http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/j.kautz/publications/depth-streaming.pdf The method establishes a mapping between 16-bit depth values and YCbCr values. The mapping is tuned to the properties of existing video codecs in order to maximize precision of the decoded depths after the YCbCr has undergone video compression. It allows an existing, unmodified video codec to be used on the backend. I'm looking at how to pull this off with the least possible work. (This design change was unplanned.) Our game engine itself is native C++, presently for Win32 and DirectX, although we've worked hard to keep platform dependence segregated because we intend other ports. We don't have motion video facilities in the engine yet but will ultimately need that anyway for cinematics. I was planning on using some off-the-shelf motion video solution we can plug into our engine, and haven't chosen one yet. This new added requirement makes selecting one harder since, among other things, we'll now need to bypass colourspace conversion on one of the streams, and also will need to be playing two streams simultaneously in lockstep, on top of in some cases audio on one of them (for the cinematics). I'm also wondering if it's possible (or even useful) to do the conversion from YCbCr to depth in a pixel shader, or if it's better to just do it in CPU and separately load the resulting depth values into a locked tex. The conversion unfortunately does involve branching logic per-pixel. (There are more naive mappings that don't need branching, but they produce inferior results.) It could be reduced to a table lookup but the table would be 32MB. Programming is second-nature to me but I'm not that experienced with pix shaders and have zero knowledge of off-the-shelf video solutions. I'd therefore be interested in advice from others who may have dealt more with depth streaming, pixel shaders, and/or off-the-shelf codecs, regarding how feasible the proposed application is and what off-the-shelf video systems out there would best get along with this usage case.

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• Creating a voxel world with 3D arrays using threads

  - by Sean M.

  I am making a voxel game (a bit like Minecraft) in C++(11), and I've come across an issue with creating a world efficiently. In my program, I have a World class, which holds a 3D array of Region class pointers. When I initialize the world, I give it a width, height, and depth so it knows how large of a world to create. Each Region is split up into a 32x32x32 area of blocks, so as you may guess, it takes a while to initialize the world once the world gets to be above 8x4x8 Regions. In order to alleviate this issue, I thought that using threads to generate different levels of the world concurrently would make it go faster. Having not used threads much before this, and being still relatively new to C++, I'm not entirely sure how to go about implementing one thread per level (level being a xz plane with a height of 1), when there is a variable number of levels. I tried this: for(int i = 0; i < height; i++) { std::thread th(std::bind(&World::load, this, width, height, depth)); th.join(); } Where load() just loads all Regions at height "height". But that executes the threads one at a time (which makes sense, looking back), and that of course takes as long as generating all Regions in one loop. I then tried: std::thread t1(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h1, h2 - 1, d)); std::thread t2(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h2, h3 - 1, d)); std::thread t3(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h3, h4 - 1, d)); std::thread t4(std::bind(&World::load, this, w, h4, h - 1, d)); t1.join(); t2.join(); t3.join(); t4.join(); This works in that the world loads about 3-3.5 times faster, but this forces the height to be a multiple of 4, and it also gives the same exact VAO object to every single Region, which need individual VAOs in order to render properly. The VAO of each Region is set in the constructor, so I'm assuming that somehow the VAO number is not thread safe or something (again, unfamiliar with threads). So basically, my question is two one-part: How to I implement a variable number of threads that all execute at the same time, and force the main thread to wait for them using join() without stopping the other threads? How do I make the VAO objects thread safe, so when a bunch of Regions are being created at the same time across multiple threads, they don't all get the exact same VAO? Turns out it has to do with GL contexts not working across multiple threads. I moved the VAO/VBO creation back to the main thread. Fixed! Here is the code for block.h/.cpp, region.h/.cpp, and CVBObject.h/.cpp which controls VBOs and VAOs, in case you need it. If you need to see anything else just ask. EDIT: Also, I'd prefer not to have answers that are like "you should have used boost". I'm trying to do this without boost to get used to threads before moving onto other libraries.

