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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 04, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 04, 2012Popular ReleasesMCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.1: 2.3.1All new Remote Client Server architecture. Reccomended Download. The Remote Client Installation is OPTIONAL, you can extract the files from the zip archive into a local folder and run MCEBuddy.GUI directly. 2.2.15 was the last standalone release. Changelog for 2.3.1 (32bit and 64bit) 1. All remote MCEBuddy Client Server architecture (GUI runs remotely/independently from engine now) 2. Fixed bug in Audio Offset 3. Added support for remote MediaInfo (right click on file in queue to get ...Multiwfn: Multiwfn 2.5.2: Multiwfn 2.5.2D3 Loot Tracker: 1.5: Support for session upload to website. Support for theme change through general settings. Time played counter will now also display a count for days. Tome of secrets are no longer logged as items.patterns & practices - Develop Windows Store apps using C++ & XAML: Hilo: Hilo C++ October 4, 2012 Drop: This drop supports Windows 8 RTM (Build 9200). To view the documentation, right-click the m_hilo.chm file on disk, select Properties, then on the General tab, select Unblock. The .chm will now display the content.xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper for 7.1 EAP (build 3): xunitcontrib release 0.6.1 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 7.1 EAP build 3, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) For ReSharper 7.0 and 6.1.1, see this release. For older versions, see this release. Also note that all builds work against ALL VERSIONS of xunit. The files are compiled against xunit.dll 1.9.1 - DO NOT REPLACE THIS FILE. Thanks to xunit's version independent runner system, this...SharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.5: Version 1.5 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerZ3: Z3 4.1.1 source code: Snapshot corresponding to version 4.1.1.DirectX Tool Kit: October 2012: October 2, 2012 Added ScreenGrab module Added CreateGeoSphere for drawing a geodesic sphere Put DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader into the DirectX C++ namespace Renamed project files for better naming consistency Updated WICTextureLoader for Windows 8 96bpp floating-point formats Win32 desktop projects updated to use Windows Vista (0x0600) rather than Windows 7 (0x0601) APIs Tweaked SpriteBatch.cpp to workaround ARM NEON compiler codegen bugHome Access Plus+: v8.1: HAP+ Web v8.1.1003.000079318 Fixed: Issue with the Help Desk and updating a ticket as an admin 79319 Fixed: formatting issue with the booking system admin header 79321 Moved to using the arrow with a circle symbol on the homepage instead of the > and < 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to login page 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to home page 79541 Added: slide events for homepage 79553 Fixed: Booking System Multiple Lesson Bug 79553 Fixed: IE Error Message 79684 Fixed: jQuery issue ...System.Net.FtpClient: System.Net.FtpClient 2012.10.02.01: This is the first release of the new code base. It is not compatible with the old API, I repeat it is not a drop in update for projects currently using System.Net.FtpClient. New users should download this release. The old code base (Branch: System.Net.FtpClient_1) will continue to be supported while the new code matures. This release is a complete re-write of System.Net.FtpClient. The API and code are simpler than ever before. There are some new features included as well as an attempt at be...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1002.3): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.3.1002.3 What's New: Multi-language support for Labels/Tooltips for custom buttons and groups Support for base language other than English (1033) Connect dialog will not require organization name for ADFS / IFD connections Automatic creation of missing labels for all provisioned languages Minor connection issues fixed Notes: Before saving the ribbon to CRM server, editor will check Ribbon XML for any missing <Title> elements inside existing <LocLabel> elements...RenameApp: RenameApp 1.0: First release of RenameAppJsonToStaticTypeGenerator: JsonToStaticTypeGenerator 0.1: This is the first alpha release of JsonToStaticTypeGenerator.XiaoKyun: XiaoKyun V1.00: https://xiaokyun.codeplex.com/CatchThatException: Release 1.12: Wow a very fast change and a much better and faster writing to the text fileNaked Objects: Naked Objects Release 5.0.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 5.0.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. Major enhancementsNaked Objects 5.0 is desi...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.0: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryNew Projects<-Zielonka.co.uk Open source libraries. Extension methods, Enums and utilities.: The following code libraries are provided to the opensource communities to help developers with common simple tasks.Affine cipher school project: Affine cipher crypt with block = 10Agendamento_Recursos: Projeto agendamento de recursos áudio visuais.ASP.NET Desktop Membership Manager Application: This project aims to make it possible to manage ASP.Net Membership within the initial life cycle stages of your web application.ASP.Net MVC Starter Architecture: A sample ASP.Net MVC application that introduces concepts around dependency injection, interface interception, repositories, and other architectural patterns.Cet MicroWorkflow: Create your own automation on Netduino in a visual way.Custom WCF Context State Pattern Implementation (example): The WcfContext project is the class library and a training project of using WCF context like we used to use the HttpContext.Current.Dash-R: dash-r (-r) is a shim for allowing use of Mercurial-style local version numbers in Git.DoombringerStudios: VideogameEI1025: Usar GLUT para desarrollar aplicaciones que usen OpenGL sobre C++ExperimentosPascal: Programitas de ejemplo para mostrar la sintaxis de Pascal.Lyricsgrabber: A Tool to get automatically lyrics to provided songs and save them in their tags.Mediafire .Net Api: This project provides an easy to use lib to work with Mediafire's REST Api for .Net developers.NDownloader C# .NET 4.5 VS2012: Windows console based downloader for files. Useful for downloading freely available pdf files such as public domain books or mp3 media from the internet.Orchid Scene Editor: This project is a generic 3D editor.PdfReport: PdfReport is a code first reporting engine, which is built on top of the iTextSharp and EPPlus libraries.PowerShell Security: PoshSec is short for PowerShell security, a module provided to allow PowerShell users testing, analysis and reporting on Window securityR to CLR: Accessing a common language runtime (.NET or Mono) from the R statistical software.RMDdownloader: RMDdownloader is a tiny application designed to locate and download the the desktops submitted by the http://ratemydesktop.org userbase. Sample Sample Code: sample sample codeScreen Ruler: Simple ruler displayed on screenSharePoint Web Change Log: An alternate notification feature for SharePoint. It's working on Web basis.SimpleMin: SimpleMin is a very easy way to minify and bundle all js/css files in your web project.Sitecore Courier: Sitecore Courier aims to fill the gap between the development and production environments when building websites with Sitecore CMS. It lets you build SitecoreSql Migrations: Sql Migrations is a database migration framework for .NET.StripeOne Beauty Salon: Projeto que visa criar uma aplicação para salões de belezaStripeOne Blog: Esse projeto tem como objetivo criar um sistema para gerenciamento de blogs no estilo Wordpress.StripeOne Core: Projeto com métodos para facilitar a vida do programador.Testability analysis: Heuristics for testability of classes.This is the future: ；-）Viva Music Player: Viva Music Player is a free and open source music player. It's using C# and NAudio audio library to play audio files.Wedding Calculator: Services for wedding portal (under construction)Whitepad: Whitepad is a digital whiteboard with an infinite canvas.Win8SSH: This project will provide a ModernUI SSH-Client for Windows 8

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• Code Reuse is (Damn) Hard

  - by James Michael Hare

  Being a development team lead, the task of interviewing new candidates was part of my job.  Like any typical interview, we started with some easy questions to get them warmed up and help calm their nerves before hitting the hard stuff. One of those easier questions was almost always: “Name some benefits of object-oriented development.”  Nearly every time, the candidate would chime in with a plethora of canned answers which typically included: “it helps ease code reuse.”  Of course, this is a gross oversimplification.  Tools only ease reuse, its developers that ultimately can cause code to be reusable or not, regardless of the language or methodology. But it did get me thinking…  we always used to say that as part of our mantra as to why Object-Oriented Programming was so great.  With polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. we in essence set up the concepts to help facilitate reuse as much as possible.  And yes, as a developer now of many years, I unquestionably held that belief for ages before it really struck me how my views on reuse have jaded over the years.  In fact, in many ways Agile rightly eschews reuse as taking a backseat to developing what's needed for the here and now.  It used to be I was in complete opposition to that view, but more and more I've come to see the logic in it.  Too many times I've seen developers (myself included) get lost in design paralysis trying to come up with the perfect abstraction that would stand all time.  Nearly without fail, all of these pieces of code become obsolete in a matter of months or years. It’s not that I don’t like reuse – it’s just that reuse is hard.  In fact, reuse is DAMN hard.  Many times it is just a distraction that eats up architect and developer time, and worse yet can be counter-productive and force wrong decisions.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of reusable code when it makes sense.  These are in the few cases where you are designing something that is inherently reusable.  The problem is, most business-class code is inherently unfit for reuse! Furthermore, the code that is reusable will often fail to be reused if you don’t have the proper framework in place for effective reuse that includes standardized versioning, building, releasing, and documenting the components.  That should always be standard across the board when promoting reusable code.  All of this is hard, and it should only be done when you have code that is truly reusable or you will be exerting a large amount of development effort for very little bang for your buck. But my goal here is not to get into how to reuse (that is a topic unto itself) but what should be reused.  First, let’s look at an extension method.  There’s many times where I want to kick off a thread to handle a task, then when I want to reign that thread in of course I want to do a Join on it.  But what if I only want to wait a limited amount of time and then Abort?  Well, I could of course write that logic out by hand each time, but it seemed like a great extension method: 1: public static class ThreadExtensions 2: { 3: public static bool JoinOrAbort(this Thread thread, TimeSpan timeToWait) 4: { 5: bool isJoined = false; 6:  7: if (thread != null) 8: { 9: isJoined = thread.Join(timeToWait); 10:  11: if (!isJoined) 12: { 13: thread.Abort(); 14: } 15: } 16: return isJoined; 17: } 18: } 19:  When I look at this code, I can immediately see things that jump out at me as reasons why this code is very reusable.  Some of them are standard OO principles, and some are kind-of home grown litmus tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The only reason this extension method need change is if the Thread class itself changes (one responsibility). Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method only depends on classes that are more stable than it is (System.Threading.Thread), and in itself is very stable, hence other classes may safely depend on it. It is also not dependent on any business domain, and thus isn't subject to changes as the business itself changes. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is inherently closed to change. Small and Stable Problem Domain – This method only cares about System.Threading.Thread. All-or-None Usage – A user of a reusable class should want the functionality of that class, not parts of that functionality.  That’s not to say they most use every method, but they shouldn’t be using a method just to get half of its result. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – since this class is highly stable and minimally complex, we can offer it up for reuse very cheaply by promoting it as “ready-to-go” and already unit tested (important!) and available through a standard release cycle (very important!). Okay, all seems good there, now lets look at an entity and DAO.  I don’t know about you all, but there have been times I’ve been in organizations that get the grand idea that all DAOs and entities should be standardized and shared.  While this may work for small or static organizations, it’s near ludicrous for anything large or volatile. 1: namespace Shared.Entities 2: { 3: public class Account 4: { 5: public int Id { get; set; } 6:  7: public string Name { get; set; } 8:  9: public Address HomeAddress { get; set; } 10:  11: public int Age { get; set;} 12:  13: public DateTime LastUsed { get; set; } 14:  15: // etc, etc, etc... 16: } 17: } 18:  19: ... 20:  21: namespace Shared.DataAccess 22: { 23: public class AccountDao 24: { 25: public Account FindAccount(int id) 26: { 27: // dao logic to query and return account 28: } 29:  30: ... 31:  32: } 33: } Now to be fair, I’m not saying there doesn’t exist an organization where some entites may be extremely static and unchanging.  But at best such entities and DAOs will be problematic cases of reuse.  Let’s examine those same tests: Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) – The reasons to change for these classes will be strongly dependent on what the definition of the account is which can change over time and may have multiple influences depending on the number of systems an account can cover. Stable Dependencies Principle (SDP) – This method depends on the data model beneath itself which also is largely dependent on the business definition of an account which can be very inherently unstable. Open-Closed Principle (OCP) – This class is not really closed for modification.  Every time the account definition may change, you’d need to modify this class. Small and Stable Problem Domain – The definition of an account is inherently unstable and in fact may be very large.  What if you are designing a system that aggregates account information from several sources? All-or-None Usage – What if your view of the account encompasses data from 3 different sources but you only care about one of those sources or one piece of data?  Should you have to take the hit of looking up all the other data?  On the other hand, should you have ten different methods returning portions of data in chunks people tend to ask for?  Neither is really a great solution. Cost of Reuse vs. Cost to Recreate – DAOs are really trivial to rewrite, and unless your definition of an account is EXTREMELY stable, the cost to promote, support, and release a reusable account entity and DAO are usually far higher than the cost to recreate as needed. It’s no accident that my case for reuse was a utility class and my case for non-reuse was an entity/DAO.  In general, the smaller and more stable an abstraction is, the higher its level of reuse.  When I became the lead of the Shared Components Committee at my workplace, one of the original goals we looked at satisfying was to find (or create), version, release, and promote a shared library of common utility classes, frameworks, and data access objects.  Now, of course, many of you will point to nHibernate and Entity for the latter, but we were looking at larger, macro collections of data that span multiple data sources of varying types (databases, web services, etc). As we got deeper and deeper in the details of how to manage and release these items, it quickly became apparent that while the case for reuse was typically a slam dunk for utilities and frameworks, the data access objects just didn’t “smell” right.  We ended up having session after session of design meetings to try and find the right way to share these data access components. When someone asked me why it was taking so long to iron out the shared entities, my response was quite simple, “Reuse is hard...”  And that’s when I realized, that while reuse is an awesome goal and we should strive to make code maintainable, often times you end up creating far more work for yourself than necessary by trying to force code to be reusable that inherently isn’t. Think about classes the times you’ve worked in a company where in the design session people fight over the best way to implement a class to make it maximally reusable, extensible, and any other buzzwordable.  Then think about how quickly that design became obsolete.  Many times I set out to do a project and think, “yes, this is the best design, I can extend it easily!” only to find out the business requirements change COMPLETELY in such a way that the design is rendered invalid.  Code, in general, tends to rust and age over time.  As such, writing reusable code can often be difficult and many times ends up being a futile exercise and worse yet, sometimes makes the code harder to maintain because it obfuscates the design in the name of extensibility or reusability. So what do I think are reusable components? Generic Utility classes – these tend to be small classes that assist in a task and have no business context whatsoever. Implementation Abstraction Frameworks – home-grown frameworks that try to isolate changes to third party products you may be depending on (like writing a messaging abstraction layer for publishing/subscribing that is independent of whether you use JMS, MSMQ, etc). Simplification and Uniformity Frameworks – To some extent this is similar to an abstraction framework, but there may be one chosen provider but a development shop mandate to perform certain complex items in a certain way.  Or, perhaps to simplify and dumb-down a complex task for the average developer (such as implementing a particular development-shop’s method of encryption). And what are less reusable? Application and Business Layers – tend to fluctuate a lot as requirements change and new features are added, so tend to be an unstable dependency.  May be reused across applications but also very volatile. Entities and Data Access Layers – these tend to be tuned to the scope of the application, so reusing them can be hard unless the abstract is very stable. So what’s the big lesson?  Reuse is hard.  In fact it’s damn hard.  And much of the time I’m not convinced we should focus too hard on it. If you’re designing a utility or framework, then by all means design it for reuse.  But you most also really set down a good versioning, release, and documentation process to maximize your chances.  For anything else, design it to be maintainable and extendable, but don’t waste the effort on reusability for something that most likely will be obsolete in a year or two anyway.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 02, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, October 02, 2012Popular ReleasesZ3: Z3 4.1.1 source code: Snapshot corresponding to version 4.1.1.DirectX Tool Kit: October 2012: October 2, 2012 Added ScreenGrab module Added CreateGeoSphere for drawing a geodesic sphere Put DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader into the DirectX C++ namespace Renamed project files for better naming consistency Updated WICTextureLoader for Windows 8 96bpp floating-point formats Win32 desktop projects updated to use Windows Vista (0x0600) rather than Windows 7 (0x0601) APIs Tweaked SpriteBatch.cpp to workaround ARM NEON compiler codegen bugHome Access Plus+: v8.1: HAP+ Web v8.1.1003.000079318 Fixed: Issue with the Help Desk and updating a ticket as an admin 79319 Fixed: formatting issue with the booking system admin header 79321 Moved to using the arrow with a circle symbol on the homepage instead of the > and < 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to login page 79541 Added: 480px wide mobile theme to home page 79541 Added: slide events for homepage 79553 Fixed: Booking System Multiple Lesson Bug 79553 Fixed: IE Error Message 79684 Fixed: jQuery issue ...Tabular Database Powershell Cmdlets: AdventureWorks Tabular PowerShell 2012 test script: AdventureWorks Tabular PowerShell 2012.ps1 is a testing script to verify the functionality of the 'Tabular Database PowerShell Cmdlets'. This script recreates parts of AdventureWorks Tabular 2012 Model; to run the script you need access to a relational database and have access to 'AdventureWorksDW2012'.CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1002.3): Visual Ribbon Editor 1.3.1002.3 What's New: Multi-language support for Labels/Tooltips for custom buttons and groups Support for base language other than English (1033) Connect dialog will not require organization name for ADFS / IFD connections Automatic creation of missing labels for all provisioned languages Minor connection issues fixed Notes: Before saving the ribbon to CRM server, editor will check Ribbon XML for any missing <Title> elements inside existing <LocLabel> elements...YAXLib: Yet Another XML Serialization Library for the .NET Framework: YAXLib 2.10: See change-log for the list of new features added and bugs fixedNaked Objects: Naked Objects Release 5.0.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 5.0.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. Major enhancementsNaked Objects 5.0 is desi...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.3.0: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...D3 Loot Tracker: 1.4.1: This version will automatically save a recording session on application exit if the user didn't stop the current session.Untangler: Untangler: First version of Untangler application available now.SubExtractor: Release 1029: Feature: Added option to make i and ¡ characters movie-specific for improved OCR on Spanish subs (Special Characters tab in Options) Feature: Allow switch to Word Spacing dialog directly from Spell Check dialog Fix: Added more default word spacings for accented characters Fix: Changed Word Spacing dialog to show all OCR'd characters in current sub Fix: Removed application focus grab during OCR Fix: Tightened HD subs fuzzy logic to reduce false matches in small characters Fix: Improved Arrow k...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.18: Reccomended download Changelog for 2.2.18 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for checking if Showanalyzer has hung and cancelling it 2. New version of comskip, 0.81.48 3. Speeding up comskip 4. Fixed a build bug in 64bit 2.2.17 5. Added a new comkip.ini, better commercial detection for international channels and less aggressive. Old one has been retained as comskip_old.ini 6. Added support for Audio Offset on Conversion Task page in GUI (this overrides the profiles AudioDelay when specified)Mugen Injection: Mugen Injection 3.0: Added a generic version of the fluent syntax. Big changes in fluent-syntax. Added support to resolve a parameters: - Factory: AnyCustomFunc{T}, AnyCustomFunc{IEnumerable<IInjectionParameters>,T}, AnyCustomFunc{IDictionary<string, object>,T}, AnyCustomFunc{IEnumerable<IInjectionParameters>,IDictionary<string, object>,T} - Lazy: AnyCustomLazy<T> - Binding metadata: ISetting Change binding builders, now you can configure them through the string settings. Increase performance. F...Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.7.1: See the KeePass Plugin Step By Step Guide for instructions on how to install the plugin. Changes Built against KeePass 2.20Pentagon-XnaGamePrototype: Pentagon_Application: -Windows 8 Toolkit - Charts and More: Beta 1.0: The First Compiled Version of my LibraryPDF.NET: PDF.NET.Ver4.5-OpenSourceCode: PDF.NET Ver4.5 ????，????Web??????。 PDF.NET Ver4.5 Open Source Code,include a sample Web application project.Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.2: This version contains no new images from v1.5.1 Contains the following improvements: Better support for detecting the installed languages The extract & inject commands won’t run if Visual Studio is running You may now run in extract or inject mode The p/invoke code was cleaned up based on Code Analysis recommendations When a p/invoke method fails the Win32 error message is now displayed Error messages use red text Status messages use green textZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.9.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2393 of the java version improved api better Unity support Windows RT binaries Windows CE binaries new Windows Service demo new WPF demo WindowsCE Hotfix: Fixes an error with ISO8859-1 encoding and scannning of QR-Codes. The hotfix is only needed for the WindowsCE platform.Picturethrill: Version 2.9.25.0: Allowing to run Picturethrill Update task while computer is not connected to internet on computer wake up.New ProjectsAssociativy Neo4j Driver: Neo4j graph database driver for Associativy. See: http://associativy.comCalcSig: Utility for identifying near-duplicate audio and image files.CTODO: TODO List management utilityEstudosSedna: goto HomeFun-Beat: Fun-Beat is a free XAudio2 based Drum-Machine/synthesizer in its initial phasesgbtest: This is a demoGlobal Stock Exchange (Hobby Project): GSE is sort of a hobby project. Global Stock Exchange has a rich dynamic UI. A number of concurrent multi-threaded actions are going on behind the scene.HealthVault Library for Windows 8: This library provides a simple framework for building Windows Store applications that connect to Microsoft HealthVault. Homework management: Házi feladat beadó rendszer megvalósításaHostalApp: Proyecto de Taller de Sistemas de InformacionIIS Logfile Archiving: IIS instances log website activity to disk. Let's archive those files for later in a .zip file.Impact Bootstrap For Windows 8: Impact Bootstrap for Windows 8 is a simple collection of scripts, code and stock art/sounds that can help you create HTML5 games on Windows 8 faster.Innovacall ASP.net MVC 3 Framework and Starter Kits: Innovacall Open Source Development Framework for Asp.Net MVC 3.1.JRFinances: Financial project for university graduationLazyField Demo: A demo module demonstrating the LazyField<T> class in Orchard.Lilith: Linux libraryManaged Metadata Migrator: Move term sets across SharePoint farms, managed metadata service applications or groups with term GUIDs intact.MyFamily: An ASP.net application for families to share pictures/videos/events with one anotherNengraphy: Nengraphy Gentoo OverlayOrchard CMS Image MultiPicker Field: This module provides image multi picker field for Orchard CMS 1.5.1.PDFWebViewer.NET 1.0: As of October 1st, 2012 TallComponents has discontinued PDFWebViewer.NET 1.0. This project publishes the 1.0.21.0 source code.PromikeHomeSite: My home site.Sharepoint Dynamic Quicklaunch: Sharepoint Dynamic Quicklaunch is a jquery plugin to generate dynamic menus for the Sharepoint 2010 Quicklaunch. Slider - Simple Slideshow Solution: Highly customizable slideshow solution for any website.TypeScript: TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.Velocity4Net: translated from apache velocity 1.7WebViewer.NET 2.0: As of October 1st, 2012 TallComponents has discontinued WebViewer.NET 2.0. This project publishes the 2.0.0.3 source code.WireBear InfoPath Printer: Adds a print button to the ribbon for InfoPath List Display Forms in SharePoint 2010.YingEngine2: ??????????????。 ??????????，???，???????RPG??。?????????????????，???????????????????，???????????。