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• Customizing the Test Status on the TFS 2010 SSRS Stories Overview Report

  - by Bob Hardister

  This post shows how to customize the SQL query used by the Team Foundation Server 2010 SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Stories Overview Report. The objective is to show test status for the current version while including user story status of the current and prior versions.  Why? Because we don’t copy completed user stories into the next release. We only want one instance of a user story for the product because we believe copies can get out of sync when they are supposed to be the same. In the example below, work items for the current version are on the area path root and prior versions are not on the area path root. However, you can use area path or iteration path criteria in the query as suits your needs. In any case, here’s how you do it: 1. Download a copy of the report RDL file as a backup 2. Open the report by clicking the edit down arrow and selecting “Edit in Report Builder” 3. Right click on the dsOverview Dataset and select Dataset Properties 4. Update the following SQL per the comments in the code: Customization 1 of 3 … -- Get the list deliverable workitems that have Test Cases linked DECLARE @TestCases Table (DeliverableID int, TestCaseID int); INSERT @TestCases     SELECT h.ID, flh.TargetWorkItemID     FROM @Hierarchy h         JOIN FactWorkItemLinkHistory flh             ON flh.SourceWorkItemID = h.ID                 AND flh.WorkItemLinkTypeSK = @TestedByLinkTypeSK                 AND flh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126)                 AND flh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK         JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] wi ON flh.TargetWorkItemID = wi.[System_ID]                  AND wi.[System_WorkItemType] = @TestCase             AND wi.ProjectNodeGUID  = @ProjectGuid              --  Customization 1 of 3: only include test status information when test case area path = root. Added the following 2 statements              AND wi.AreaPath = '{the root area path of the team project}'  …          Customization 2 of 3 … -- Get the Bugs linked to the deliverable workitems directly DECLARE @Bugs Table (ID int, ActiveBugs int, ResolvedBugs int, ClosedBugs int, ProposedBugs int) INSERT @Bugs     SELECT h.ID,         SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Active THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Active,         SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Resolved THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Resolved,         SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Closed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Closed,         SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Proposed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Proposed     FROM @Hierarchy h         JOIN FactWorkItemLinkHistory flh             ON flh.SourceWorkItemID = h.ID             AND flh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK         JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] wi             ON wi.[System_WorkItemType] = @Bug             AND wi.[System_Id] = flh.TargetWorkItemID             AND flh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126)             AND wi.[ProjectNodeGUID] = @ProjectGuid              --  Customization 2 of 3: only include test status information when test case area path = root. Added the following statement              AND wi.AreaPath = '{the root area path of the team project}'       GROUP BY h.ID … Customization 2 of 3 … -- Add the Bugs linked to the Test Cases which are linked to the deliverable workitems -- Walks the links from the user stories to test cases (via the tested by link), and then to -- bugs that are linked to the test case. We don't need to join to the test case in the work -- item history view. -- --    [WIT:User Story/Requirement] --> [Link:Tested By]--> [Link:any type] --> [WIT:Bug] INSERT @Bugs SELECT tc.DeliverableID,     SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Active THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Active,     SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Resolved THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Resolved,     SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Closed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Closed,     SUM (CASE WHEN wi.[System_State] = @Proposed THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) Proposed FROM @TestCases tc     JOIN FactWorkItemLinkHistory flh         ON flh.SourceWorkItemID = tc.TestCaseID         AND flh.RemovedDate = CONVERT(DATETIME, '9999', 126)         AND flh.TeamProjectCollectionSK = @TeamProjectCollectionSK     JOIN [CurrentWorkItemView] wi         ON wi.[System_Id] = flh.TargetWorkItemID         AND wi.[System_WorkItemType] = @Bug         AND wi.[ProjectNodeGUID] = @ProjectGuid         --  Customization 3 of 3: only include test status information when test case area path = root. Added the following statement         AND wi.AreaPath = '{the root area path of the team project}'     GROUP BY tc.DeliverableID … 5. Save the report and you’re all set. Note: you may need to re-apply custom parameter changes like pre-selected sprints.

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• About the K computer

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  Okay ? after getting yet another mail because of the new #1 on the Top500 list, I want to add some comments from my side: Yes, the system is using SPARC processor. And that is great news for a SPARC fan like me. It is using the SPARC VIIIfx processor from Fujitsu clocked at 2 GHz. No, it isn't the only one. Most people are saying there are two in the Top500 list using SPARC (#77 JAXA and #1 K) but in fact there are three. The Tianhe-1 (#2 on the Top500 list) super computer contains 2048 Galaxy "FT-1000" 1 GHz 8-core processors. Don't know it? The FeiTeng-1000 ? this proc is a 8 core, 8 threads per core, 1 ghz processor made in China. And it's SPARC based. By the way ? this sounds really familiar to me ? perhaps the people just took the opensourced UltraSPARC-T2 design, because some of the parameters sound just to similar. However it looks like that Tianhe-1 is using the SPARCs as input nodes and not as compute notes. No, I don't see it as the next M-series processor. Simple reason: You can't create SMP systems out of them ? it simply hasn't the functionality to do so. Even when there are multiple CPUs on a single board, they are not connected like an SMP/NUMA machine to a shared memory machine ? they are connected with the cluster interconnect (in this case the Tofu interconnect) and work like a large cluster. Yes, it has a lot of oomph in Linpack ? however I assume a lot came from the extensions to the SPARCv9 standard. No, Linpack has no relevance for any commercial workload ? Linpack is such a special load, that even some HPC people are arguing that it isn't really a good benchmark for HPC. It's embarrassingly parallel, it can work with relatively small interconnects compared to the interconnects in SMP systems (however we get in spheres SMP interconnects where a few years ago). Amdahl isn't hitting that hard when running Linpack. Yes, it's a good move to use SPARC. At some time in the last 10 years, there was an interesting twist in perception: SPARC was considered as proprietary architecture and x86 was the open architecture. However it's vice versa ? try to create a x86 clone and you have a lot of intellectual property problems, create a SPARC clone and you have to spend 100 bucks or so to get the specification from the SPARC Foundation and develop your own SPARC processor. Fujitsu is doing this for a long time now. So they had their own processor, their own know-how. So why was SPARC a good choice? Well ? essentially Fujitsu can do what they want with their core as it is their core, for example adding the extensions to the SPARCv9 chipset ? getting Intel to create extensions to x86 to help you with your product is a little bit harder. So Fujitsu could do they needed to do with their processor in order to create such a supercomputer. No, the K is really using no FPGA or GPU as accelerators. The K is really using the CPU at doing this job. Yes, it has a significantly enhanced FPU capable to execute 8 instructions in parallel. No, it doesn't run Solaris. Yes, it uses Linux. No, it doesn't hurt me ... as my colleague Roland Rambau (he knows a lot about HPC) said once to me ... it doesn't matter which OS is staying out of the way of the workload in HPC.

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• Oracle ZS3 Contest for Partners: Share an unforgettable experience at the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan

  - by Claudia Caramelli-Oracle

  12.00 Dear valued Partner, We are pleased to launch a partner contest exclusive to our partners dedicated to promoting and selling Oracle Systems! You are essential to the success of Oracle and we want to recognize your contribution and effort in driving Oracle Storage to the market. To show our appreciation we are delighted to announce a contest, giving the winners the opportunity to attend a roundtable chaired by Senior Oracle Executives and spend an unforgettable evening at the magnificent Teatro Alla Scala in Milan, followed by a stay at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, courtesy of Oracle. Recognition will be given to 12 partner companies (10 VARs & 2 VADs) who will be recognized for their ZFS storage booking achievement in the broad market between June 1st and July 18th 2014. Criteria of Eligibility A minimum deal value of $30k is required for qualification Partners who are wholly or partially owned by a public sector organization are not eligible for participation  Winners The winning VARs will be: The highest ZS3 or ZBA bookings achievers by COB on July 18th, 2014 in each Oracle EMEA region (1) The highest Oracle on Oracle (2) ZS3 or ZBA bookings achievers by COB on July 18th, 2014 in each Oracle EMEA region The winning VADs (3) will be: The highest ZS3 or ZBA bookings achiever by COB on July 18th 2014 in EMEA The highest Oracle on Oracle (2) ZS3 or ZBA bookings achiever by COB on July 18th 2014 in EMEA  The Prize Winners will be invited to participate to a roundtable chaired by Oracle on Monday September 8th 2014 in Milan and to be guests of Oracle in the evening of September 8th, 2014 at the Teatro Alla Scala. The evening will comprise of a private tour of the Scala museum, cocktail reception at the elegant museum rooms and attending the performance by the renowned Soprano, Maria Agresta. Our guests will then retire for the evening to the Grand Hotel et de Milan, courtesy of Oracle. Oracle shall be the final arbiter in selecting the winners and all winners will be notified via their Oracle account manager.Full details about the contest, expenses covered by Oracle and timetable of events can be found on the Oracle EMEA Hardware (Servers & Storage) Partner Community workspace (FY15 Q1 ZFS Partner Contest). Remember: access to the community workspace requires membership. If you are not a member please register here. Good Luck!! For more information, please contact Sasan Moaveni. (1) Two VAR winners for each EMEA region – Eastern Europe & CIS, Middle East & Africa, South Europe, North Europe, UK/Ireland & Israel - as per the criteria outlined above (2) Oracle on Oracle, in this instance, means ZS3 or ZBA storage attached to DB or DB options, Engineered Systems or Sparc servers sold to the same customer by the same partner within the contest timelines.(3) Two VAD winners, one for each of the criteria outlined above, will be selected from across EMEA. Normal 0 14 false false false IT X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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• How Does a 724% Return on Your Salesforce Automation Investment Sound?