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• How to configure TATA Photon+ EC1261 HUAWEI

  - by user3215

  I'm running ubuntu 10.04. I have a newly purchased TATA Photon+ Internet connection which supports Windows and Mac. On the Internet I found a article saying that it could be configured on Linux. I followed the steps to install it on Ubuntu from this link. I am still not able to get online, and need some help. Also, it is very slow, but I was told that I would see speeds up to 3.1MB. I dont have wvdial installed and cannot install it from apt as I'm not connected to internet Booting from windows I dowloaded "wvdial" .deb package and tried to install on ubuntu but it's ended with dependency problem. Automatically, don't know how, I got connected to internet only for once. Immediately I installed wvdial package after this I followed the tutorials(I could not browse and upload the files here) . From then it's showing that the device is connected in the network connections but no internet connection. Once I disable the device, it won't show as connected again and I'll have to restart my system. Sometimes the device itself not detected(wondering if there is any command to re-read the all devices). output of wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.cof: #wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf Editing `/etc/wvdial.conf'. Scanning your serial ports for a modem. ttyS0<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- failed with 2400 baud, next try: 9600 baud ttyS0<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- failed with 9600 baud, next try: 115200 baud ttyS0<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- and failed too at 115200, giving up. Modem Port Scan<*1>: S1 S2 S3 WvModem<*1>: Cannot get information for serial port. ttyUSB0<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- failed with 2400 baud, next try: 9600 baud ttyUSB0<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- failed with 9600 baud, next try: 9600 baud ttyUSB0<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- and failed too at 115200, giving up. WvModem<*1>: Cannot get information for serial port. ttyUSB1<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- failed with 2400 baud, next try: 9600 baud ttyUSB1<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- failed with 9600 baud, next try: 9600 baud ttyUSB1<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- and failed too at 115200, giving up. WvModem<*1>: Cannot get information for serial port. ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 Z -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: Modem Identifier: ATI -- Manufacturer: +GMI: HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD ttyUSB2<*1>: Speed 9600: AT -- OK ttyUSB2<*1>: Max speed is 9600; that should be safe. ttyUSB2<*1>: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 -- OK Found a modem on /dev/ttyUSB2. Modem configuration written to /etc/wvdial.conf. ttyUSB2<Info>: Speed 9600; init "ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0" output of wvdial: #wvdial --> WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.60 --> Cannot get information for serial port. --> Initializing modem. --> Sending: ATZ ATZ OK --> Sending: ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 OK --> Sending: AT+CRM=1 AT+CRM=1 OK --> Modem initialized. --> Sending: ATDT#777 --> Waiting for carrier. ATDT#777 CONNECT --> Carrier detected. Starting PPP immediately. --> Starting pppd at Sat Oct 16 15:30:47 2010 --> Pid of pppd: 5681 --> Using interface ppp0 --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> local IP address 14.96.147.104 --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> remote IP address 172.29.161.223 --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> primary DNS address 121.40.152.90 --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] --> secondary DNS address 121.40.152.100 --> pppd: (u;[08]@s;[08]`{;[08] Output of log message /var/log/messages: Oct 16 15:29:44 avyakta-desktop pppd[5119]: secondary DNS address 121.242.190.180 Oct 16 15:29:58 desktop pppd[5119]: Terminating on signal 15 Oct 16 15:29:58 desktop pppd[5119]: Connect time 0.3 minutes. Oct 16 15:29:58 desktop pppd[5119]: Sent 0 bytes, received 177 bytes. Oct 16 15:29:58 desktop pppd[5119]: Connection terminated. Oct 16 15:30:47 desktop pppd[5681]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Oct 16 15:30:47 desktop pppd[5681]: Using interface ppp0 Oct 16 15:30:47 desktop pppd[5681]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/ttyUSB2 Oct 16 15:30:47 desktop pppd[5681]: CHAP authentication succeeded Oct 16 15:30:47 desktop pppd[5681]: CHAP authentication succeeded Oct 16 15:30:48 desktop pppd[5681]: local IP address 14.96.147.104 Oct 16 15:30:48 desktop pppd[5681]: remote IP address 172.29.161.223 Oct 16 15:30:48 desktop pppd[5681]: primary DNS address 121.40.152.90 Oct 16 15:30:48 desktop pppd[5681]: secondary DNS address 121.40.152.100 EDIT 1 : I tried the following sudo stop network-manager sudo killall modem-manager sudo /usr/sbin/modem-manager --debug > ~/mm.log 2>&1 & sudo /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --no-daemon > ~/nm.log 2>&1 & Output of mm.log: #vim ~/mm.log: ** Message: Loaded plugin Option High-Speed ** Message: Loaded plugin Option ** Message: Loaded plugin Huawei ** Message: Loaded plugin Longcheer ** Message: Loaded plugin AnyData ** Message: Loaded plugin ZTE ** Message: Loaded plugin Ericsson MBM ** Message: Loaded plugin Sierra ** Message: Loaded plugin Generic ** Message: Loaded plugin Gobi ** Message: Loaded plugin Novatel ** Message: Loaded plugin Nokia ** Message: Loaded plugin MotoC Output of nm.log: #vim ~/nm.log: NetworkManager: <info> starting... NetworkManager: <info> modem-manager is now available NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: init! NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: update_system_hostname NetworkManager: SCPluginIfupdown: guessed connection type (eth0) = 802-3-ethernet NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: update_connection_setting_from_if_block: name:eth0, type:802-3-ethernet, id:Ifupdown (eth0), uuid: 681b428f-beaf-8932-dce4-678ed5bae28e NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: addresses count: 1 NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: No dns-nameserver configured in /etc/network/interfaces NetworkManager: nm-ifupdown-connection.c.119 - invalid connection read from /etc/network/interfaces: (1) addresses NetworkManager: SCPluginIfupdown: management mode: unmanaged NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.4/0000:02:02.0/net/eth1, iface: eth1) NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.4/0000:02:02.0/net/eth1, iface: eth1): no ifupdown configuration found. NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/lo, iface: lo) @

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• Our winners- and some BBQ for everyone

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Congrats to our two winners for the first two comments on my last entry. Steve from Australia and John Lemon. Steve won since he was the first person over the International Date Line to see the post I made so late after a workday on Friday. So not only does he get to live in a country with the 2nd most beautiful women in the world, but now he gets some cool Oracle Swag, too. (Yes, I live on the beach in southern California, so you can guess where 1st place is for that other contest…Now if Steve happens to live in Manly, we may actually have a tie going…) OK, ok, for everyone else, you can be winners, too. How you ask? I will make you the envy of every guy and gal in your neighborhood or campsite. What follows is the way to smoke the best ribs you or anyone you know have ever tasted. Follow my instructions and give it a try. People at your party/cookout/campsite will tell you that they’re the best ribs they’ve ever had, and I will let you take all the credit. Yes, I fully realize this post is going to be longer than any post I’ve done yet. But let’s get serious here. Smoking meat is much more important, agreed? J In all honesty, this is a repeat of another blog I did, so I’m just copying and pasting. Step 1. Get some ribs. I actually really like Costco’s pack. They have both St. Louis and Baby Back. (They are the same ribs, but cut in half down the sides. St. Louis style is the ‘front’ of the ribs closest to the stomach, and ‘Baby back’ is the part of the ribs where is connects to the backbone). I like them both, so here you see I got one pack of each. About 4 racks to a pack. So these two packs for $25 each will feed about 16-20 of my guests. So around 3 bucks a person is a pretty good deal for the best ribs you’ll ever have. Step 2. Prep the ribs the night before you’re going to smoke. You need to trim them to fit your smoker racks, and also take off the membrane and add your rub. Then cover and set in fridge overnight. Here’s how to take off the membrane, which will not break down with heat and smoke like the rest of the meat, so must be removed. Use a butter knife to work in a ways between the membrane and the white bone. Just enough to make room for your finger. Try really hard not to poke through the membrane, you want to keep it whole. See how my gloved fingers can now start to lift up and pull off the membrane? This is what you are trying to do. It’s awesome when the whole thing can come off at once. This one is going great, maybe the best one I’ve ever done. Sometime, it falls apart and doesn't come off in one nice piece. I hate when that happens. Now, add your rub and pat it down once into the meat with your other hand. My rub is not secret. I got it from my mentor, a BBQ competitive chef who is currently ranked #1 in California and #3 in the nation on the BBQ circuit. He does full-day classes in southern California if anyone is interested in taking his class. Go to www.slapyodaddybbq.com to check him out. I tweaked his run recipe a tad and made my own. It’s one part Lawry’s, one part sugar, one part Montreal Steak Seasoning, one part garlic powder, one-half part red chili powder, one-half part paprika, and then 1/20th part cayenne. You can adjust that last ingredient, or leave it out. Real cheap stuff you can get at Costco. This lets you make enough rub to last about a year or two. Don’t make it all at once, make a shaker’s worth and use it up before you make more. Place it all in a bowl, mix well, and then add to a shaker like you see here. You can get a shaker with medium sized holes on it at any restaurant supply store or Smart & Final. The kind you see at pizza places for their red pepper flakes works best. Now cover and place in fridge overnight. Step 3. The next day. Ok, I’m ready to go. Get your stuff together. You will need your smoker, some good foil, a can of peach nectar, a bottle of Agave syrup, and a package of brown sugar. You will need this stuff later. I also use a clean spray bottle, and apple juice. Step 4. Make your fire, or turn on your electric smoker. In this example I’m using my portable charcoal smoker. I got this for only $40. I then modified it to be useful. Once modified, these guys actually work very well. Trust me, your food DOES NOT KNOW how expensive your smoker is. Someone who tells you that you need to spend a bunch of money on a smoker is an idiot. I also have an electric smoker that stays in my backyard. It’s cleaner and larger so I can smoke more food. But this little $40 one works great for going camping. Here is what my fire-bowl looks like. I leave a space in the middle open, and place cold charcoal and wood chucks in a circle going outwards. This makes it so when I dump the hot coals down the middle, they will slowly burn outwards, hitting different wood chucks at different times, allowing me to go 4-5 hours without having to even touch my fire. For ribs, I use apple and pecan wood. Pecan works for anything. Apple or any fruit wood is excellent for pork. So now I make my hot charcoal with a chimney only about half-full. I found a great use for that side-burner on my grill that I never use. It makes a fantastic chimney starter. You never use fluids of any kind, nor ever use that stupid charcoal that has lighter fluid built into it. Never, ever, ever. Step 5. Smoke. Add your ribs in the racks and stack them up in your smoker. I have a digital thermometer on a probe that I use to keep track of the temp in the smoker. I just lay the probe on the top rack and shut the lid. This cheap guy is a little harder to maintain the right temperature of around 225 F, so I do have to keep my eye on it more than my electric one or a more expensive charcoal one with the cool gadgets that regulate your temp for you. Every hour, spray apple juice all over your ribs using that spray bottle. After about 3 hours, you should have a very good crust (called the Bark) on your ribs. Once you have the Bark where you want it, carefully remove your ribs and place them in a tray. We are now ready for a very important part to make the flavor. Get a large piece of foil and place one rib section on it. Splash some of the peach nectar on it, and then a drizzle of the Agave syrup. Then, use your gloved hand to pack on some brown sugar. Do this on BOTH sides, and then completely wrap it up TIGHT in the foil. Do this for each rib section, and then place all the wrapped sections back into the smoker for another 4 to 6 hours. This is where the meat will get tender and flavorful. The first three hours is only to make the smoke bark. You don’t need smoke anymore, since the ribs are wrapped, you only need to keep the heat around 225 for the next 4-6 hours. Obviously you don’t spray anymore. Just time and slow heat. Be patient. It’s actually really hard to overdo it. You can let them go longer, and all that will happen is they will get even MORE tender!!! If you take them out too soon, they will be tough. How do you know? Take out one package (use long tongs) and open it up. If you grab a bone with your tongs and it just falls apart and breaks away from the rest of the meat, you are done!!! Enjoy!!! Step 6. Eat. It pulls apart like this when it’s done. By the way, smoking tri-tip is way easier. Just rub it with the same rub, and put in your smoker for about 2.5 hours at 250 F. That’s it. Low-maintenance. It comes out like this, with a fantastic smoke ring and amazing flavor. Thanks, and I will put up another good tip, about the ZFSSA, around the end of November. Steve 

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• Why unhandled exceptions are useful

  - by Simon Cooper

  It’s the bane of most programmers’ lives – an unhandled exception causes your application or webapp to crash, an ugly dialog gets displayed to the user, and they come complaining to you. Then, somehow, you need to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully, you’ve got a log file, or some other way of reporting unhandled exceptions (obligatory employer plug: SmartAssembly reports an application’s unhandled exceptions straight to you, along with the entire state of the stack and variables at that point). If not, you have to try and replicate it yourself, or do some psychic debugging to try and figure out what’s wrong. However, it’s good that the program crashed. Or, more precisely, it is correct behaviour. An unhandled exception in your application means that, somewhere in your code, there is an assumption that you made that is actually invalid. Coding assumptions Let me explain a bit more. Every method, every line of code you write, depends on implicit assumptions that you have made. Take this following simple method, that copies a collection to an array and includes an item if it isn’t in the collection already, using a supplied IEqualityComparer: public static T[] ToArrayWithItem( ICollection<T> coll, T obj, IEqualityComparer<T> comparer) { // check if the object is in collection already // using the supplied comparer foreach (var item in coll) { if (comparer.Equals(item, obj)) { // it's in the collection already // simply copy the collection to an array // and return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); return array; } } // not in the collection // copy coll to an array, and add obj to it // then return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count+1]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); array[array.Length-1] = obj; return array; } What’s all the assumptions made by this fairly simple bit of code? coll is never null comparer is never null coll.CopyTo(array, 0) will copy all the items in the collection into the array, in the order defined for the collection, starting at the first item in the array. The enumerator for coll returns all the items in the collection, in the order defined for the collection comparer.Equals returns true if the items are equal (for whatever definition of ‘equal’ the comparer uses), false otherwise comparer.Equals, coll.CopyTo, and the coll enumerator will never throw an exception or hang for any possible input and any possible values of T coll will have less than 4 billion items in it (this is a built-in limit of the CLR) array won’t be more than 2GB, both on 32 and 64-bit systems, for any possible values of T (again, a limit of the CLR) There are no threads that will modify coll while this method is running and, more esoterically: The C# compiler will compile this code to IL according to the C# specification The CLR and JIT compiler will produce machine code to execute the IL on the user’s computer The computer will execute the machine code correctly That’s a lot of assumptions. Now, it could be that all these assumptions are valid for the situations this method is called. But if this does crash out with an exception, or crash later on, then that shows one of the assumptions has been invalidated somehow. An unhandled exception shows that your code is running in a situation which you did not anticipate, and there is something about how your code runs that you do not understand. Debugging the problem is the process of learning more about the new situation and how your code interacts with it. When you understand the problem, the solution is (usually) obvious. The solution may be a one-line fix, the rewrite of a method or class, or a large-scale refactoring of the codebase, but whatever it is, the fix for the crash will incorporate the new information you’ve gained about your own code, along with the modified assumptions. When code is running with an assumption or invariant it depended on broken, then the result is ‘undefined behaviour’. Anything can happen, up to and including formatting the entire disk or making the user’s computer sentient and start doing a good impression of Skynet. You might think that those can’t happen, but at Halting problem levels of generality, as soon as an assumption the code depended on is broken, the program can do anything. That is why it’s important to fail-fast and stop the program as soon as an invariant is broken, to minimise the damage that is done. What does this mean in practice? To start with, document and check your assumptions. As with most things, there is a level of judgement required. How you check and document your assumptions depends on how the code is used (that’s some more assumptions you’ve made), how likely it is a method will be passed invalid arguments or called in an invalid state, how likely it is the assumptions will be broken, how expensive it is to check the assumptions, and how bad things are likely to get if the assumptions are broken. Now, some assumptions you can assume unless proven otherwise. You can safely assume the C# compiler, CLR, and computer all run the method correctly, unless you have evidence of a compiler, CLR or processor bug. You can also assume that interface implementations work the way you expect them to; implementing an interface is more than simply declaring methods with certain signatures in your type. The behaviour of those methods, and how they work, is part of the interface contract as well. For example, for members of a public API, it is very important to document your assumptions and check your state before running the bulk of the method, throwing ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, InvalidOperationException, or another exception type as appropriate if the input or state is wrong. For internal and private methods, it is less important. If a private method expects collection items in a certain order, then you don’t necessarily need to explicitly check it in code, but you can add comments or documentation specifying what state you expect the collection to be in at a certain point. That way, anyone debugging your code can immediately see what’s wrong if this does ever become an issue. You can also use DEBUG preprocessor blocks and Debug.Assert to document and check your assumptions without incurring a performance hit in release builds. On my coding soapbox… A few pet peeves of mine around assumptions. Firstly, catch-all try blocks: try { ... } catch { } A catch-all hides exceptions generated by broken assumptions, and lets the program carry on in an unknown state. Later, an exception is likely to be generated due to further broken assumptions due to the unknown state, causing difficulties when debugging as the catch-all has hidden the original problem. It’s much better to let the program crash straight away, so you know where the problem is. You should only use a catch-all if you are sure that any exception generated in the try block is safe to ignore. That’s a pretty big ask! Secondly, using as when you should be casting. Doing this: (obj as IFoo).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = obj as IFoo; ... foo.Method(); when you should be doing this: ((IFoo)obj).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = (IFoo)obj; ... foo.Method(); There’s an assumption here that obj will always implement IFoo. If it doesn’t, then by using as instead of a cast you’ve turned an obvious InvalidCastException at the point of the cast that will probably tell you what type obj actually is, into a non-obvious NullReferenceException at some later point that gives you no information at all. If you believe obj is always an IFoo, then say so in code! Let it fail-fast if not, then it’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong. Thirdly, document your assumptions. If an algorithm depends on a non-trivial relationship between several objects or variables, then say so. A single-line comment will do. Don’t leave it up to whoever’s debugging your code after you to figure it out. Conclusion It’s better to crash out and fail-fast when an assumption is broken. If it doesn’t, then there’s likely to be further crashes along the way that hide the original problem. Or, even worse, your program will be running in an undefined state, where anything can happen. Unhandled exceptions aren’t good per-se, but they give you some very useful information about your code that you didn’t know before. And that can only be a good thing.

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• Context Sensitive JTable

  - by Geertjan

  Here's a plain old JTable on the NetBeans Platform. Whenever the toolbar button is clicked, information about the currently selected row is displayed in the status bar: Normally, the above would be achieved in NetBeans Platform applications via Nodes publishing their underlying business object when the selection changes. In this case, there are no Nodes at all. There's only a JTable and a DefaultTableModel, i.e., all pure Java Swing. So, how does it work? To follow the logic, it makes sense to create the example yourself, starting with the Stock object: public class Stock {     String name;     String desc;     public Stock() {     }     public Stock(String name, String desc) {         this.name = name;         this.desc = desc;     }     public String getDesc() {         return desc;     }     public String getName() {         return name;     }     public void setDesc(String desc) {         this.desc = desc;     }     public void setName(String name) {         this.name = name;     } } Next, create a new Window Component via the wizard and then rewrite the constructor as follows: public final class MyWindowTopComponent extends TopComponent {     private final InstanceContent ic = new InstanceContent();     public MyWindowTopComponent() {         initComponents();         //Statically create a few stocks,         //in reality these would come from a data source         //of some kind:         List<Stock> list = new ArrayList();         list.add(new Stock("AMZN", "Amazon"));         list.add(new Stock("BOUT", "About.com"));         list.add(new Stock("Something", "Something.com"));         //Create a JTable, passing the List above         //to a DefaultTableModel:         final JTable table = new JTable(StockTableModel (list));         //Whenever the mouse is clicked on the table,         //somehow construct a new Stock object //(or get it from the List above) and publish it:         table.addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {             @Override             public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {                 int selectedColumn = table.getSelectedColumn();                 int selectedRow = table.getSelectedRow();                 Stock s = new Stock();                 if (selectedColumn == 0) {                     s.setName(table.getModel().getValueAt(selectedRow, 0).toString());                     s.setDesc(table.getModel().getValueAt(selectedRow, 1).toString());                 } else {                     s.setName(table.getModel().getValueAt(selectedRow, 1).toString());                     s.setDesc(table.getModel().getValueAt(selectedRow, 0).toString());                 }                 ic.set(Collections.singleton(s), null);             }         });         JScrollPane scrollPane = new JScrollPane(table);         add(scrollPane, BorderLayout.CENTER);         //Put the dynamic InstanceContent into the Lookup:         associateLookup(new AbstractLookup(ic));     }     private DefaultTableModel StockTableModel (List<Stock> stockList) {         DefaultTableModel stockTableModel = new DefaultTableModel() {             @Override             public boolean isCellEditable(int row, int column) {                 return false;             }         };         Object[] columnNames = new Object[2];         columnNames[0] = "Symbol";         columnNames[1] = "Name";         stockTableModel.setColumnIdentifiers(columnNames);         Object[] rows = new Object[2];         ListIterator<Stock> stockListIterator = stockList.listIterator();         while (stockListIterator.hasNext()) {             Stock nextStock = stockListIterator.next();             rows[0] = nextStock.getName();             rows[1] = nextStock.getDesc();             stockTableModel.addRow(rows);         }         return stockTableModel;     }     ...     ...     ... And now, since you're publishing a new Stock object whenever the user clicks in the table, you can create loosely coupled Actions, like this: @ActionID(category = "Edit", id = "org.my.ui.ShowStockAction") @ActionRegistration(iconBase = "org/my/ui/Datasource.gif", displayName = "#CTL_ShowStockAction") @ActionReferences({     @ActionReference(path = "Menu/File", position = 1300),     @ActionReference(path = "Toolbars/File", position = 300) }) @Messages("CTL_ShowStockAction=Show Stock") public final class ShowStockAction implements ActionListener {     private final Stock context;     public ShowStockAction(Stock context) {         this.context = context;     }     @Override     public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {         StatusDisplayer.getDefault().setStatusText(context.getName() + " / " + context.getDesc());     } }

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• How Mature is Your Database Change Management Process?

  - by Ben Rees

  .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database Delivery Patterns & Practices Further Reading Organization and team processes How do you get your database schema changes live, on to your production system? As your team of developers and DBAs are working on the changes to the database to support your business-critical applications, how do these updates wend their way through from dev environments, possibly to QA, hopefully through pre-production and eventually to production in a controlled, reliable and repeatable way? In this article, I describe a model we use to try and understand the different stages that customers go through as their database change management processes mature, from the very basic and manual, through to advanced continuous delivery practices. I also provide a simple chart that will help you determine “How mature is our database change management process?” This process of managing changes to the database – which all of us who have worked in application/database development have had to deal with in one form or another – is sometimes known as Database Change Management (even if we’ve never used the term ourselves). And it’s a difficult process, often painfully so. Some developers take the approach of “I’ve no idea how my changes get live – I just write the stored procedures and add columns to the tables. It’s someone else’s problem to get this stuff live. I think we’ve got a DBA somewhere who deals with it – I don’t know, I’ve never met him/her”. I know I used to work that way. I worked that way because I assumed that making the updates to production was a trivial task – how hard can it be? Pause the application for half an hour in the middle of the night, copy over the changes to the app and the database, and switch it back on again? Voila! But somehow it never seemed that easy. And it certainly was never that easy for database changes. Why? Because you can’t just overwrite the old database with the new version. Databases have a state – more specifically 4Tb of critical data built up over the last 12 years of running your business, and if your quick hotfix happened to accidentally delete that 4Tb of data, then you’re “Looking for a new role” pretty quickly after the failed release. There are a lot of other reasons why a managed database change management process is important for organisations, besides job security, not least: Frequency of releases. Many business managers are feeling the pressure to get functionality out to their users sooner, quicker and more reliably. The new book (which I highly recommend) Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky provides a great discussion on how many enterprises are having to move towards a leaner, more frequent release cycle to maintain their competitive advantage. It’s no longer acceptable to release once per year, leaving your customers waiting all year for changes they desperately need (and expect) Auditing and compliance. SOX, HIPAA and other compliance frameworks have demanded that companies implement proper processes for managing changes to their databases, whether managing schema changes, making sure that the data itself is being looked after correctly or other mechanisms that provide an audit trail of changes. We’ve found, at Red Gate that we have a very wide range of customers using every possible form of database change management imaginable. Everything from “Nothing – I just fix the schema on production from my laptop when things go wrong, and write it down in my notebook” to “A full Continuous Delivery process – any change made by a dev gets checked in and recorded, fully tested (including performance tests) before a (tested) release is made available to our Release Management system, ready for live deployment!”. And everything in between of course. Because of the vast number of customers using so many different approaches we found ourselves struggling to keep on top of what everyone was doing – struggling to identify patterns in customers’ behavior. This is useful for us, because we want to try and fit the products we have to different needs – different products are relevant to different customers and we waste everyone’s time (most notably, our customers’) if we’re suggesting products that aren’t appropriate for them. If someone visited a sports store, looking to embark on a new fitness program, and the store assistant suggested the latest $10,000 multi-gym, complete with multiple weights mechanisms, dumb-bells, pull-up bars and so on, then he’s likely to lose that customer. All he needed was a pair of running shoes! To solve this issue – in an attempt to simplify how we understand our customers and our offerings – we built a model. This is a an attempt at trying to classify our customers in to some sort of model or “Customer Maturity Framework” as we rather grandly term it, which somehow simplifies our understanding of what our customers are doing. The great statistician, George Box (amongst other things, the “Box” in the Box-Jenkins time series model) gave us the famous quote: “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful” We’ve taken this quote to heart – we know it’s a gross over-simplification of the real world of how users work with complex legacy and new database developments. Almost nobody precisely fits in to one of our categories. But we hope it’s useful and interesting. There are actually a number of similar models that exist for more general application delivery. We’ve found these from ThoughtWorks/Forrester, from InfoQ and others, and initially we tried just taking these models and replacing the word “application” for “database”. However, we hit a problem. From talking to our customers we know that users are far less further down the road of mature database change management than they are for application development. As a simple example, no application developer, who wants to keep his/her job would develop an application for an organisation without source controlling that code. Sure, he/she might not be using an advanced Gitflow branching methodology but they’ll certainly be making sure their code gets managed in a repo somewhere with all the benefits of history, auditing and so on. But this certainly isn’t the case (yet) for the database – a very large segment of the people we speak to have no source control set up for their databases whatsoever, even at the most basic level (for example, keeping change scripts in a source control system somewhere). By the way, if this is you, Red Gate has a great whitepaper here, on the barriers people face getting a source control process implemented at their organisations. This difference in maturity is the same as you move in to areas such as continuous integration (common amongst app developers, relatively rare for database developers) and automated release management (growing amongst app developers, very rare for the database). So, when we created the model we started from scratch and biased the levels of maturity towards what we actually see amongst our customers. But, what are these stages? And what level are you? The table below describes our definitions for four levels of maturity – Baseline, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. As I say, this is a model – you won’t fit any of these categories perfectly, but hopefully one will ring true more than others. We’ve also created a PDF with a flow chart to help you find which of these groups most closely matches your team:  Download the Database Delivery Maturity Framework PDF here   Level D1 – Baseline Work directly on live databases Sometimes work directly in production Generate manual scripts for releases. Sometimes use a product like SQL Compare or similar to do this Any tests that we might have are run manually Level D2 – Beginner Have some ad-hoc DB version control such as manually adding upgrade scripts to a version control system Attempt is made to keep production in sync with development environments There is some documentation and planning of manual deployments Some basic automated DB testing in process Level D3 – Intermediate The database is fully version-controlled with a product like Red Gate SQL Source Control or SSDT Database environments are managed Production environment schema is reproducible from the source control system There are some automated tests Have looked at using migration scripts for difficult database refactoring cases Level D4 – Advanced Using continuous integration for database changes Build, testing and deployment of DB changes carried out through a proper database release process Fully automated tests Production system is monitored for fast feedback to developers   Does this model reflect your team at all? Where are you on this journey? We’d be very interested in knowing how you get on. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment, at Red Gate, trying to help people progress through these stages. For example, if you’re currently not source controlling your database, then this is a natural next step. If you are already source controlling your database, what about the next stage – continuous integration and automated release management? To help understand these issues, there’s a summary of the Red Gate Database Delivery learning program on our site, alongside a Patterns and Practices library here on Simple-Talk and a Training Academy section on our documentation site to help you get up and running with the tools you need to progress. All feedback is welcome and it would be great to hear where you find yourself on this journey! This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 31, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 31, 2012Popular ReleasesNaked Objects: Naked Objects Release 4.1.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 4.1.0 available via NuGet. Note that the versioning has moved to SemVer (http://semver.org/) This is a bug fix release with no new functionality. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wi...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.54: Fix for issue #18161: pretty-printing CSS @media rule throws an exception due to mismatched Indent/Unindent pair.OMS.Ice - T4 Text Template Generator: OMS.Ice - T4 Text Template Generator v1.4.0.14110: Issue 601 - Template file name cannot contain characters that are not allowed in C#/VB identifiers Issue 625 - Last line will be ignored by the parser Issue 626 - Usage of environment variables and macrosSilverlight Toolkit: Silverlight 5 Toolkit Source - May 2012: Source code for December 2011 Silverlight 5 Toolkit release.totalem: version 2012.05.30.1: Beta version added function for mass renaming files and foldersAudio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch and Shift 4.4.0: Tracklist added on main window Improved performances with tracklist Some other fixesJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 6: New feature - Added IgnoreDataMemberAttribute support New feature - Added GetResolvedPropertyName to DefaultContractResolver New feature - Added CheckAdditionalContent to JsonSerializer Change - Metro build now always uses late bound reflection Change - JsonTextReader no longer returns no content after consecutive underlying content read failures Fix - Fixed bad JSON in an array with error handling creating an infinite loop Fix - Fixed deserializing objects with a non-default cons...Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v12.1: Version History Changed in v12.1: Fixed crash when unable to start asynchronous analysis Fixed upgrade from v11 Changed in v12: background document analysis new options dialog with Quick Set selections for behavior new "glow" style for guides new menu icon in VS 11 preview control now uses editor theming highlighting can be customised on each line fixed issues with collapsed code blocks improved behaviour around left-aligned pragma/preprocessor commands (C#/C++) new setting...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.00: Major Highlights Fixed issue in the Site Settings when single quotes were being treated as escape characters Fixed issue loading the Mobile Premium Data after upgrading from CE to PE Fixed errors logged when updating folder provider settings Fixed the order of the mobile device capabilities in the Site Redirection Management UI The User Profile page was completely rebuilt. We needed User Profiles to have multiple child pages. This would allow for the most flexibility by still f...Thales Simulator Library: Version 0.9.6: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptographic device. This release fixes a problem with the FK command and a bug in the implementation of PIN block 05 format deconstruction. A new 0.9.6.Binaries file has been posted. This includes executable programs without an installer, including the GUI and console simulators, the key manager and the PVV clashing demo. Please note that you will need ...????: ????2.0.1: 1、?????。WiX Toolset: WiX v3.6 RC: WiX v3.6 RC (3.6.2928.0) provides feature complete Burn with VS11 support. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/5/28/WiX-v3.6-Release-Candidate-availableJavascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.7: SetParameter() reverts to its old behaviour of allowing JavaScript code to add new properties to wrapped C# objects. The behavior added briefly in 0.6 (throws an exception) can be had via the new SetParameterOptions.RejectUnknownProperties. TerminateExecution now uses its isolate to terminate the correct context automatically. Added support for converting all C# integral types, decimal and enums to JavaScript numbers. (Previously only the common types were handled properly.) Bug fixe...callisto: callisto 2.0.29: Added DNS functionality to scripting. See documentation section for details of how to incorporate this into your scripts.Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (May 2012): Fixes: unserialize() of negative float numbers fix pcre possesive quantifiers and character class containing ()[] array deserilization when the array contains a reference to ISerializable parsing lambda function fix round() reimplemented as it is in PHP to avoid .NET rounding errors filesize bypass for FileInfo.Length bug in Mono New features: Time zones reimplemented, uses Windows/Linux databaseSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.1): New fetures:Admin enable / disable match Hide/Show Euro 2012 SharePoint lists (3 lists) Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint Euro 2012 Predictor has been developed as a SharePoint Sandbox solution to support SharePoint Online (Office 365) Download the solution havivi.euro2012.wsp from the download page: Downloads Upload this solution to your Site Collection via the solutions area. Click on Activate to make the web parts in the solution available for use in the Site C...ScreenShot: InstallScreenShot: This is the current stable release.????SDK for .Net 4.0+(OAuth2.0+??V2?API): ??V2?SDK???: ?????????API?? ???????OAuth2.0?? ????：????????????，??????????“SOURCE CODE”?????????Changeset，http://weibosdk.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets ???：????????，DEMO??AppKey????????????????，?????AppKey，????AppKey???????????，?????“????>????>????>??????”.Net Code Samples: Code Samples: Code samples (SLNs).LINQ_Koans: LinqKoans v.02: Cleaned up a bitNew ProjectsAAABBBCCC: hauhuhaAutomação e Robótica: Sistema de automação e robótica de periféricos. todo o projeto consiste em integrar interface de controle pelo software do hardware para realização de comando e acionamentos eletricos e eletromecânicos.Barium Live! API Client: Simple test client for the Barium Live! REST API Contact Barium Live! support on http://www.bariumlive.com/support to get an API key for development. Please note that the test client has a dependency to the Newtonsoft Json.NET library that has to be downloaded separately from http://json.codeplex.com/BizTalk Host Restarter: This is a quick tool that I wrote to more quickly Stop, Start and Restart the BizTalk Host instances. It's command line, with full source code, I use it in my build scripts and deploy scripts, works a treat. MUCH faster than the BizTalk Admin Console can do the same task. CNAF Portal: CNAFPortalConsulta_Productos: Nos permite ingresar un código del 1 al 10..... y al dar clic en buscar nos aparecerá un mensaje con el nombre del producto de dicho código.Deployment Tool: Deployement is a small piece in our IT lifecycle for many small projects. But, considering that you are working for a large project, it has many servers, softwares, configurations, databases and so on. The problem emits, even you have upgrades and version controls. The deploymentool is a solution which can help you resolve the difficulties described above.Devmil MVVM: A toolset for MVVM development with focus on INotifyPropertyChanged and dependenciesEAL: no summaryEasyCLI: EasyCLI is a command shell for the Commodore 64 computer. EasyCLI is packaged as an EasyFlash cartridge.ExcelSharePointListSync: This tool help is Getting Data Form SharePoint to Excel 2010 , Following are the silent feature : 1) Maintain a List connection Offline 2) Choose to get data Form a View of Form Columns 3) Sync the data Back to SharePoint GH: Some summaryicontrolpcv: icontrolpvcLotteryVoteMVC: LotteryVote use mvcMail API for Windows Phone 7: Library that allows developers to add some email functionality to their application, like sending and reading email messages, with the capability of adding attachments to the messages. Matchy - Fashion Website: Fashion website for Match Brand, a fashion brand of BOOM JSC.,MIracLE Guild Admin System: asdOrchard Content Picker: Orchard Content Picker enables content editor to select Content Items.ProSoft Mail Services: This project implements a mail server that allows sending mail with SMTP and access the mailbox via POP. Later on, the server also get a MAPI interface and an interface for SPAM defense.Silver Sugar Web Browser: This is a simple web browser named "Silver Sugar". It has a back button, forward button, home button, url text box and a go button.social sdk for windows phone: Windows Phone Social Share Lib. (Including Weibo, Tencent Weibo & Renren)SolutionX: dfsdf asdfds asdfsdf asdfsdfspUtils: This project aims to facilitate easy to use methods that interact with SharePoint's Client OM/JSOM.Streambolics Library: A library of C# classes providing robust tools for real-time data monitoringTestExpression: TestExpressionTFS Helper package: VS2010 is well integrated to TFS and has all the features required on day to day basis. Most common feature any developer use is managing workitems. Creating work items is very easy as is copying work items, but what I need is to copy workitem between projects retaining links and attachments. I am sure this is not Ideal and against sprint projects.Ubelsoft: Sistema de Registro Eletrônico de Ponto - SREPZombieSim: Simulate the spread of a zombie virusZYWater: ......................