  - by Brian Dayton

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Oracle Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud customer Apex IT gained just that, a 724% return on investment (ROI) when they implemented these Oracle Cloud solutions in their fast-moving, rapidly-growing business. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Congratulations Apex IT! Apex IT was just announced as a winner of the Nucleus Research 11th annual Technology ROI Awards. The award, given by the analyst firm highlights organizations that have successfully leveraged IT deployments to maximize value per dollar spent. Fast Facts: Return on Investment - 724% Payback - 2 months Average annual benefit - $91,534 Cost: Benefit Ratio – 1:48 Business Benefits In addition to the ROI and cost metrics the award calls out improvements in Apex IT’s business operations—across both Sales and Marketing teams: Improved ability to identify new opportunities and focus sales resources on higher-probability deals Reduced administration and manual lead tracking—resulting in more time selling and a net new client increase of 46% Increased campaign productivity for both Marketing and Sales, including Oracle Marketing Cloud’s automation of campaign tracking and nurture programs Improved margins with more structured and disciplined sales processes—resulting in more effective deal negotiations Please join us in congratulating Apex IT on this award and their business achievements. Want More Details? Don’t take our word for it. Read the full Apex IT ROI Case Study and learn more about Apex IT’s business—including their work with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud on behalf of their clients in leading Sales organizations. Learn More About Oracle Sales Cloud www.oracle.com/salescloud www.facebook.com/oraclesalescloud www.youtube.com/oraclesalescloud Oracle Customer Experience and Complementary Sales Solutions Oracle Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Cloud Oracle Marketing Cloud Oracle Customer Experience /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Bios Memory settings and Virtualization + Ubuntu (Unofficial Answers Welcome) [closed]

  - by TardisGuy

  Attempting to optimize my (Main Windowless) Ubuntu system for my uses I will detail questions below, I understand this might be the wrong place to ask these questions. If so, my apologies and I thank you so much for your patience. Thanks to all the volenteers that have helped me learn ubuntu over the years (Since 5.10) This is a "short" list of questions I have been trying to figure out for some time. If you feel you can answer one but not another, that's already more than I could ask for. I have wrote this up in a format for easy navigation to important points Hopefully to less annoy your eyes. You're welcome :) or i'm sorry i annoy you. :( If you would be so kind, Please format answers as follows: question 1: _ _ _ _ _ or question 1-a: _ _ _ _ _ If you want to simply link me to relevant information, rather than type up something really detailed; that would be more than awesome! Memory Specific Questions Goal: Maximizing memory bandwith to better perform in Virtualization, and Large file compression. (Possible conflict?) Ganged vs Unganged "which is better?"** is relative, i know. But what about ganged vs unganged - With or without Bank/channel interleaving? a: Speculation - If i understand correctly, "channel interleaving has something to do with using both channels to read or write in a kind of "striping" pattern, as opposed to a standard half duplex operation.(probably wrong) but wouldn't ganged channels make this irrelevant? Memory Interleaving(bank). Does it have a down side? Does it require a ratio of clocks? (If I run 4x4gig ddr3) a. If im reading correctly(trying to learn), this is designed to spread operations between latency cycles to work around the higher latency of "normal" operation. b. However it seems to me that it has to be: divisible by fractions of a master clock? So if i run memory at 1333mhz, then the mean between 2 (physical) banks would operate every (roughly) 600Mhz? Warning! Possibly utter nonsense: (1333/2 interleaving to act like 1 memory module per 2 sticks of a total of 4 sticks, meaning 2x channels@4) c. which makes me wonder if there would be left over clock cycles the system would have to... "truncate/balance" or something? But I'm certain theres a feature somewhere i don't understand. Virtualization Questions AMD-V - Option of IOMMU Turned it on, why do i have extra option of "64MB"? If IOMMU is on, but "64MB" is "disabled", Is it on? (have scoured google, I still dont know) a. I think i understand that its supposed to (kind of) "set aside" a part of ram to act as a faster interactive zone for "stuff" (usb, Graphics, and... what?) b. I am using Nvidia graphics on AMD (Used kernel option "iommu=pt iommu=1, pt "passthrough"? No idea what they do, found it on google to solve boot up issue) c. Will this option help me use low latency sound hardware, like my midi keyboard? Can you recommend any additional tweaks? a. sysctl settings? b. swap settings? Grats, youve reached the end. Thanks for Reading.