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, August 15, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, August 15, 2012Popular ReleasesTFS Workbench: TFS Workbench v2.2.0.10: Compiled installers for TFS Workbench 2.2.0.10 Bug Fix Fixed bug that stopped the change workspace action from working.MoltenMercury: MoltenMercury 1.0 beta 1: This is initial implementation of the MoltenMercury with everything running but not throughoutly tested. Release contains a zip file with program binaries and a zip file containing resources. Before using please create a new directory named data in the same directory with program executables and extract DefaultCharacter zip file in there. If you have ???????????, you can simply place executables into the same directory with the program mentioned above. MoltenMercury supports character resour...SharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.0: Version 1.0 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerSPListViewFilter: Version 1.6: Layout selection: http://blog.vitalyzhukov.ru/imagelibrary/120815/Settings_Layouts.pngConsoleHoster: ConsoleHoster Version 1.2: Cleanup some logging UI impreovements: Fixed the bug with _ character in project-name Fixed the bug with tab close button to be X style Fixed the style of search content bar Fixed the bug with disappearing Edit project window Moved the Clear History button to the taskbar and added also a menu item Changed the QC button to CH Applied project colors to tab headersMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.60: Allow for CSS3 grid-column and grid-row repeat syntax. Provide option for -analyze scope-report output to be in XML for easier programmatic processing; also allow for report to be saved to a separate output file.Diablo III Drop Statistics Service: 1.0: Client OnlyClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.67.2: v0.67.2 Fix when copying conditional formats with relative formulas v0.67.1 Misc fixes to the conditional formats v0.67.0 Conditional formats now accept formulas. Major performance improvement when opening files with merged ranges. Misc fixes.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.8.1: Whats newBug fixes: Fixed: When upgrading to 4.8.0, the database upgrade didn't run Update: unfortunately, upgrading with SQLCE is problematic, there's a workaround here: http://bit.ly/TEmMJN The changes to the <imaging> section in umbracoSettings.config caused errors when you didn't apply them during the upgrade. Defaults will now be used if any keys are missing Scheduled unpublishes now only unpublishes nodes set to published rather than newest Work item: 30937 - Fixed problem with Fi...MySqlBackup.NET - MySQL Backup Solution for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET: MySqlBackup.NET 1.4.4 Beta: MySqlBackup.NET 1.4.4 beta Fix bug: If the target database's default character set is not UTF8, UTF8 character will be encoded wrongly during Import. Now, database default character set will be recorded into Dump File at line of "SET NAMES". During import(restore), MySqlBackup will again detect and use the target database default character char set. MySqlBackup.NET 1.4.2 beta Fix bug: MySqlConnection is not closed when AutoCloseConnection set to true after Export or Import completed/halted. M...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET 4.5 and WinRT - Preview: The Unity 3.0.1208.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. This is an updated version of the port after the .NET Framework 4.5 and Windows 8 have RTM'ed. Please see the Release Notes Providing feedback Post your feedback on the Unity forum Submit and vote on new features for Unity on our Uservoice site.LiteBlog (MVC): LiteBlog 1.31: Features of this release Windows8 styled UI Namespace and code refactoring Resolved the deployment issues in the previous release Added documentation Help file Help file is HTML based built using SandCastle Help file works in all browsers except IE10Self-Tracking Entity Generator for WPF and Silverlight: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 2.0.0 for VS11: Self-Tracking Entity Generator for WPF and Silverlight v 2.0.0 for Entity Framework 5.0 and Visual Studio 2012Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.6.0: New Stuff ImageTile Control - think People Tile MicrophoneRecorder - Coding4Fun.Phone.Audio GzipWebClient - Coding4Fun.Phone.Net Serialize - Coding4Fun.Phone.Storage this is code I've written countless times. JSON.net is another alternative ChatBubbleTextBox - Added in Hint TimeSpan languages added: Pl Bug Fixes RoundToggleButton - Enable Visual State not being respected OpacityToggleButton - Enable Visual State not being respected Prompts VS Crash fix for IsPrompt=true More...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.2 Unnamed: Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we try to pack it. Try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compile your own for Linux (source included) Added 3rd person Added mario jumps Fixed nextprimary code exploit ...NPOI: NPOI 2.0: New features a. Implement OpenXml4Net (same as System.Packaging from Microsoft). It supports both .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 b. Excel 2007 read/write library (NPOI.XSSF) c. Word 2007 read/write library(NPOI.XWPF) d. NPOI.SS namespace becomes the interface shared between XSSF and HSSF e. Load xlsx template and save as new xlsx file (partially supported) f. Diagonal line in cell both in xls and xlsx g. Support isRightToLeft and setRightToLeft on the common spreadsheet Sheet interface, as per existin...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.1: This release includes bug fixes from the 1.0 release for email notifications, RSS feeds, and several other issues. Please see the change log for a full list of changes. http://support.bugnetproject.com/Projects/ReleaseNotes.aspx?pid=1&m=76 Upgrade Notes The following changes to the web.config in the profile section have occurred: Removed <add name="NotificationTypes" type="String" defaultValue="Email" customProviderData="NotificationTypes;nvarchar;255" />Added <add name="ReceiveEmailNotifi...????: ????2.0.5: 1、?????????????。RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.01: changes NEW: Added Support for Clipboard Function in Mono Version NEW: Added Support for "ImgBox.com" links FIXED: "PixHub.eu" links FIXED: "ImgChili.com" links FIXED: Kitty-Kats Forum loginPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (Preview 5): Support for Smooth Streaming SDK beta 2 Support for live playback New bitrate meter and SD/HD indicators Auto smooth streaming track restriction for snapped mode to conserve bandwidth New "Go Live" button and SeekToLive API Support for offset start times Support for Live position unique from end time Support for multiple audio streams (smooth and progressive content) Improved intellisense in JS version Support for Windows 8 RTM ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmooth Streaming Client SD...New ProjectsA Java Open Platform: A Java Open PlatformAutomation Tools: noneAzManPermissions: Allows AzMan (Authorization Manager) operation permission checks declaratively and imperatively. It can connect to AzMan stores directly or through a service.Configuration Manager 2012 Automation: Configuration Manager 2012 Automation is a powershell project to help perform the basic implementation of a CM12 infrastructure...Dynamicweb Blog Engine 2012: A simple blog engine built on Dynamicweb.E Lixo: Projeto E_LIXOEasy Windows Service Manager: Easy Windows Service Manager (ewsm) is a desktop utility that enables the easily management of Windows services. flexwork: A Flex Pluggable Extension FrameworkGit On Codeplex: Just trying git on CodePlexGT.BlogBox: Blogsite-Webtemplate for SharePoint 2010gvPoco: gvPoco is a .NET class library for the Google Visualization Charts API. IAllenSoft: IAllenSoft is a silverlight control library, which originates from some idea. Its target is to improve development productivity for silverlight projects. ListNetRanker: ListNetRanker is a listwise ranker based on machine learning. Given documents and query's feature set, ListNetRanker will rank these documents by ranking score.lvyao: stillMetro Tic-Tac-Toe: Tic-Tac-Toe is a Windows 8 developed using MonoGame for Windows 8. The intent of this code is to help XNA developers with porting their XNA apps to Windows 8myProject: my private code Nintemulator: Nintemulator is a work in progress multi-system emulator. Plans for emulated systems are NES, SNES, GB/GBC, GBA.Picnic Game: Picnic Game is a 2D game written in Small Basic. The objective is to get the pizza to the basket before you get stung or time runs out.Picnic Level Editor: Picnic Game is a 2D 3rd person game where you are an ant, and you have to gather the pizza and bring it to the basket before you get stung by a bee.ResCom: ResCom is a community response system for Windows Phone 8Scalable Object Persistence (SOP) Framework: Scalable object persistence (SOP) framework. RDBMS "index" like performance and scale on data Stores but without the unnecessary baggage, fine grained control.self-balancing-avl-tree: Self balancing AVL tree with Concat and Split operations.SEMS(synthetical evaluation management system): that's itsergionadal-mvc: Mvc para sistemas AndroidTFS Test Plan Builder: TFS Test plan builder is a tool to assis users of Microst Test Manager to build new test plans then moving from sprint to sprint or release to release The Excel Library: DExcelLibrary is a project that allows you to load and display "any" excel file given a specificaction of with areas/grids to loadTimePunch Metro Wpf Library: This library contains WPF controls and MVVM Implementation to create touch optimized applications in the new Windows 8 UI style formerly known as "Metro". UniPie: UniPie is a system wide pie menu system for sending key-mouse button combinations to certain applications. It can also convert one combo to another.xref: This is an extension of the classic FizzBuzz problem.ZombieRPG: Basic Zombie RPG game made using Game Maker??????: ZHJP

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• Make Your Menu Item Highlighted

  - by Shaun

  When I was working on the TalentOn project (Promotion in MSDN Chinese) I was asked to implement a functionality that makes the top menu items highlighted when the currently viewing page was in that section. This might be a common scenario in the web application development I think.   Simple Example When thinking about the solution of the highlighted menu items the biggest problem would be how to define the sections (menu item) and the pages it belongs to rather than making the menu highlighted. With the ASP.NET MVC framework we can use the controller – action infrastructure for us to achieve it. Each controllers would have a related menu item on the master page normally. The menu item would be highlighted if any of the views under this controller are being shown. Some specific menu items would be highlighted of that action was invoked, for example the home page, the about page, etc. The check rule can be specified on-demand. For example I can define the action LogOn and Register of Account controller should make the Account menu item highlighted while the ChangePassword should make the Profile menu item highlighted. I’m going to use the HtmlHelper to render the highlight-able menu item. The key point is that I need to pass the predication to check whether the current view belongs to this menu item which means this menu item should be highlighted or not. Hence I need a delegate as its parameter. The simplest code would be like this. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using System.Web.Mvc.Html; 7:  8: namespace ShaunXu.Blogs.HighlighMenuItem 9: { 10: public static class HighlightMenuItemHelper 11: { 12: public static MvcHtmlString HighlightMenuItem(this HtmlHelper helper, 13: string text, string controllerName, string actionName, object routeData, object htmlAttributes, 14: string highlightText, object highlightHtmlAttributes, 15: Func<HtmlHelper, bool> highlightPredicate) 16: { 17: var shouldHighlight = highlightPredicate.Invoke(helper); 18: if (shouldHighlight) 19: { 20: return helper.ActionLink(string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(highlightText) ? text : highlightText, 21: actionName, controllerName, routeData, highlightHtmlAttributes == null ? htmlAttributes : highlightHtmlAttributes); 22: } 23: else 24: { 25: return helper.ActionLink(text, actionName, controllerName, routeData, htmlAttributes); 26: } 27: } 28: } 29: } There are 3 groups of the parameters: the first group would be the same as the in-build ActionLink method parameters. It has the link text, controller name and action name, etc passed in so that I can render a valid linkage for the menu item. The second group would be more focus on the highlight link text and Html attributes. I will use them to render the highlight menu item. The third group, which contains one parameter, would be a predicate that tells me whether this menu item should be highlighted or not based on the user’s definition. And then I changed my master page of the sample MVC application. I let the Home and About menu highlighted only when the Index and About action are invoked. And I added a new menu named Account which should be highlighted for all actions/views under its Account controller. So my master would be like this. 1: <div id="menucontainer"> 2:  3: <ul id="menu"> 4: <li><% 1: : Html.HighlightMenuItem( 2: "Home", "Home", "Index", null, null, 3: "[Home]", null, 4: helper => helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString() == "Home" 5: && helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString() == "Index")%></li> 5:  6: <li><% 1: : Html.HighlightMenuItem( 2: "About", "Home", "About", null, null, 3: "[About]", null, 4: helper => helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString() == "Home" 5: && helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString() == "About")%></li> 7:  8: <li><% 1: : Html.HighlightMenuItem( 2: "Account", "Account", "LogOn", null, null, 3: "[Account]", null, 4: helper => helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString() == "Account")%></li> 9: 10: </ul> 11:  12: </div> Note: You need to add the import section for the namespace “ShaunXu.Blogs.HighlighMenuItem” to make the extension method I created below available. So let’s see the result. When the home page was shown the Home menu was highlighted since at this moment it was controller = Home and action = Index. And if I clicked the About menu you can see it turned highlighted as now the action was About. And if I navigated to the register page the Account menu was highlighted since it should be like that when any actions under the Account controller was invoked.   Fluently Language Till now it’s a fully example for the highlight menu item but not perfect yet. Since the most common scenario would be: highlighted when the action invoked, or highlighted when any action was invoked under this controller, we can created 2 shortcut method so for them so that normally the developer will be no need to specify the delegation. Another place we can improve would be, to make the method more user-friendly, or I should say developer-friendly. As you can see when we want to add a highlight menu item we need to specify 8 parameters and we need to remember what they mean. In fact we can make the method more “fluently” so that the developer can have the hints when using it by the Visual Studio IntelliSense. Below is the full code for it. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using System.Web.Mvc.Html; 7:  8: namespace Ethos.Xrm.HR 9: { 10: #region Helper 11:  12: public static class HighlightActionMenuHelper 13: { 14: public static IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterCreated HighlightActionMenu(this HtmlHelper helper) 15: { 16: return new HighlightActionMenuProvider(helper); 17: } 18: } 19:  20: #endregion 21:  22: #region Interfaces 23:  24: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterCreated 25: { 26: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn On(string actionName, string controllerName); 27: } 28:  29: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn 30: { 31: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith With(string text, object routeData, object htmlAttributes); 32: } 33:  34: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith 35: { 36: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhen(Func<HtmlHelper, bool> predicate); 37: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerMatch(); 38: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerAndActionMatch(); 39: } 40:  41: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen 42: { 43: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes, string highlightText); 44: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes); 45: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass, string highlightText); 46: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass); 47: } 48:  49: public interface IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle 50: { 51: MvcHtmlString ToActionLink(); 52: } 53:  54: #endregion 55:  56: public class HighlightActionMenuProvider : 57: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterCreated, 58: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn, IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith, 59: IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen, IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle 60: { 61: private HtmlHelper _helper; 62:  63: private string _controllerName; 64: private string _actionName; 65: private string _text; 66: private object _routeData; 67: private object _htmlAttributes; 68:  69: private Func<HtmlHelper, bool> _highlightPredicate; 70:  71: private string _highlightText; 72: private object _highlightHtmlAttributes; 73:  74: public HighlightActionMenuProvider(HtmlHelper helper) 75: { 76: _helper = helper; 77: } 78:  79: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterOn On(string actionName, string controllerName) 80: { 81: _actionName = actionName; 82: _controllerName = controllerName; 83: return this; 84: } 85:  86: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterWith With(string text, object routeData, object htmlAttributes) 87: { 88: _text = text; 89: _routeData = routeData; 90: _htmlAttributes = htmlAttributes; 91: return this; 92: } 93:  94: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhen(Func<HtmlHelper, bool> predicate) 95: { 96: _highlightPredicate = predicate; 97: return this; 98: } 99:  100: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerMatch() 101: { 102: return HighlightWhen((helper) => 103: { 104: return helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().ToLower() == _controllerName.ToLower(); 105: }); 106: } 107:  108: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterHighlightWhen HighlightWhenControllerAndActionMatch() 109: { 110: return HighlightWhen((helper) => 111: { 112: return helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().ToLower() == _controllerName.ToLower() && 113: helper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString().ToLower() == _actionName.ToLower(); 114: }); 115: } 116:  117: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes, string highlightText) 118: { 119: _highlightText = highlightText; 120: _highlightHtmlAttributes = highlightHtmlAttributes; 121: return this; 122: } 123:  124: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(object highlightHtmlAttributes) 125: { 126: return ApplyHighlighStyle(highlightHtmlAttributes, _text); 127: } 128:  129: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass, string highlightText) 130: { 131: return ApplyHighlighStyle(new { @class = cssClass }, highlightText); 132: } 133:  134: public IHighlightActionMenuProviderAfterApplyHighlightStyle ApplyHighlighStyle(string cssClass) 135: { 136: return ApplyHighlighStyle(new { @class = cssClass }, _text); 137: } 138:  139: public MvcHtmlString ToActionLink() 140: { 141: if (_highlightPredicate.Invoke(_helper)) 142: { 143: // should be highlight 144: return _helper.ActionLink(_highlightText, _actionName, _controllerName, _routeData, _highlightHtmlAttributes); 145: } 146: else 147: { 148: // should not be highlight 149: return _helper.ActionLink(_text, _actionName, _controllerName, _routeData, _htmlAttributes); 150: } 151: } 152: } 153: } So in the master page when I need the highlight menu item I can “tell” the helper how it should be, just like this. 1: <li> 2: <% 1: : Html.HighlightActionMenu() 2: .On("Index", "Home") 3: .With(SiteMasterStrings.Home, null, null) 4: .HighlightWhenControllerMatch() 5: .ApplyHighlighStyle(new { style = "background:url(../../Content/Images/topmenu_bg.gif) repeat-x;text-decoration:none;color:#feffff;" }) 6: .ToActionLink() %> 3: </li> While I’m typing the code the IntelliSense will advise me that I need a highlight action menu, on the Index action of the Home controller, with the “Home” as its link text and no need the additional route data and Html attributes, and it should be highlighted when the controller was “Home”, and if it’s highlighted the style should be like this and finally render it to me. This is something we call “Fluently Language”. If you had been using Moq you will see that’s very development-friendly, document-ly and easy to read.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to implement a highlight menu item in ASP.NET MVC by using its controller – action infrastructure. We can see the ASP.NET MVC helps us to organize our web application better. And then I also told a little bit more on the “Fluently Language” and showed how it will make our code better and easy to be used.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 24, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 24, 2011Popular ReleasesPeople's Note: People's Note 0.31: Added note tag editing. Changed note edit conflict resolution to keep the latest version. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...Workflow Automation (for Dynamics CRM 2011): Release 1.0: Initial release version 1.0.Window Manipulation with the Microsoft Touch Mouse: Window Touch v1.0: This is the initial release of the Window Touch software, which may have bugs and incomplete interactions. Please be patient with us as we work out all of the kinks, and feel free to send comments. To install and run the program download and double click the .msi file below. Make sure you already have a Microsoft Touch Mouse and can use it before installing.xUnit.net Contrib: xunitcontrib-resharper 0.4.4 (dotCover): xunitcontrib release 0.4.4 (ReSharper runner) This release provides a test runner plugin for Resharper 6.0 RTM, targetting all versions of xUnit.net. (See the xUnit.net project to download xUnit.net itself.) This release addresses the following issues:Support for dotCover code coverage 4132 Note that this build work against ALL VERSIONS of xunit. The files are compiled against xunit.dll 1.8 - DO NOT REPLACE THIS FILE. Thanks to xunit's version independent runner system, this package can r...BookShop: BookShop: BookShop WP7 clientRibbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Ribbon Editor (0.1.2122.266): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New icon Bug fix: can't connect to an IFD deployment when the discovery service url has been customizedSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.921.340): Added CodePlex and PayPal links New iconMVCQuick: MVCQuick 0.3.1: Features??NHibernate 3.2??Repository（ORuM） ??Spring.Net 1.3.2??Container（IoC） ??Common.Logging 1.2??Logging ASP.NET Security Provider?? ??MVCQuick.Framework??MusicStoreDotNet.Framework.Common: DotNet.Framework.Common 4.0: ??????????，????????????XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.5: Changes in 4.0.5: Added 'Copy Attribute XPath to Address Bar' feature. Added methods for decoding node text and value from Base64 encoded strings, and copying them to the clipboard. Added 'ChildNodeDefinitions' to the options, which allows for easier navigation of parent-child and ID-IDREF relationships. Discovery happens on-demand, as nodes are expanded and child nodes are added. Nodes can now have 'virtual' child nodes, defined by an xpath to select an identifier (usually relative to ...Media Companion: MC 3.419b Weekly: A couple of minor bug fixes, but the important fix in this release is to tackle the extremely long load times for users with large TV collections (issue #130). A note has been provided by developer Playos: "One final note, you will have to suffer one final long load and then it should be fixed... alternatively you can delete the TvCache.xml and rebuild your library... The fix was to include the file extension so it doesn't have to look for the video file (checking to see if a file exists is a...CODE Framework: 4.0.11021.0: This build adds a lot of our WPF components, including our MVVC and MVC components as well as a "Metro" and "Battleship" style.GridLibre para Visual FoxPro: GridLibre para Visual FoxPro v3.5: GridLibre Para Visual FoxPro: esta herramienta ayudara a los usuarios y programadores en los manejos de los datos, como Filtrar, multiseleccion y el autoformato a las columnas como la asignacion del controlsource.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.0 CMS Alpha 3: Umbraco 5 Alpha 3Umbraco 5 (aka Jupiter) will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out the Alpha of v5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video. What's Alpha 3?This is our third Alpha release. It's intended for developers looking to become familiar with the codebase & architecture, or for thos...Vkontakte WP: Vkontakte: source codeWay2Sms Applications for Android, Desktop/Laptop & Java enabled phones: Way2SMS Desktop App v2.0: 1. Fixed issue with sending messages due to changes to Way2Sms site 2. Updated the character limit to 160 from 140GART - Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit: 1.0.1: About Release 1.0.1 Release 1.0.1 is a service release that addresses several issues and improves performance. As always, check the Documentation tab for instructions on how to get started. If you don't have the Windows Phone SDK yet, grab it here. Breaking Change Please note: There is a breaking change in this release. As noted below, the WorldCalculationMode property of ARItem has been replaced by a user-definable function. ARItem is now automatically wired up with a function that perform...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.32: Fix for issue #16710 - string literals in "constant literal operations" which contain ASP.NET substitutions should not be considered "constant." Move the JS1284 error (Misplaced Function Declaration) so it only fires when in strict mode. I got a couple complaints that people didn't like that error popping up in their existing code when they could verify that the location of that function, although not strict JS, still functions as expected cross-browser.Naked Objects: Naked Objects Release 4.0.110.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 4.0.110.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. Documentation Please note that after ...New Projects360zebra4en: 360zebra???AG: Web Framework that can leverage silverlight, but fall back on native html if silverlight is not available.BookShop: BookShop ????? ???? ? ????????????? ?????????.CompendiumImport: Import data from Dungeons & Dragons Compendium to Masterplan librariesCS 6235 Arbiter Server: CS 6235 Arbiter ServerDual numbers for automatic differentiation: Dual numbers can be used to automatically calculate numerically stable derivatives of functions.Effort - Entity Framework Unit Testing Tool: Effort is a powerful unit testing tool that brings an easy way to create unit tests for Entity Framework based applications. It can manipulate the behavior of EntityConnection or ObjectContext objects, so that the data operations are executed by a fake in-process database, while omitting the real database completely. This mechanism makes possible to remove the dependency between your unit test and the real database.FlexiCache for ASP.NET applications: This library provides extended cache capabilities to the ASP.NET applications. It includes the MongoDB and SQL Server output cache providers extending ASP.NET Output Cache capabilities by allowing to store cached data outside of the application process that is especially important in web-farm scenario. This library provides "Session-On-Demand" functionality - ability to separate ASP.NET Session data to subsets that can be stored outside of the main ASP.NET session and loaded on demand w...HtmlAgilityPackContrib - Logical extension to HtmlAgilityPack: HtmlAgilityPackContrib - A logical extension to HtmlAgilityPack to parse HTML using jQuery like methods inspired by jSoupjsonhttphandler: The JsonHttpHandler is a simple JSON oriented Http handler to easily integrate JSON GET, POST, and JSONP web services into your application.My Recent Documents: This Webpart for Sharepoint 2010 is developed for users that need help finding the last number of documents they have been working on. The target user have trouble location where he/she placed their documents. This Webpart gives the following features... 1. Locate your last edited documents.. 2. Customize how many documents the webpart should find. 3. Should it look in subsites also? 4. Show the structure in where the documents are located and click easy link to either document lib...Option pricing for arbitrary distributions: European option pricing with arbitrary distributions using dual numbers to calculate greeks.Project Tracy: ????????？ ????????？ ????????10??????？ ???????????????????????。。。。。 ???！Tracy?????????????！（?RegSharp: RegSharp provides server functionality for Sencha Extjs (http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/) paging grid. RegSharp implements sorting, filtering and paging logic on the server side that is required for using the paging grid. Is't developed in C#SharePoint/TFS Continuous Integration Starter Pack: Provides a customized TFS Build workflow and PowerShell scripts to get started with Continuous Integration (automated builds) in SharePoint 2010/TFS 2010. This pack will allow you to automatically build and deploy WSPs using TFS, and optionally also include automated testing as part of the build such as Visual Studio 2010's Coded UI Tests. Sharp Investor: Sharp Investor pools various online sources as well as preforms a couple local calculation to return recommended stocks. The program is easy to use, and requires very little work to find profitable stocks online. It's developed in C#.SharpXML: Aims to be a simpler library for interacting with XML files that exposes attributes and children elements as properties and objects respectively.Splash: Splash is an interactive MediaCenter-style YouTube client written in WPF.TomCdc: TomCdc is a solution which makes tracking of sql databse changes easy. Quick and simple installation process allows to start using the solution in just a few minutes. It supports all versions of Microsoft Sql server. You'll no longer have to write triggers manually to find out what process is changing data in a table.Track your work: Another work-time tracker TumblePower: TumblePower is a simplified API library for Tumblr. Use it in your application to post Text, Photos, Quotes, Links, Chats, Audio and Videos as well as set functions such as tags, dates and choose whether the post should be private or not.VisualBASH: This project aims to extends Visual Studio's language support to include bash scripting. This includes syntax highlighting, code completion, and syntax error checking.Window Manipulation with the Microsoft Touch Mouse: Window Manipulation for the Microsoft Touch Mouse provides a set of simple gestures for moving and resizing windows.Workflow Automation (for Dynamics CRM 2011): Workflow Automation for Dynamics CRM 2011 allows user to automate or schedule workflow execution via Windows Task Scheduler. XNA Model Viewer: The XNA Model Viewer allows you to load FBX files and view them. It allows you to test that models will work in XNA, determine the effect of modifying bone transforms, and view animation clips. You can examine the bones and meshes and see the complete hierarchy.

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• When someone deletes a shared data source in SSRS

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server Reporting Services plays nicely. You can have things in the catalogue that get shared. You can have Reports that have Links, Datasets that can be used across different reports, and Data Sources that can be used in a variety of ways too. So if you find that someone has deleted a shared data source, you potentially have a bit of a horror story going on. And this works for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday theme, hosted by Nick Haslam, who wants to hear about horror stories. I don’t write about LobsterPot client horror stories, so I’m writing about a situation that a fellow MVP friend asked me about recently instead. The best thing to do is to grab a recent backup of the ReportServer database, restore it somewhere, and figure out what’s changed. But of course, this isn’t always possible. And it’s much nicer to help someone with this kind of thing, rather than to be trying to fix it yourself when you’ve just deleted the wrong data source. Unfortunately, it lets you delete data sources, without trying to scream that the data source is shared across over 400 reports in over 100 folders, as was the case for my friend’s colleague. So, suddenly there’s a big problem – lots of reports are failing, and the time to turn it around is small. You probably know which data source has been deleted, but getting the shared data source back isn’t the hard part (that’s just a connection string really). The nasty bit is all the re-mapping, to get those 400 reports working again. I know from exploring this kind of stuff in the past that the ReportServer database (using its default name) has a table called dbo.Catalog to represent the catalogue, and that Reports are stored here. However, the information about what data sources these deployed reports are configured to use is stored in a different table, dbo.DataSource. You could be forgiven for thinking that shared data sources would live in this table, but they don’t – they’re catalogue items just like the reports. Let’s have a look at the structure of these two tables (although if you’re reading this because you have a disaster, feel free to skim past). Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be a Books Online page for this information, sorry about that. I’m also not going to look at all the columns, just ones that I find interesting enough to mention, and that are related to the problem at hand. These fields are consistent all the way through to SQL Server 2012 – there doesn’t seem to have been any changes here for quite a while. dbo.Catalog The Primary Key is ItemID. It’s a uniqueidentifier. I’m not going to comment any more on that. A minor nice point about using GUIDs in unfamiliar databases is that you can more easily figure out what’s what. But foreign keys are for that too… Path, Name and ParentID tell you where in the folder structure the item lives. Path isn’t actually required – you could’ve done recursive queries to get there. But as that would be quite painful, I’m more than happy for the Path column to be there. Path contains the Name as well, incidentally. Type tells you what kind of item it is. Some examples are 1 for a folder and 2 a report. 4 is linked reports, 5 is a data source, 6 is a report model. I forget the others for now (but feel free to put a comment giving the full list if you know it). Content is an image field, remembering that image doesn’t necessarily store images – these days we’d rather use varbinary(max), but even in SQL Server 2012, this field is still image. It stores the actual item definition in binary form, whether it’s actually an image, a report, whatever. LinkSourceID is used for Linked Reports, and has a self-referencing foreign key (allowing NULL, of course) back to ItemID. Parameter is an ntext field containing XML for the parameters of the report. Not sure why this couldn’t be a separate table, but I guess that’s just the way it goes. This field gets changed when the default parameters get changed in Report Manager. There is nothing in dbo.Catalog that describes the actual data sources that the report uses. The default data sources would be part of the Content field, as they are defined in the RDL, but when you deploy reports, you typically choose to NOT replace the data sources. Anyway, they’re not in this table. Maybe it was already considered a bit wide to throw in another ntext field, I’m not sure. They’re in dbo.DataSource instead. dbo.DataSource The Primary key is DSID. Yes it’s a uniqueidentifier... ItemID is a foreign key reference back to dbo.Catalog Fields such as ConnectionString, Prompt, UserName and Password do what they say on the tin, storing information about how to connect to the particular source in question. Link is a uniqueidentifier, which refers back to dbo.Catalog. This is used when a data source within a report refers back to a shared data source, rather than embedding the connection information itself. You’d think this should be enforced by foreign key, but it’s not. It does allow NULLs though. Flags this is an int, and I’ll come back to this. When a Data Source gets deleted out of dbo.Catalog, you might assume that it would be disallowed if there are references to it from dbo.DataSource. Well, you’d be wrong. And not because of the lack of a foreign key either. Deleting anything from the catalogue is done by calling a stored procedure called dbo.DeleteObject. You can look at the definition in there – it feels very much like the kind of Delete stored procedures that many people write, the kind of thing that means they don’t need to worry about allowing cascading deletes with foreign keys – because the stored procedure does the lot. Except that it doesn’t quite do that. If it deleted everything on a cascading delete, we’d’ve lost all the data sources as configured in dbo.DataSource, and that would be bad. This is fine if the ItemID from dbo.DataSource hooks in – if the report is being deleted. But if a shared data source is being deleted, you don’t want to lose the existence of the data source from the report. So it sets it to NULL, and it marks it as invalid. We see this code in that stored procedure. UPDATE [DataSource]    SET       [Flags] = [Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD, -- broken link       [Link] = NULL FROM    [Catalog] AS C    INNER JOIN [DataSource] AS DS ON C.[ItemID] = DS.[Link] WHERE    (C.Path = @Path OR C.Path LIKE @Prefix ESCAPE '*') Unfortunately there’s no semi-colon on the end (but I’d rather they fix the ntext and image types first), and don’t get me started about using the table name in the UPDATE clause (it should use the alias DS). But there is a nice comment about what’s going on with the Flags field. What I’d LIKE it to do would be to set the connection information to a report-embedded copy of the connection information that’s in the shared data source, the one that’s about to be deleted. I understand that this would cause someone to lose the benefit of having the data sources configured in a central point, but I’d say that’s probably still slightly better than LOSING THE INFORMATION COMPLETELY. Sorry, rant over. I should log a Connect item – I’ll put that on my todo list. So it sets the Link field to NULL, and marks the Flags to tell you they’re broken. So this is your clue to fixing it. A bitwise AND with 0x7FFFFFFD is basically stripping out the ‘2’ bit from a number. So numbers like 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, etc, whose binary representation ends in either 11 or 10 get turned into 0, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, etc. We can test for it using a WHERE clause that matches the SET clause we’ve just used. I’d also recommend checking for Link being NULL and also having no ConnectionString. And join back to dbo.Catalog to get the path (including the name) of broken reports are – in case you get a surprise from a different data source being broken in the past. SELECT c.Path, ds.Name FROM dbo.[DataSource] AS ds JOIN dbo.[Catalog] AS c ON c.ItemID = ds.ItemID WHERE ds.[Flags] = ds.[Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD AND ds.[Link] IS NULL AND ds.[ConnectionString] IS NULL; When I just ran this on my own machine, having deleted a data source to check my code, I noticed a Report Model in the list as well – so if you had thought it was just going to be reports that were broken, you’d be forgetting something. So to fix those reports, get your new data source created in the catalogue, and then find its ItemID by querying Catalog, using Path and Name to find it. And then use this value to fix them up. To fix the Flags field, just add 2. I prefer to use bitwise OR which should do the same. Use the OUTPUT clause to get a copy of the DSIDs of the ones you’re changing, just in case you need to revert something later after testing (doing it all in a transaction won’t help, because you’ll just lock out the table, stopping you from testing anything). UPDATE ds SET [Flags] = [Flags] | 2, [Link] = '3AE31CBA-BDB4-4FD1-94F4-580B7FAB939D' /*Insert your own GUID*/ OUTPUT deleted.Name, deleted.DSID, deleted.ItemID, deleted.Flags FROM dbo.[DataSource] AS ds JOIN dbo.[Catalog] AS c ON c.ItemID = ds.ItemID WHERE ds.[Flags] = ds.[Flags] & 0x7FFFFFFD AND ds.[Link] IS NULL AND ds.[ConnectionString] IS NULL; But please be careful. Your mileage may vary. And there’s no reason why 400-odd broken reports needs to be quite the nightmare that it could be. Really, it should be less than five minutes. @rob_farley

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• Using LINQ to Twitter OAuth with Windows 8