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• Html.ValidationSummary and Multiple Forms

  - by MightyZot

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/MightyZot/archive/2013/11/11/html.validationsummary-and-multiple-forms.aspxThe Html.ValidationSummary helper writes a div with a list of general errors added to the model state while a request is being serviced. There is generally one form per view or partial view, I think, so often there is only one call to Html.ValidationSummary in the page resulting from the assembly of your views. And, consequently, there is no problem with the markup that Html.ValidationSummary spits out as a result. What if you want to put multiple forms in one view? Even if you create a view model that’s an aggregate of the view models for each form, the error validation summary is going to contain errors from both forms. Check out this screen shot, which shows a page with multiple forms. Notice how the error validation summary shows up twice. Grrr! Errors for the login form also show up in the registration form. Luckily, there is an easy way around this. Pull the errors out of the model state and separate them for each form. You’ll need to identify the appropriate form by setting the key when you make calls to ModelState.AddModelError. Assume in my example that errors for the login form are added to model state using the “LoginForm” key. And, likewise, assume that errors for the registration form are added to model state using the “RegistrationForm” key. An example of that might look like this… // If we got this far, something failed, redisplay form ModelState.AddModelError("LoginForm", "User name or password is not right..."); return View(model); Over in the code for your View, you can pull each form’s errors from the model state using lambda expressions that look like these… var LoginFormErrors = ViewData.ModelState.Where(ms => ms.Key == "LoginForm"); var RegistrationFormErrors = ViewData.ModelState.Where(ms => ms.Key == "RegistrationForm"); Now that you have two collections containing errors, you can display only the errors specific to each form. I’m doing that in my code by removing the calls to Html.ValidationSummary and replacing them with enumerators that look like this… if(LoginFormErrors.Count() > 0) { <div class="cdt-error-list">     <ul>     @foreach (var entry in LoginFormErrors)     {         foreach (var error in entry.Value.Errors)         {             <li>@error.ErrorMessage</li>         }     }     </ul> </div> } …and for the registration form, the code looks like this… @if(RegistrationFormErrors.Count() > 0) { <div class="cdt-error-list">     <ul>     @foreach (var entry in RegistrationFormErrors)     {         foreach (var error in entry.Value.Errors)         {             <li>@error.ErrorMessage</li>         }     }     </ul> </div> } The result is a nice clean separation of the list of errors that are specific to each form. And, this is important because each form is submitted separately in my case, so both forms don’t generate errors in the same context. As you’ll see in the screen shot below, errors added to the model state when the login form is submitted do not show up in the registration form’s validation summary.

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• Review: Windows 8 - Initial Experience