  - by Joe Mayo

  In previous posts, I explained how to use LINQ to Twitter with Windows 8, but the example was a Twitter Search, which didn’t require authentication. Much of the Twitter API requires authentication, so this post will explain how you can perform OAuth authentication with LINQ to Twitter in a Windows 8 Metro-style application. Getting Started I have earlier posts on how to create a Windows 8 app and add pages, so I’ll assume it isn’t necessary to repeat here. One difference is that I’m using Visual Studio 2012 RC and some of the terminology and/or library code might be slightly different.  Here are steps to get started: Create a new Windows metro style app, selecting the Blank App project template. Create a new Basic Page and name it OAuth.xaml.  Note: You’ll receive a prompt window for adding files and you should click Yes because those files are necessary for this demo. Add a new Basic Page named TweetPage.xaml. Open App.xaml.cs and change !rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage)) to !rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(TweetPage)). Now that the project is set up you’ll see the reason why authentication is required by setting up the TweetPage. Setting Up to Tweet a Status In this section, I’ll show you how to set up the XAML and code-behind for a tweet.  The tweet logic will check to see if the user is authenticated before performing the tweet. To tweet, I put a TextBox and Button on the XAML page. The following code omits most of the page, concentrating primarily on the elements of interest in this post: <StackPanel Grid.Row="1"> <TextBox Name="TweetTextBox" Margin="15" /> <Button Name="TweetButton" Content="Tweet" Click="TweetButton_Click" Margin="15,0" /> </StackPanel> Given the UI above, the user types the message they want to tweet, and taps Tweet. This invokes TweetButton_Click, which checks to see if the user is authenticated.  If the user is not authenticated, the app navigates to the OAuth page.  If they are authenticated, LINQ to Twitter does an UpdateStatus to post the user’s tweet.  Here’s the TweetButton_Click implementation: void TweetButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { PinAuthorizer auth = null; if (SuspensionManager.SessionState.ContainsKey("Authorizer")) { auth = SuspensionManager.SessionState["Authorizer"] as PinAuthorizer; } if (auth == null || !auth.IsAuthorized) { Frame.Navigate(typeof(OAuthPage)); return; } var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); Status tweet = twitterCtx.UpdateStatus(TweetTextBox.Text); new MessageDialog(tweet.Text, "Successful Tweet").ShowAsync(); } For authentication, this app uses PinAuthorizer, one of several authorizers available in the LINQ to Twitter library. I’ll explain how PinAuthorizer works in the next section. What’s important here is that LINQ to Twitter needs an authorizer to post a Tweet. The code above checks to see if a valid authorizer is available. To do this, it uses the SuspensionManager class, which is part of the code generated earlier when creating OAuthPage.xaml. The SessionState property is a Dictionary<string, object> and I’m using the Authorizer key to store the PinAuthorizer.  If the user previously authorized during this session, the code reads the PinAuthorizer instance from SessionState and assigns it to the auth variable. If the user is authorized, auth would not be null and IsAuthorized would be true. Otherwise, the app navigates the user to OAuthPage.xaml, which I’ll discuss in more depth in the next section. When the user is authorized, the code passes the authorizer, auth, to the TwitterContext constructor. LINQ to Twitter uses the auth instance to build OAuth signatures for each interaction with Twitter.  You no longer need to write any more code to make this happen. The code above accepts the tweet just posted in the Status instance, tweet, and displays a message with the text to confirm success to the user. You can pull the PinAuthorizer instance from SessionState, instantiate your TwitterContext, and use it as you need. Just remember to make sure you have a valid authorizer, like the code above. As shown earlier, the code navigates to OAuthPage.xaml when a valid authorizer isn’t available. The next section shows how to perform the authorization upon arrival at OAuthPage.xaml. Doing the OAuth Dance This section shows how to authenticate with LINQ to Twitter’s built-in OAuth support. From the user perspective, they must be navigated to the Twitter authentication page, add credentials, be navigated to a Pin number page, and then enter that Pin in the Windows 8 application. The following XAML shows the relevant elements that the user will interact with during this process. <StackPanel Grid.Row="2"> <WebView x:Name="OAuthWebBrowser" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="400" Margin="15" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="700" /> <TextBlock Text="Please perform OAuth process (above), enter Pin (below) when ready, and tap Authenticate:" Margin="15,15,15,5" /> <TextBox Name="PinTextBox" Margin="15,0,15,15" Width="432" HorizontalAlignment="Left" IsEnabled="False" /> <Button Name="AuthenticatePinButton" Content="Authenticate" Margin="15" IsEnabled="False" Click="AuthenticatePinButton_Click" /> </StackPanel> The WebView in the code above is what allows the user to see the Twitter authentication page. The TextBox is for entering the Pin, and the Button invokes code that will take the Pin and allow LINQ to Twitter to complete the authentication process. As you can see, there are several steps to OAuth authentication, but LINQ to Twitter tries to minimize the amount of code you have to write. The two important parts of the code to make this happen are the part that starts the authentication process and the part that completes the authentication process. The following code, from OAuthPage.xaml.cs, shows a couple events that are instrumental in making this process happen: public OAuthPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); this.Loaded += OAuthPage_Loaded; OAuthWebBrowser.LoadCompleted += OAuthWebBrowser_LoadCompleted; } The OAuthWebBrowser_LoadCompleted event handler enables UI controls when the browser is done loading – notice that the TextBox and Button in the previous XAML have their IsEnabled attributes set to False. When the Page.Loaded event is invoked, the OAuthPage_Loaded handler starts the OAuth process, shown here: void OAuthPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { auth = new PinAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" }, UseCompression = true, GoToTwitterAuthorization = pageLink => Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, () => OAuthWebBrowser.Navigate(new Uri(pageLink, UriKind.Absolute))) }; auth.BeginAuthorize(resp => Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, () => { switch (resp.Status) { case TwitterErrorStatus.Success: break; case TwitterErrorStatus.RequestProcessingException: case TwitterErrorStatus.TwitterApiError: new MessageDialog(resp.Error.ToString(), resp.Message).ShowAsync(); break; } })); } The PinAuthorizer, auth, a field of this class instantiated in the code above, assigns keys to the Credentials property. These are credentials that come from registering an application with Twitter, explained in the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications. Notice how I use Dispatcher.RunAsync to marshal the web browser navigation back onto the UI thread. Internally, LINQ to Twitter invokes the lambda expression assigned to GoToTwitterAuthorization when starting the OAuth process.  In this case, we want the WebView control to navigate to the Twitter authentication page, which is defined with a default URL in LINQ to Twitter and passed to the GoToTwitterAuthorization lambda as pageLink. Then you need to start the authorization process by calling BeginAuthorize. This starts the OAuth dance, running asynchronously.  LINQ to Twitter invokes the callback assigned to the BeginAuthorize parameter, allowing you to take whatever action you need, based on the Status of the response, resp. As mentioned earlier, this is where the user performs the authentication process, enters the Pin, and clicks authenticate. The handler for authenticate completes the process and saves the authorizer for subsequent use by the application, as shown below: void AuthenticatePinButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { auth.CompleteAuthorize( PinTextBox.Text, completeResp => Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, () => { switch (completeResp.Status) { case TwitterErrorStatus.Success: SuspensionManager.SessionState["Authorizer"] = auth; Frame.Navigate(typeof(TweetPage)); break; case TwitterErrorStatus.RequestProcessingException: case TwitterErrorStatus.TwitterApiError: new MessageDialog(completeResp.Error.ToString(), completeResp.Message).ShowAsync(); break; } })); } The PinAuthorizer CompleteAuthorize method takes two parameters: Pin and callback. The Pin is from what the user entered in the TextBox prior to clicking the Authenticate button that invoked this method. The callback handles the response from completing the OAuth process. The completeResp holds information about the results of the operation, indicated by a Status property of type TwitterErrorStatus. On success, the code assigns auth to SessionState. You might remember SessionState from the previous description of TweetPage – this is where the valid authorizer comes from. After saving the authorizer, the code navigates the user back to TweetPage, where they can type in a message, click the Tweet button, and observe that they have successfully tweeted. Summary You’ve seen how to get started with using LINQ to Twitter in a Metro-style application. The generated code contained a SuspensionManager class with way to manage information across multiple pages via its SessionState property. You also saw how LINQ to Twitter performs authorization in two steps of starting the process and completing the process when the user provides a Pin number. Remember to marshal callback thread back onto the UI – you saw earlier how to use Dispatcher.RunAsync to accomplish this. There were a few steps in the process, but LINQ to Twitter did minimize the amount of code you needed to write to make it happen. You can download the MetroOAuthDemo.zip sample on the LINQ to Twitter Samples Page.   @JoeMayo

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• Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

  - by Jeff

  (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, November 23, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, November 23, 2012Popular ReleasesLiberty: v3.4.3.0 Release 23rd November 2012: Change Log -Added -H4 A dialog which gives further instructions when attempting to open a "Halo 4 Data" file -H4 Added a short note to the weapon editor stating that dropping your weapons will cap their ammo -Reach Edit the world's gravity -Reach Fine invincibility controls in the object editor -Reach Edit object velocity -Reach Change the teams of AI bipeds and vehicles -Reach Enable/disable fall damage on the biped editor screen -Reach Make AIs deaf and/or blind in the objec...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.11.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.11.0. Whats new50 bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesNone since 4.10.0 NoteIf you need Courier use the release candidate (as of build 26). The code editor has been greatly improved, but is sometimes problematic in Internet Explorer 9 and lower. Previously it was just disabled for IE and we recommend you disable it in umbracoSettings.config (scriptDisableEditor) if y...VidCoder: 1.4.8 Beta: Fixed encode failures when including chapter markers (Regression in 1.4.7).Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.3: Fixed supported files list on open dialog (added .pls and .m3u) Impulse Media Player splash message (can be disabled anyway)LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK 2.0 alpha: This is an early preview of the LiveChat Starter Kit version 2 using SignalR as the core communication mechanism. To add LCSK to an existing ASP.NET app do the following: Copy the LCSK folder to your ASP.NET project Install SignalR form your package manager window Install-Package SignalR Include the following javascript tags where you want the visitor to see the chat box: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.signalR-0.5.3.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/signalr/hubs" typ...Impulse Media Player: Impulse Media Player 1.0.0.0: Impulse Media Player is born !!!patterns & practices - HiloJS: a Windows Store app using JavaScript: Source with Unit Tests: This source is also available under the _Source Code tab. See the folder Hilo.Specifications.Rackspace Cloud Files Manager: Rackspace Cloud Files Manager v1: Rackspace Cloud Files Manager v1MJPEG Decoder: MJPEG Decoder v1.2: Added support for WinRT (ARM and x86/x64) Added support for Windows Phone 8 Added Error event to catch connection exceptions (thanks to Mirek Czerwinski for the idea) Note that the XNA and WP7 assemblies remain at v1.1 and do not contain this addition Samples for WinRT in C#/XAML and HTML/JavaScript (in source code repository) Sample for Windows Phone 8 in C#/XAML (in source code repository)ServiceMon - Extensible Real-time, Service Monitoring Utility for Windows: ServiceMon Release 1.2.0.58: Auto-uploaded from build serverImapX 2: ImapX 2.0.0.6: An updated release of the ImapX 2 library, containing many bugfixes for both, the library and the sample application.WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availablePicturethrill: Version 2.11.20.0: Fixed up Bing image provider on Windows 8Excel AddIn to reset the last worksheet cell: XSFormatCleaner.xla: Modified the commandbar code to use CommandBar IDs instead of English names.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 11: New feature - Added ITraceWriter, MemoryTraceWriter, DiagnosticsTraceWriter New feature - Added StringEscapeHandling with options to escape HTML and non-ASCII characters New feature - Added non-generic JToken.ToObject methods New feature - Deserialize ISet<T> properties as HashSet<T> New feature - Added implicit conversions for Uri, TimeSpan, Guid New feature - Missing byte, char, Guid, TimeSpan and Uri explicit conversion operators added to JToken New feature - Special case...EntitiesToDTOs - Entity Framework DTO Generator: EntitiesToDTOs.v3.0: DTOs and Assemblers can be generated inside project folders! Choose the types you want to generate! Support for Visual Studio 2012 !!! Support for new Entity Framework EDMX (format used by VS2012) ! Support for Enum Types! Optional automatic check for updates! Added the following methods to Assemblers! IEnumerable<DTO>.ToEntities() : ICollection<Entity> IEnumerable<Entity>.ToDTOs() : ICollection<DTO> Indicate class identifier for DTOs and Assemblers! Cleaner Assemblers code....mojoPortal: 2.3.9.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2394-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...DotNetNuke® Store: 03.01.07: What's New in this release? IMPORTANT: this version requires DotNetNuke 04.06.02 or higher! DO NOT REPORT BUGS HERE IN THE ISSUE TRACKER, INSTEAD USE THE DotNetNuke Store Forum! Bugs corrected: - Replaced some hard coded references to the default address provider classes by the corresponding interfaces to allow the creation of another address provider with a different name. New Features: - Added the 'pickup' delivery option at checkout. - Added the 'no delivery' option in the Store Admin ...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.0: +2012-11-18 v3.2.0 -?????????????????SelectedValueArray????????（◇?◆:）。 -???????????????????RecoverPropertiesFromJObject????（〓?〓、????、??、Vian_Pan）。 -????????????，?????????????，???SelectedValueArray???????（sam.chang）。 -??Alert.Show???????????（swtseaman）。 -???????????????，??Icon??IconUrl????（swtseaman）。 -?????????TimePicker（??）。 -?????????，??/res.axd?css=blue.css&v=1。 -????????，?????????????，???????。 -????MenuCheckBox（???????）。 -?RadioButton??AutoPostBack??。 -???????FCKEditor?????????...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.2: Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.2: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/bugnet-1-2-has-been-released Please do not post questions as reviews. Questions should be posted in the Discussions tab, where they will usually get promptly responded to. If you post a question as a review, you will pollute the rating, and you won't get an answer.New Projects1123case1325: Face everything you enccounting bravely and optimistically1123case1327: blessbestgifts4us1: Gift registry v2CPE-in: A LinkedIn like for CPE Lyon engineering schoolcsanid_cs_db: mvc db operatedurrrguffy: Example project in C# This project has a wide scope and will cover the basics of the dot net framework as it applies to office environment (including sharepoint). At the end of this project, you will be able to call yourself a sharepoint developer. Epic Life: Achievements: An attempt to adapt the achievement system from games to the real life. Something between a to-do manager and a "done-in-this-year"-list. NOT A TO-DO MANAGERGeoVIP: ??????? ??? ?????????????? ?????????? ??????? ???????? ????? ?????????GTcfla KM: ??????????????????????????.??????Oracle????Java????Harlinn Windows: A C++ library targeting Windows 7 and aboveIdentityModel.Tools: Tools to support WIF with .NET 4.5jean1123-1326: rLOLSimulator: AMacroprocesos: Gestión de los procesos existentes en una empresa, así como del control de su ocumentaciónMakeQuestionaryProject: Projeto de geração de questionários dinâmicosMrCMS - ASP.NET MVC Open source CMS: MrCMS is an open source ASP.NET MVC content management system. MyWebApplication: WebApplication Next Code Generator: Next.CodeGen project is a simple application generator that offers a command line interface in order to help developers create WPF applications.Orchard backend additions: Proof of concept for combining translated contenitems and version in the backend content item listProgrammer's Color Picker for C# and WPF: Wybór koloru dla programisty C# i WPFProjet Flux RSS EPSI W: It's a project for windows 8 applicationSpander: Spander ist ein Open-Source VOS (Virtual Operating System).SQLServer Database Browser: It's a simple SQLServer Database Browser for simple query .TemplateCodeGenerator: ????????。???????。Vector Rumble WP7: navmesh navigation demo running on wp7VSDBM - Viral Sequence Data Base Manager: VSDBM - Viral Sequence Database ManagerWebApp2013: Please develop HTML5 mobile web apps rater than native mobile apps! This project is used in my training as MCT for microsoft certified WebApp Developer 70-480.Windows Phone Streaming Media: HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) for Windows Phone.WixDeploymentExtension: Extension support Biztalk Application deployment, Business Activity Monitor (BAM) Deployment and VSDBCMD based SQL deployment and SQLCMD script execution.

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• REST to Objects in C#

  RESTful interfaces for web services are all the rage for many Web 2.0 sites.  If you want to consume these in a very simple fashion, LINQ to XML can do the job pretty easily in C#.  If you go searching for help on this, youll find a lot of incomplete solutions and fairly large toolkits and frameworks (guess how I know this) this quick article is meant to be a no fluff just stuff approach to making this work. POCO Objects Lets assume you have a Model that you want to suck data into from a RESTful web service.  Ideally this is a Plain Old CLR Object, meaning it isnt infected with any persistence or serialization goop.  It might look something like this: public class Entry { public int Id; public int UserId; public DateTime Date; public float Hours; public string Notes; public bool Billable;   public override string ToString() { return String.Format("[{0}] User: {1} Date: {2} Hours: {3} Notes: {4} Billable {5}", Id, UserId, Date, Hours, Notes, Billable); } } Not that this isnt a completely trivial object.  Lets look at the API for the service.  RESTful HTTP Service In this case, its TickSpots API, with the following sample output: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <entries type="array"> <entry> <id type="integer">24</id> <task_id type="integer">14</task_id> <user_id type="integer">3</user_id> <date type="date">2008-03-08</date> <hours type="float">1.00</hours> <notes>Had trouble with tribbles.</notes> <billable>true</billable> # Billable is an attribute inherited from the task <billed>true</billed> # Billed is an attribute to track whether the entry has been invoiced <created_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</created_at> <updated_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</updated_at> # The following attributes are derived and provided for informational purposes: <user_email>[email protected]</user_email> <task_name>Remove converter assembly</task_name> <sum_hours type="float">2.00</sum_hours> <budget type="float">10.00</budget> <project_name>Realign dilithium crystals</project_name> <client_name>Starfleet Command</client_name> </entry> </entries> Im assuming in this case that I dont necessarily care about all of the data fields the service is returning I just need some of them for my applications purposes.  Thus, you can see there are more elements in the <entry> XML than I have in my Entry class. Get The XML with C# The next step is to get the XML.  The following snippet does the heavy lifting once you pass it the appropriate URL: protected XElement GetResponse(string uri) { var request = WebRequest.Create(uri) as HttpWebRequest; request.UserAgent = ".NET Sample"; request.KeepAlive = false;   request.Timeout = 15 * 1000;   var response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;   if (request.HaveResponse == true && response != null) { var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()); return XElement.Parse(reader.ReadToEnd()); } throw new Exception("Error fetching data."); } This is adapted from the Yahoo Developer article on Web Service REST calls.  Once you have the XML, the last step is to get the data back as your POCO. Use LINQ-To-XML to Deserialize POCOs from XML This is done via the following code: public IEnumerable<Entry> List(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) { string additionalParameters = String.Format("start_date={0}&end_date={1}", startDate.ToShortDateString(), endDate.ToShortDateString()); string uri = BuildUrl("entries", additionalParameters);   XElement elements = GetResponse(uri);   var entries = from e in elements.Elements() where e.Name.LocalName == "entry" select new Entry { Id = int.Parse(e.Element("id").Value), UserId = int.Parse(e.Element("user_id").Value), Date = DateTime.Parse(e.Element("date").Value), Hours = float.Parse(e.Element("hours").Value), Notes = e.Element("notes").Value, Billable = bool.Parse(e.Element("billable").Value) }; return entries; }   For completeness, heres the BuildUrl method for my TickSpot API wrapper: // Change these to your settings protected const string projectDomain = "DOMAIN.tickspot.com"; private const string authParams = "[email protected]&password=MyTickSpotPassword";   protected string BuildUrl(string apiMethod, string additionalParams) { if (projectDomain.Contains("DOMAIN")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your domain in ProjectRepository.cs."); } if (authParams.Contains("MyTickSpotPassword")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your email and password in ProjectRepository.cs."); } return string.Format("https://{0}/api/{1}?{2}&{3}", projectDomain, apiMethod, authParams, additionalParams); } Thats it!  Now go forth and consume XML and map it to classes you actually want to work with.  Have fun! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Auto-hydrate your objects with ADO.NET

  - by Jake Rutherford

  Recently while writing the monotonous code for pulling data out of a DataReader to hydrate some objects in an application I suddenly wondered "is this really necessary?" You've probably asked yourself the same question, and many of you have: - Used a code generator - Used a ORM such as Entity Framework - Wrote the code anyway because you like busy work     In most of the cases I've dealt with when making a call to a stored procedure the column names match up with the properties of the object I am hydrating. Sure that isn't always the case, but most of the time it's 1 to 1 mapping.  Given that fact I whipped up the following method of hydrating my objects without having write all of the code. First I'll show the code, and then explain what it is doing.      /// <summary>     /// Abstract base class for all Shared objects.     /// </summary>     /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>     [Serializable, DataContract(Name = "{0}SharedBase")]     public abstract class SharedBase<T> where T : SharedBase<T>     {         private static List<PropertyInfo> cachedProperties;         /// <summary>         /// Hydrates derived class with values from record.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="dataRecord"></param>         /// <param name="instance"></param>         public static void Hydrate(IDataRecord dataRecord, T instance)         {             var instanceType = instance.GetType();                         //Caching properties to avoid repeated calls to GetProperties.             //Noticable performance gains when processing same types repeatedly.             if (cachedProperties == null)             {                 cachedProperties = instanceType.GetProperties().ToList();             }                         foreach (var property in cachedProperties)             {                 if (!dataRecord.ColumnExists(property.Name)) continue;                 var ordinal = dataRecord.GetOrdinal(property.Name);                 var isNullable = property.PropertyType.IsGenericType &&                                  property.PropertyType.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof (Nullable<>);                 var isNull = dataRecord.IsDBNull(ordinal);                 var propertyType = property.PropertyType;                 if (isNullable)                 {                     if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyType.FullName))                     {                         var nullableType = Type.GetType(propertyType.FullName);                         propertyType = nullableType != null ? nullableType.GetGenericArguments()[0] : propertyType;                     }                 }                 switch (Type.GetTypeCode(propertyType))                 {                     case TypeCode.Int32:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (int?) null : dataRecord.GetInt32(ordinal), null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.Double:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (double?) null : dataRecord.GetDouble(ordinal),                                           null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.Boolean:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (bool?) null : dataRecord.GetBoolean(ordinal),                                           null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.String:                         property.SetValue(instance, (isNullable && isNull) ? null : isNull ? null : dataRecord.GetString(ordinal),                                           null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.Int16:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (int?) null : dataRecord.GetInt16(ordinal), null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.DateTime:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull)                                               ? (DateTime?) null                                               : dataRecord.GetDateTime(ordinal), null);                         break;                 }             }         }     }   Here is a class which utilizes the above: [Serializable] [DataContract] public class foo : SharedBase<foo> {     [DataMember]     public int? ID { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Name { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Description { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Subject { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Body { get; set; }            public foo(IDataRecord record)     {         Hydrate(record, this);                }     public foo() {} }   Explanation: - Class foo inherits from SharedBase specifying itself as the type. (NOTE SharedBase is abstract here in the event we want to provide additional methods which could be overridden by the instance class) public class foo : SharedBase<foo> - One of the foo class constructors accepts a data record which then calls the Hydrate method on SharedBase passing in the record and itself. public foo(IDataRecord record) {      Hydrate(record, this); } - Hydrate method on SharedBase will use reflection on the object passed in to determine its properties. At the same time, it will effectively cache these properties to avoid repeated expensive reflection calls public static void Hydrate(IDataRecord dataRecord, T instance) {      var instanceType = instance.GetType();      //Caching properties to avoid repeated calls to GetProperties.      //Noticable performance gains when processing same types repeatedly.      if (cachedProperties == null)      {           cachedProperties = instanceType.GetProperties().ToList();      } . . . - Hydrate method on SharedBase will iterate each property on the object and determine if a column with matching name exists in data record foreach (var property in cachedProperties) {      if (!dataRecord.ColumnExists(property.Name)) continue;      var ordinal = dataRecord.GetOrdinal(property.Name); . . . NOTE: ColumnExists is an extension method I put on IDataRecord which I’ll include at the end of this post. - Hydrate method will determine if the property is nullable and whether the value in the corresponding column of the data record has a null value var isNullable = property.PropertyType.IsGenericType && property.PropertyType.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof (Nullable<>); var isNull = dataRecord.IsDBNull(ordinal); var propertyType = property.PropertyType; . . .  - If Hydrate method determines the property is nullable it will determine the underlying type and set propertyType accordingly - Hydrate method will set the value of the property based upon the propertyType   That’s it!!!   The magic here is in a few places. First, you may have noticed the following: public abstract class SharedBase<T> where T : SharedBase<T> This says that SharedBase can be created with any type and that for each type it will have it’s own instance. This is important because of the static members within SharedBase. We want this behavior because we are caching the properties for each type. If we did not handle things in this way only 1 type could be cached at a time, or, we’d need to create a collection that allows us to cache the properties for each type = not very elegant.   Second, in the constructor for foo you may have noticed this (literally): public foo(IDataRecord record) {      Hydrate(record, this); } I wanted the code for auto-hydrating to be as simple as possible. At first I wasn’t quite sure how I could call Hydrate on SharedBase within an instance of the class and pass in the instance itself. Fortunately simply passing in “this” does the trick. I wasn’t sure it would work until I tried it out, and fortunately it did.   So, to actually use this feature when utilizing ADO.NET you’d do something like the following:        public List<foo> GetFoo(int? fooId)         {             List<foo> fooList;             const string uspName = "usp_GetFoo";             using (var conn = new SqlConnection(_dbConnection))             using (var cmd = new SqlCommand(uspName, conn))             {                 cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;                 cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@FooID", SqlDbType.Int)                                        {Direction = ParameterDirection.Input, Value = fooId});                 conn.Open();                 using (var dr = cmd.ExecuteReader())                 {                     fooList= (from row in dr.Cast<DbDataRecord>()                                             select                                                 new foo(row)                                            ).ToList();                 }             }             return fooList;         }   Nice! Instead of having line after line manually assigning values from data record to an object you simply create a new instance and pass in the data record. Note that there are certainly instances where columns returned from stored procedure do not always match up with property names. In this scenario you can still use the above method and simply do your manual assignments afterward.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 2): Dependencies

  - by Simon Cooper

  In developing Schema Compare for Oracle, one of the issues we came across was the size of the databases. As detailed in my last blog post, we had to allow schema pre-filtering due to the number of objects in a standard Oracle database. Unfortunately, this leads to some quite tricky situations regarding object dependencies. This post explains how we deal with these dependencies. 1. Cross-schema dependencies Say, in the following database, you're populating SchemaA, and synchronizing SchemaA.Table1: SOURCE   TARGET CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1(Col1));   CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100) REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1(Col1)); CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER PRIMARY KEY);   CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100) PRIMARY KEY); We need to do a rebuild of SchemaA.Table1 to change Col1 from a VARCHAR2(100) to a NUMBER. This consists of: Creating a table with the new schema Inserting data from the old table to the new table, with appropriate conversion functions (in this case, TO_NUMBER) Dropping the old table Rename new table to same name as old table Unfortunately, in this situation, the rebuild will fail at step 1, as we're trying to create a NUMBER column with a foreign key reference to a VARCHAR2(100) column. As we're only populating SchemaA, the naive implementation of the object population prefiltering (sticking a WHERE owner = 'SCHEMAA' on all the data dictionary queries) will generate an incorrect sync script. What we actually have to do is: Drop foreign key constraint on SchemaA.Table1 Rebuild SchemaB.Table1 Rebuild SchemaA.Table1, adding the foreign key constraint to the new table This means that in order to generate a correct synchronization script for SchemaA.Table1 we have to know what SchemaB.Table1 is, and that it also needs to be rebuilt to successfully rebuild SchemaA.Table1. SchemaB isn't the schema that the user wants to synchronize, but we still have to load the table and column information for SchemaB.Table1 the same way as any table in SchemaA. Fortunately, Oracle provides (mostly) complete dependency information in the dictionary views. Before we actually read the information on all the tables and columns in the database, we can get dependency information on all the objects that are either pointed at by objects in the schemas we’re populating, or point to objects in the schemas we’re populating (think about what would happen if SchemaB was being explicitly populated instead), with a suitable query on all_constraints (for foreign key relationships) and all_dependencies (for most other types of dependencies eg a function using another function). The extra objects found can then be included in the actual object population, and the sync wizard then has enough information to figure out the right thing to do when we get to actually synchronize the objects. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough. 2. Dependency chains The solution above will only get the immediate dependencies of objects in populated schemas. What if there’s a chain of dependencies? A.tbl1 -> B.tbl1 -> C.tbl1 -> D.tbl1 If we’re only populating SchemaA, the implementation above will only include B.tbl1 in the dependent objects list, whereas we might need to know about C.tbl1 and D.tbl1 as well, in order to ensure a modification on A.tbl1 can succeed. What we actually need is a graph traversal on the dependency graph that all_dependencies represents. Fortunately, we don’t have to read all the database dependency information from the server and run the graph traversal on the client computer, as Oracle provides a method of doing this in SQL – CONNECT BY. So, we can put all the dependencies we want to include together in big bag with UNION ALL, then run a SELECT ... CONNECT BY on it, starting with objects in the schema we’re populating. We should end up with all the objects that might be affected by modifications in the initial schema we’re populating. Good solution? Well, no. For one thing, it’s sloooooow. all_dependencies, on my test databases, has got over 110,000 rows in it, and the entire query, for which Oracle was creating a temporary table to hold the big bag of graph edges, was often taking upwards of two minutes. This is too long, and would only get worse for large databases. But it had some more fundamental problems than just performance. 3. Comparison dependencies Consider the following schema: SOURCE   TARGET CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1(col1));   CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER PRIMARY KEY);   CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); What will happen if we used the dependency algorithm above on the source & target database? Well, SchemaA.Table1 has a foreign key reference to SchemaB.Table1, so that will be included in the source database population. On the target, SchemaA.Table1 has no such reference. Therefore SchemaB.Table1 will not be included in the target database population. In the resulting comparison of the two objects models, what you will end up with is: SOURCE  TARGET SchemaA.Table1 -> SchemaA.Table1 SchemaB.Table1 -> (no object exists) When this comparison is synchronized, we will see that SchemaB.Table1 does not exist, so we will try the following sequence of actions: Create SchemaB.Table1 Rebuild SchemaA.Table1, with foreign key to SchemaB.Table1 Oops. Because the dependencies are only followed within a single database, we’ve tried to create an object that already exists. To fix this we can include any objects found as dependencies in the source or target databases in the object population of both databases. SchemaB.Table1 will then be included in the target database population, and we won’t try and create objects that already exist. All good? Well, consider the following schema (again, only explicitly populating SchemaA, and synchronizing SchemaA.Table1): SOURCE   TARGET CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1(col1));   CREATE TABLE SchemaA.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100)); CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER PRIMARY KEY);   CREATE TABLE SchemaB.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100) PRIMARY KEY); CREATE TABLE SchemaC.Table1 ( Col1 NUMBER);   CREATE TABLE SchemaC.Table1 ( Col1 VARCHAR2(100) REFERENCES SchemaB.Table1); Although we’re now including SchemaB.Table1 on both sides of the comparison, there’s a third table (SchemaC.Table1) that we don’t know about that will cause the rebuild of SchemaB.Table1 to fail if we try and synchronize SchemaA.Table1. That’s because we’re only running the dependency query on the schemas we’re explicitly populating; to solve this issue, we would have to run the dependency query again, but this time starting the graph traversal from the objects found in the other database. Furthermore, this dependency chain could be arbitrarily extended.This leads us to the following algorithm for finding all the dependencies of a comparison: Find initial dependencies of schemas the user has selected to compare on the source and target Include these objects in both the source and target object populations Run the dependency query on the source, starting with the objects found as dependents on the target, and vice versa Repeat 2 & 3 until no more objects are found For the schema above, this will result in the following sequence of actions: Find initial dependenciesSchemaA.Table1 -> SchemaB.Table1 found on sourceNo objects found on target Include objects in both source and targetSchemaB.Table1 included in source and target Run dependency query, starting with found objectsNo objects to start with on sourceSchemaB.Table1 -> SchemaC.Table1 found on target Include objects in both source and targetSchemaC.Table1 included in source and target Run dependency query on found objectsNo objects found in sourceNo objects to start with in target Stop This will ensure that we include all the necessary objects to make any synchronization work. However, there is still the issue of query performance; the CONNECT BY on the entire database dependency graph is still too slow. After much sitting down and drawing complicated diagrams, we decided to move the graph traversal algorithm from the server onto the client (which turned out to run much faster on the client than on the server); and to ensure we don’t read the entire dependency graph onto the client we also pull the graph across in bits – we start off with dependency edges involving schemas selected for explicit population, and whenever the graph traversal comes across a dependency reference to a schema we don’t yet know about a thunk is hit that pulls in the dependency information for that schema from the database. We continue passing more dependent objects back and forth between the source and target until no more dependency references are found. This gives us the list of all the extra objects to populate in the source and target, and object population can then proceed. 4. Object blacklists and fast dependencies When we tested this solution, we were puzzled in that in some of our databases most of the system schemas (WMSYS, ORDSYS, EXFSYS, XDB, etc) were being pulled in, and this was increasing the database registration and comparison time quite significantly. After debugging, we discovered that the culprits were database tables that used one of the Oracle PL/SQL types (eg the SDO_GEOMETRY spatial type). These were creating a dependency chain from the database tables we were populating to the system schemas, and hence pulling in most of the system objects in that schema. To solve this we introduced blacklists of objects we wouldn’t follow any dependency chain through. As well as the Oracle-supplied PL/SQL types (MDSYS.SDO_GEOMETRY, ORDSYS.SI_COLOR, among others) we also decided to blacklist the entire PUBLIC and SYS schemas, as any references to those would likely lead to a blow up in the dependency graph that would massively increase the database registration time, and could result in the client running out of memory. Even with these improvements, each dependency query was taking upwards of a minute. We discovered from Oracle execution plans that there were some columns, with dependency information we required, that were querying system tables with no indexes on them! To cut a long story short, running the following query: SELECT * FROM all_tab_cols WHERE data_type_owner = ‘XDB’; results in a full table scan of the SYS.COL$ system table! This single clause was responsible for over half the execution time of the dependency query. Hence, the ‘Ignore slow dependencies’ option was born – not querying this and a couple of similar clauses to drastically speed up the dependency query execution time, at the expense of producing incorrect sync scripts in rare edge cases. Needless to say, along with the sync script action ordering, the dependency code in the database registration is one of the most complicated and most rewritten parts of the Schema Compare for Oracle engine. The beta of Schema Compare for Oracle is out now; if you find a bug in it, please do tell us so we can get it fixed!

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• Inside the DLR – Invoking methods

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, we’ve looked at how a dynamic call is represented in a compiled assembly, and how the dynamic lookup is performed at runtime. The last piece of the puzzle is how the resolved method gets invoked, and that is the subject of this post. Invoking methods As discussed in my previous posts, doing a full lookup and bind at runtime each and every single time the callsite gets invoked would be far too slow to be usable. The results obtained from the callsite binder must to be cached, along with a series of conditions to determine whether the cached result can be reused. So, firstly, how are the conditions represented? These conditions can be anything; they are determined entirely by the semantics of the language the binder is representing. The binder has to be able to return arbitary code that is then executed to determine whether the conditions apply or not. Fortunately, .NET 4 has a neat way of representing arbitary code that can be easily combined with other code – expression trees. All the callsite binder has to return is an expression (called a ‘restriction’) that evaluates to a boolean, returning true when the restriction passes (indicating the corresponding method invocation can be used) and false when it does’t. If the bind result is also represented in an expression tree, these can be combined easily like so: if ([restriction is true]) { [invoke cached method] } Take my example from my previous post: public class ClassA { public static void TestDynamic() { CallDynamic(new ClassA(), 10); CallDynamic(new ClassA(), "foo"); } public static void CallDynamic(dynamic d, object o) { d.Method(o); } public void Method(int i) {} public void Method(string s) {} } When the Method(int) method is first bound, along with an expression representing the result of the bind lookup, the C# binder will return the restrictions under which that bind can be reused. In this case, it can be reused if the types of the parameters are the same: if (thisArg.GetType() == typeof(ClassA) && arg1.GetType() == typeof(int)) { thisClassA.Method(i); } Caching callsite results So, now, it’s up to the callsite to link these expressions returned from the binder together in such a way that it can determine which one from the many it has cached it should use. This caching logic is all located in the System.Dynamic.UpdateDelegates class. It’ll help if you’ve got this type open in a decompiler to have a look yourself. For each callsite, there are 3 layers of caching involved: The last method invoked on the callsite. All methods that have ever been invoked on the callsite. All methods that have ever been invoked on any callsite of the same type. We’ll cover each of these layers in order Level 1 cache: the last method called on the callsite When a CallSite<T> object is first instantiated, the Target delegate field (containing the delegate that is called when the callsite is invoked) is set to one of the UpdateAndExecute generic methods in UpdateDelegates, corresponding to the number of parameters to the callsite, and the existance of any return value. These methods contain most of the caching, invoke, and binding logic for the callsite. The first time this method is invoked, the UpdateAndExecute method finds there aren’t any entries in the caches to reuse, and invokes the binder to resolve a new method. Once the callsite has the result from the binder, along with any restrictions, it stitches some extra expressions in, and replaces the Target field in the callsite with a compiled expression tree similar to this (in this example I’m assuming there’s no return value): if ([restriction is true]) { [invoke cached method] return; } if (callSite._match) { _match = false; return; } else { UpdateAndExecute(callSite, arg0, arg1, ...); } Woah. What’s going on here? Well, this resulting expression tree is actually the first level of caching. The Target field in the callsite, which contains the delegate to call when the callsite is invoked, is set to the above code compiled from the expression tree into IL, and then into native code by the JIT. This code checks whether the restrictions of the last method that was invoked on the callsite (the ‘primary’ method) match, and if so, executes that method straight away. This means that, the next time the callsite is invoked, the first code that executes is the restriction check, executing as native code! This makes this restriction check on the primary cached delegate very fast. But what if the restrictions don’t match? In that case, the second part of the stitched expression tree is executed. What this section should be doing is calling back into the UpdateAndExecute method again to resolve a new method. But it’s slightly more complicated than that. To understand why, we need to understand the second and third level caches. Level 2 cache: all methods that have ever been invoked on the callsite When a binder has returned the result of a lookup, as well as updating the Target field with a compiled expression tree, stitched together as above, the callsite puts the same compiled expression tree in an internal list of delegates, called the rules list. This list acts as the level 2 cache. Why use the same delegate? Stitching together expression trees is an expensive operation. You don’t want to do it every time the callsite is invoked. Ideally, you would create one expression tree from the binder’s result, compile it, and then use the resulting delegate everywhere in the callsite. But, if the same delegate is used to invoke the callsite in the first place, and in the caches, that means each delegate needs two modes of operation. An ‘invoke’ mode, for when the delegate is set as the value of the Target field, and a ‘match’ mode, used when UpdateAndExecute is searching for a method in the callsite’s cache. Only in the invoke mode would the delegate call back into UpdateAndExecute. In match mode, it would simply return without doing anything. This mode is controlled by the _match field in CallSite<T>. The first time the callsite is invoked, _match is false, and so the Target delegate is called in invoke mode. Then, if the initial restriction check fails, the Target delegate calls back into UpdateAndExecute. This method sets _match to true, then calls all the cached delegates in the rules list in match mode to try and find one that passes its restrictions, and invokes it. However, there needs to be some way for each cached delegate to inform UpdateAndExecute whether it passed its restrictions or not. To do this, as you can see above, it simply re-uses _match, and sets it to false if it did not pass the restrictions. This allows the code within each UpdateAndExecute method to check for cache matches like so: foreach (T cachedDelegate in Rules) { callSite._match = true; cachedDelegate(); // sets _match to false if restrictions do not pass if (callSite._match) { // passed restrictions, and the cached method was invoked // set this delegate as the primary target to invoke next time callSite.Target = cachedDelegate; return; } // no luck, try the next one... } Level 3 cache: all methods that have ever been invoked on any callsite with the same signature The reason for this cache should be clear – if a method has been invoked through a callsite in one place, then it is likely to be invoked on other callsites in the codebase with the same signature. Rather than living in the callsite, the ‘global’ cache for callsite delegates lives in the CallSiteBinder class, in the Cache field. This is a dictionary, typed on the callsite delegate signature, providing a RuleCache<T> instance for each delegate signature. This is accessed in the same way as the level 2 callsite cache, by the UpdateAndExecute methods. When a method is matched in the global cache, it is copied into the callsite and Target cache before being executed. Putting it all together So, how does this all fit together? Like so (I’ve omitted some implementation & performance details): That, in essence, is how the DLR performs its dynamic calls nearly as fast as statically compiled IL code. Extensive use of expression trees, compiled to IL and then into native code. Multiple levels of caching, the first of which executes immediately when the dynamic callsite is invoked. And a clever re-use of compiled expression trees that can be used in completely different contexts without being recompiled. All in all, a very fast and very clever reflection caching mechanism.