  - by Tim Murphy

  I originally started this post when I had the Windows 8 preview setup on VirtualBox image.  I have since put the RTM bits on a Dell E6530 that is my new work laptop.  It isn’t a table so I am not getting the touch experience, but as a developer this makes the most sense for the moment. This is the first Windows OS that I have had to spend much time exploring to even get started.  The first thing I ran into was when I clicked on the desktop icon I was lost.  Where is the Start menu? Where are my programs?  How do I get back to the Metro environment?  I finally tried hitting the Windows button and it popped back out to the Metro screen. Once I got past that I found that the look of the Metro interface is clean and well organized.  It should be familiar to anyone who is already using a Zune or Windows Phone 7.  In the Desktop, aside from the lack of the Start button to bring up programs the desktop is just like the Windows 7 environment we are all used to.  I do have to say though that I don’t like popping out to the Metro screen to find program.  I think installers for programs like ones that developers usually work in for a desktop mode will need to give an option for creating a desktop icon and pinning to the task bar of the desktop. One of the things I do really enjoy is having live tiles in the Metro environment.  It is a nice way of feeding my need for constant information.  The one drawback though is that the task bar at the bottom of my screen used to be where I got this information without leaving what I was working on.  It allowed me to see current temperatures and when there were messages waiting.  I have since found that these still work as expected in the Desktop and Toast message keep you up on what is going on in the Metro apps. Thankfully familiar functionality like Alt-Tab and Windows-Tab still work regardless of if apps are in the Metro or the Desktop environment.  Add to this the ability to find any application on the Metro screen by simply typing and things get very comfortable. I also started exploring some of the apps.  If you want see a ton of stats on your team at a glance check out the Sports app.  What games are coming up? Who are the leaders in a number of stats?  The Weather and Finance apps have good features as well and I am sure they will improve as users supply feedback. I have had to install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with VS2012 because the Windows Phone 7 SDK would only install on VS2010.  This isn’t a Windows 8 issue per se, but something that you need to be aware of if you are a developer moving to the new ecosystem. The overall experience is a joy despite a few hiccups.  For anyone moving to Windows 8 in on a non-touch laptop or desktop I do suggest this list of keyboard shortcuts.  Enjoy. del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Win8,Metro,Review

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• Patterns for a tree of persistent data with multiple storage options?

  - by Robin Winslow

  I have a real-world problem which I'll try to abstract into an illustrative example. So imagine I have data objects in a tree, where parent objects can access children, and children can access parents: // Interfaces interface IParent<TChild> { List<TChild> Children; } interface IChild<TParent> { TParent Parent; } // Classes class Top : IParent<Middle> {} class Middle : IParent<Bottom>, IChild<Top> {} class Bottom : IChild<Middle> {} // Usage var top = new Top(); var middles = top.Children; // List<Middle> foreach (var middle in middles) { var bottoms = middle.Children; // List<Bottom> foreach (var bottom in bottoms) { var middle = bottom.Parent; // Access the parent var top = middle.Parent; // Access the grandparent } } All three data objects have properties that are persisted in two data stores (e.g. a database and a web service), and they need to reflect and synchronise with the stores. Some objects only request from the web service, some only write to it. Data Mapper My favourite pattern for data access is Data Mapper, because it completely separates the data objects themselves from the communication with the data store: class TopMapper { public Top FetchById(int id) { var top = new Top(DataStore.TopDataById(id)); top.Children = MiddleMapper.FetchForTop(Top); return Top; } } class MiddleMapper { public Middle FetchById(int id) { var middle = new Middle(DataStore.MiddleDataById(id)); middle.Parent = TopMapper.FetchForMiddle(middle); middle.Children = BottomMapper.FetchForMiddle(bottom); return middle; } } This way I can have one mapper per data store, and build the object from the mapper I want, and then save it back using the mapper I want. There is a circular reference here, but I guess that's not a problem because most languages can just store memory references to the objects, so there won't actually be infinite data. The problem with this is that every time I want to construct a new Top, Middle or Bottom, it needs to build the entire object tree within that object's Parent or Children property, with all the data store requests and memory usage that that entails. And in real life my tree is much bigger than the one represented here, so that's a problem. Requests in the object In this the objects request their Parents and Children themselves: class Middle { private List<Bottom> _children = null; // cache public List<Bottom> Children { get { _children = _children ?? BottomMapper.FetchForMiddle(this); return _children; } set { BottomMapper.UpdateForMiddle(this, value); _children = value; } } } I think this is an example of the repository pattern. Is that correct? This solution seems neat - the data only gets requested from the data store when you need it, and thereafter it's stored in the object if you want to request it again, avoiding a further request. However, I have two different data sources. There's a database, but there's also a web service, and I need to be able to create an object from the web service and save it back to the database and then request it again from the database and update the web service. This also makes me uneasy because the data objects themselves are no longer ignorant of the data source. We've introduced a new dependency, not to mention a circular dependency, making it harder to test. And the objects now mask their communication with the database. Other solutions Are there any other solutions which could take care of the multiple stores problem but also mean that I don't need to build / request all the data every time?

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• A* algorithm very slow

  - by Amaranth

  I have an programming a RTS game (I use XNA with C#). The pathfinding is working fine, except that when it has a lot of node to search in, there is a lag period of one or two seconds, it happens mainly when there is no path to the target destination, since it that situation there is more nodes to explore. I have the same problem when the path is shorter but selected more than 3 units (can't take the same path since the selected units can be in different part of the map). private List<NodeInfo> FindPath(Unit u, NodeInfo start, NodeInfo end) { Map map = GameInfo.GetInstance().GameMap; _nearestToTarget = start; start.MoveCost = 0; Vector2 endPosition = map.getTileByPos(end.X, end.Y).Position; //getTileByPos simply gets the tile in a 2D array with the X and Y indexes start.EstimatedRemainingCost = (int)(endPosition - map.getTileByPos(start.X, start.Y).Position).Length(); start.Parent = null; List<NodeInfo> openedNodes = new List<NodeInfo>(); ; List<NodeInfo> closedNodes = new List<NodeInfo>(); Point[] movements = GetMovements(u.UnitType); openedNodes.Add(start); while (!closedNodes.Contains(end) && openedNodes.Count > 0) { //Loop in nodes to find lowest cost NodeInfo currentNode = FindLowestCostOpenedNode(openedNodes); openedNodes.Remove(currentNode); closedNodes.Add(currentNode); Vector2 previousMouvement; if (currentNode.Parent == null) { previousMouvement = ConvertRotationToDirectionVector(u.Rotation); } else { previousMouvement = map.getTileByPos(currentNode.X, currentNode.Y).Position - map.getTileByPos(currentNode.Parent.X, currentNode.Parent.Y).Position; previousMouvement.Normalize(); } //For each neighbor foreach (Point movement in movements) { Point exploredGridPos = new Point(currentNode.X + movement.X, currentNode.Y + movement.Y); //Checks if valid move and checks if not if closed nodes list if (ValidNavigableNode(u.UnitType, new Point(currentNode.X, currentNode.Y), exploredGridPos) && !closedNodes.Contains(_gridMap[exploredGridPos.Y, exploredGridPos.X])) { NodeInfo exploredNode = _gridMap[exploredGridPos.Y, exploredGridPos.X]; Tile.TileType exploredTerrain = map.getTileByPos(exploredGridPos.X, exploredGridPos.Y).TerrainType; if(openedNodes.Contains(exploredNode)) { int newCost = currentNode.MoveCost + GetMoveCost(previousMouvement, movement, exploredTerrain); if (newCost < exploredNode.MoveCost) { exploredNode.Parent = currentNode; exploredNode.MoveCost = newCost; //Find nearest tile to the target (in case doesn't find path to target) //Only compares the node to the current nearest FindNearest(exploredNode); } } else { exploredNode.Parent = currentNode; exploredNode.MoveCost = currentNode.MoveCost + GetMoveCost(previousMouvement, movement, exploredTerrain); Vector2 exploredNodeWorldPos = map.getTileByPos(exploredGridPos.X, exploredGridPos.Y).Position; exploredNode.EstimatedRemainingCost = (int)(endPosition - exploredNodeWorldPos).Length(); //Find nearest tile to the target (in case doesn't find path to target) //Only compares the node to the current nearest FindNearest(exploredNode); openedNodes.Add(exploredNode); } } } } return closedNodes; } After that, I simply check if the end node is contained in the returned nodes. If so, I add the end node and each parent until I reach the start. If not, I add the nearestToTarget and each parent until I reach the start. I added a condition before calling FindPath so that only one unit can call a find path each frame (60 frame per second), but it makes no difference. I thought maybe I could solve this by allowing the find path to run in background while the game continues to run correctly, even if it takes a few frame (it is currently sequential sonce it is called in the update() of the unit if there's a target location but no path), but I don't really know how... I also though about sorting my opened nodes list by cost so I don't have to loop them, but I don't know if that would have an effect on the performance... Would there be other solutions? P.S. In the code, when I get the Move Cost, I check if the unit has to turn to perform the move, and the terrain type, nothing hard to do.

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