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• Masters vs. PhD - long [closed]

  - by Sterling

  I'm 21 years old and a first year master's computer science student. Whether or not to continue with my PhD has been plaguing me for the past few months. I can't stop thinking about it and am extremely torn on the issue. I have read http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html and many, many other masters vs phd articles on the web. Unfortunately, I have not yet come to a conclusion. I was hoping that I could post my ideas about the issue on here in hopes to 1) get some extra insight on the issue and 2) make sure that I am correct in my assumptions. Hopefully having people who have experience in the respective fields can tell me if I am wrong so I don't make my decision based on false ideas. Okay, to get this topic out of the way - money. Money isn't the most important thing to me, but it is still important. It's always been a goal of mine to make 6 figures, but I realize that will probably take me a long time with either path. According to most online salary calculating sites, the average starting salary for a software engineer is ~60-70k. The PhD program here is 5 years, so that's about 300k I am missing out on by not going into the workforce with a masters. I have only ever had ~1k at one time in my life so 300k is something I can't even really accurately imagine. I know that I wouldn't have at once obviously, but just to know I would be earning that is kinda crazy to me. I feel like I would be living quite comfortably by the time I'm 30 years old (but risk being too content too soon). I would definitely love to have at least a few years of my 20s to spend with that kind of money before I have a family to spend it all on. I haven't grown up very financially stable so it would be so nice to just spend some money…get a nice car, buy a new guitar or two, eat some good food, and just be financially comfortable. I have always felt like I deserved to make good money in my life, even as a kid growing up, and I just want to have it be a reality. I know that either path I take will make good money by the time I'm ~40-45 years old, but I guess I'm just sick of not making money and am getting impatient about it. However, a big idea pushing me towards a PhD is that I feel the masters path would give me a feeling of selling out if I have the capability to solve real questions in the computer science world. (pretty straight-forward - not much to elaborate on, but this is a big deal) Now onto other aspects of the decision. I originally got into computer science because of programming. I started in high school and knew very soon that it was what I wanted to do for a career. I feel like getting a masters and being a software engineer in the industry gives me much more time to program in my career. In research, I feel like I would spend more time reading, writing, trying to get grant money, etc than I would coding. A guy I work with in the lab just recently published a paper. He showed it to me and I was shocked by it. The first two pages was littered with equations and formulas. Then the next page or so was followed by more equations and formulas that he derived from the previous ones. That was his work - breaking down and creating all of these formulas for robotic arm movement. And whenever I read computer science papers, they all seem to follow this pattern. I always pictured myself coding all day long…not proving equations and things of that nature. I know that's only one part of computer science research, but that part bores me. A couple cons on each side - Phd - I don't really enjoy writing or feel like I'm that great at technical writing. Whenever I'm in groups to make something, I'm always the one who does the large majority of the work and then give it to my team members to write up a report. Presenting is different though - I don't mind presenting at all as long as I have a good grasp on what I am presenting. But writing papers seems like such a chore to me. And because of this, the "publish or perish" phrase really turns me off from research. Another bad thing - I feel like if I am doing research, most of it would be done alone. I work best in small groups. I like to have at least one person to bounce ideas off of when I am brainstorming. The idea of being a part of some small elite group to build things sounds ideal to me. So being able to work in small groups for the majority of my career is a definite plus. I don't feel like I can get this doing research. Masters - I read a lot online that most people come in as engineers and eventually move into management positions. As of now, I don't see myself wanting to be a part of management. Lets say my company wanted to make some new product or system - I would get much more pride, enjoyment, and overall satisfaction to say "I made this" rather than "I managed a group of people that made this." I want to be a big part of the development process. I want to make things. I think it would be great to be more specialized than other people. I would rather know everything about something than something about everything. I always have been that way - was a great pitcher during my baseball years, but not so good at everything else, great at certain classes in school, but not so good at others, etc. To think that my career would be the same way sounds okay to me. Getting a PhD would point me in this direction. It would be great to be some guy who is someone that people look towards and come to ask for help because of being such an important contributor to a very specific field, such as artificial neural networks or robotic haptic perception. From what I gather about the software industry, being specialized can be a very bad thing because of the speed of the new technology. I When it comes to being employed, I have pretty conservative views. I don't want to change companies every 5 years. Maybe this is something everyone wishes, but I would love to just be an important person in one company for 10+ (maybe 20-25+ if I'm lucky!) years if the working conditions were acceptable. I feel like that is more possible as a PhD though, being a professor or researcher. The more I read about people in the software industry, the more it seems like most software engineers bounce from company to company at rapid paces. Some even work like a hired gun from project to project which is NOT what I want AT ALL. But finding a place to make great and important software would be great if that actually happens in the real world. I'm a very competitive person. I thrive on competition. I don't really know why, but I have always been that way even as a kid growing up. Competition always gave me a reason to practice that little extra every night, always push my limits, etc. It seems to me like there is no competition in the research world. It seems like everyone is very relaxed as long as research is being conducted. The only competition is if someone is researching the same thing as you and its whoever can finish and publish first (but everyone seems to careful to check that circumstance). The only noticeable competition to me is just with yourself and your own discipline. I like the idea that in the industry, there is real competition between companies to put out the best product or be put out of business. I feel like this would constantly be pushing me to be better at what I do. One thing that is really pushing me towards a PhD is the lifetime of the things you make. I feel like if you make something truly innovative in the industry…just some really great new application or system…there is a shelf-life of about 5-10 years before someone just does it faster and more efficiently. But with research work, you could create an idea or algorithm that last decades. For instance, the A* search algorithm was described in 1968 and is still widely used today. That is amazing to me. In the words of Palahniuk, "The goal isn't to live forever, its to create something that will." Over anything, I just want to do something that matters. I want my work to help and progress society. Seriously, if I'm stuck programming GUIs for the next 40 years…I might shoot myself in the face. But then again, I hate the idea that less than 1% of the population will come into contact with my work and even less understand its importance. So if anything I have said is false then please inform me. If you think I come off as a masters or PhD, inform me. If you want to give me some extra insight or add on to any point I made, please do. Thank you so much to anyone for any help.

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• Looking into the jQuery LazyLoad Plugin

  - by nikolaosk

  I have been using JQuery for a couple of years now and it has helped me to solve many problems on the client side of web development.  You can find all my posts about JQuery in this link. In this post I will be providing you with a hands-on example on the JQuery LazyLoad Plugin.If you want you can have a look at this post, where I describe the JQuery Cycle Plugin.You can find another post of mine talking about the JQuery Carousel Lite Plugin here. Another post of mine regarding the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin can be found here. You can have a look at the JQuery Overlays Plugin here . There are times when when I am asked to create a very long page with lots of images.My first thought is to enable paging on the proposed page. Imagine that we have 60 images on a page. There are performance concerns when we have so many images on a page. Paging can solve that problem if I am allowed to place only 5 images on a page.Sometimes the customer does not like the idea of the paging.Believe it or not some people find the idea of paging not attractive at all.In that case I need a way to only load the initial set of images and as the user scrolls down the page to load the rest.So as someone scrolls down new requests are made to the server and more images are fetched. I can accomplish that with the jQuery LazyLoad Plugin.This is just a plugin that delays loading of images in long web pages.The images that are outside of the viewport (visible part of web page) won't be loaded before the user scrolls to them. Using jQuery LazyLoad Plugin on long web pages containing many large images makes the page load faster. In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like. You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.  You can download this plugin from this link. I launch Expression Web 4.0 and then I type the following HTML markup (I am using HTML 5)<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>Liverpool Legends</title>    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.3.min.js"></script>        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.lazyload.min.js" ></script></head>  <body>    <header>                <h1>Liverpool Legends</h1>    </header>        <div id="main">             <img src="barnes.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />        <img src="dalglish.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />                <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="fans.JPG" width="1200" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="lfc.JPG" width="1000" height="700" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="Liverpool-players.JPG" width="1100" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="steven_gerrard.JPG" width="1110" height="1000" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="robbie.JPG" width="1200" height="1000" /><p />          </div>            <footer>        <p>All Rights Reserved</p>      </footer>                    <script type="text/javascript">                $(function () {                    $("img.LiverpoolImage").lazyload();                });        </script>     </body>  </html> This is a very simple markup. I have  added references to the JQuery library (current version is 1.8.3) and the JQuery LazyLoad Plugin. Firstly, I add two images         <img src="barnes.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />        <img src="dalglish.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />  that will load immediately as soon as the page loads. Then I add the images that will not load unless they become active in the viewport. I have all my img tags pointing the src attribute towards a placeholder image. I’m using a blank 1×1 px grey image,loader.gif.The five images that will load as the user scrolls down the page follow.         <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="fans.JPG" width="1200" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="lfc.JPG" width="1000" height="700" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="Liverpool-players.JPG" width="1100" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="steven_gerrard.JPG" width="1110" height="1000" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="robbie.JPG" width="1200" height="1000" /><p /> Then we need to rename the image src to point towards the proper image placeholder. The full image URL goes into the data-original attribute.The Javascript code that makes it all happen follows. We need to make a call to the JQuery LazyLoad Plugin. We add the script just before we close the body element.         <script type="text/javascript">                $(function () {                    $("img.LiverpoolImage").lazyload();                });        </script>We can change the code above to incorporate some effects.          <script type="text/javascript">  $("img.LiverpoolImage").lazyload({    effect: "fadeIn"  });    </script> That is all I need to write to achieve lazy loading. It it true that you can do so much with less!!I view my simple page in Internet Explorer 10 and it works as expected. I have tested this simple solution in all major browsers and it works fine. You can test it yourself and see the results in your favorite browser. Hope it helps!!!

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• Farseer tutorial for the absolute beginners

  - by Bil Simser

  This post is inspired (and somewhat a direct copy) of a couple of posts Emanuele Feronato wrote back in 2009 about Box2D (his tutorial was ActionScript 3 based for Box2D, this is C# XNA for the Farseer Physics Engine). Here’s what we’re building: What is Farseer The Farseer Physics Engine is a collision detection system with realistic physics responses to help you easily create simple hobby games or complex simulation systems. Farseer was built as a .NET version of Box2D (based on the Box2D.XNA port of Box2D). While the constructs and syntax has changed over the years, the principles remain the same. This tutorial will walk you through exactly what Emanuele create for Flash but we’ll be doing it using C#, XNA and the Windows Phone platform. The first step is to download the library from its home on CodePlex. If you have NuGet installed, you can install the library itself using the NuGet package that but we’ll also be using some code from the Samples source that can only be obtained by downloading the library. Once you download and unpacked the zip file into a folder and open the solution, this is what you will get: The Samples XNA WP7 project (and content) have all the demos for Farseer. There’s a wealth of info here and great examples to look at to learn. The Farseer Physics XNA WP7 project contains the core libraries that do all the work. DebugView XNA contains an XNA-ready class to let you view debug data and information in the game draw loop (which you can copy into your project or build the source and reference the assembly). The downloaded version has to be compiled as it’s only available in source format so you can do that now if you want (open the solution file and rebuild everything). If you’re using the NuGet package you can just install that. We only need the core library and we’ll be copying in some code from the samples later. Your first Farseer experiment Start Visual Studio and create a new project using the Windows Phone template can call it whatever you want. It’s time to edit Game1.cs 1 public class Game1 : Game 2 { 3 private readonly GraphicsDeviceManager _graphics; 4 private DebugViewXNA _debugView; 5 private Body _floor; 6 private SpriteBatch _spriteBatch; 7 private float _timer; 8 private World _world; 9 10 public Game1() 11 { 12 _graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this) 13 { 14 PreferredBackBufferHeight = 800, 15 PreferredBackBufferWidth = 480, 16 IsFullScreen = true 17 }; 18 19 Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; 20 21 // Frame rate is 30 fps by default for Windows Phone. 22 TargetElapsedTime = TimeSpan.FromTicks(333333); 23 24 // Extend battery life under lock. 25 InactiveSleepTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1); 26 } 27 28 protected override void LoadContent() 29 { 30 // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. 31 _spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(_graphics.GraphicsDevice); 32 33 // Load our font (DebugViewXNA needs it for the DebugPanel) 34 Content.Load<SpriteFont>("font"); 35 36 // Create our World with a gravity of 10 vertical units 37 if (_world == null) 38 { 39 _world = new World(Vector2.UnitY*10); 40 } 41 else 42 { 43 _world.Clear(); 44 } 45 46 if (_debugView == null) 47 { 48 _debugView = new DebugViewXNA(_world); 49 50 // default is shape, controller, joints 51 // we just want shapes to display 52 _debugView.RemoveFlags(DebugViewFlags.Controllers); 53 _debugView.RemoveFlags(DebugViewFlags.Joint); 54 55 _debugView.LoadContent(GraphicsDevice, Content); 56 } 57 58 // Create and position our floor 59 _floor = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle( 60 _world, 61 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(480), 62 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(50), 63 10f); 64 _floor.Position = ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(240, 775); 65 _floor.IsStatic = true; 66 _floor.Restitution = 0.2f; 67 _floor.Friction = 0.2f; 68 } 69 70 protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) 71 { 72 // Allows the game to exit 73 if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) 74 Exit(); 75 76 // Create a random box every second 77 _timer += (float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; 78 if (_timer >= 1.0f) 79 { 80 // Reset our timer 81 _timer = 0f; 82 83 // Determine a random size for each box 84 var random = new Random(); 85 var width = random.Next(20, 100); 86 var height = random.Next(20, 100); 87 88 // Create it and store the size in the user data 89 var box = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle( 90 _world, 91 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(width), 92 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(height), 93 10f, 94 new Point(width, height)); 95 96 box.BodyType = BodyType.Dynamic; 97 box.Restitution = 0.2f; 98 box.Friction = 0.2f; 99 100 // Randomly pick a location along the top to drop it from 101 box.Position = ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(random.Next(50, 400), 0); 102 } 103 104 // Advance all the elements in the world 105 _world.Step(Math.Min((float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds*0.001f, (1f/30f))); 106 107 // Clean up any boxes that have fallen offscreen 108 foreach (var box in from box in _world.BodyList 109 let pos = ConvertUnits.ToDisplayUnits(box.Position) 110 where pos.Y > _graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height 111 select box) 112 { 113 _world.RemoveBody(box); 114 } 115 116 base.Update(gameTime); 117 } 118 119 protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) 120 { 121 GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.FromNonPremultiplied(51, 51, 51, 255)); 122 123 _spriteBatch.Begin(); 124 125 var projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographicOffCenter( 126 0f, 127 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(_graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width), 128 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(_graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height), 0f, 0f, 129 1f); 130 _debugView.RenderDebugData(ref projection); 131 132 _spriteBatch.End(); 133 134 base.Draw(gameTime); 135 } 136 } 137 Lines 4: Declare the debug view we’ll use for rendering (more on that later). Lines 8: Declare _world variable of type class World. World is the main object to interact with the Farseer engine. It stores all the joints and bodies, and is responsible for stepping through the simulation. Lines 12-17: Create the graphics device we’ll be rendering on. This is an XNA component and we’re just setting it to be the same size as the phone and toggling it to be full screen (no system tray). Lines 34: We create a SpriteFont here by adding it to the project. It’s called “font” because that’s what the DebugView uses but you can name it whatever you want (and if you’re not using DebugView for your production app you might have several fonts). Lines 37-44: We create the physics environment that Farseer uses to contain all the objects by specifying it here. We’re using Vector2.UnitY*10 to represent the gravity to be used in the environment. In other words, 10 units going in a downward motion. Lines 46-56: We create the DebugViewXNA here. This is copied from the […] from the code you downloaded and provides the ability to render all entities onto the screen. In a production release you’ll be doing the rendering yourself of each object but we cheat a bit for the demo and let the DebugView do it for us. The other thing it can provide is to render out a panel of debugging information while the simulation is going on. This is useful in tracking down objects, figuring out how something works, or just keeping track of what’s in the engine. Lines 49-67: Here we create a rigid body (Farseer only supports rigid bodies) to represent the floor that we’ll drop objects onto. We create it by using one of the Farseer factories and specifying the width and height. The ConvertUnits class is copied from the samples code as-is and lets us toggle between display units (pixels) and simulation units (usually metres). We’re creating a floor that’s 480 pixels wide and 50 pixels high (converting them to SimUnits for the engine to understand). We also position it near the bottom of the screen. Values are in metres and when specifying values they refer to the centre of the body object. Lines 77-78: The game Update method fires 30 times a second, too fast to be creating objects this quickly. So we use a variable to track the elapsed seconds since the last update, accumulate that value, then create a new box to drop when 1 second has passed. Lines 89-94: We create a box the same way we created our floor (coming up with a random width and height for the box). Lines 96-101: We set the box to be Dynamic (rather than Static like the floor object) and position it somewhere along the top of the screen. And now you created the world. Gravity does the rest and the boxes fall to the ground. Here’s the result: Farseer Physics Engine Demo using XNA Lines 105: We must update the world at every frame. We do this with the Step method which takes in the time interval. [more] Lines 108-114: Body objects are added to the world but never automatically removed (because Farseer doesn’t know about the display world, it has no idea if an item is on the screen or not). Here we just loop through all the entities and anything that’s dropped off the screen (below the bottom) gets removed from the World. This keeps our entity count down (the simulation never has more than 30 or 40 objects in the world no matter how long you run it for). Too many entities and the app will grind to a halt. Lines 125-130: Farseer knows nothing about the UI so that’s entirely up to you as to how to draw things. Farseer is just tracking the objects and moving them around using the physics engine and it’s rules. You’ll still use XNA to draw items (using the SpriteBatch.Draw method) so you can load up your usual textures and draw items and pirates and dancing zombies all over the screen. Instead in this demo we’re going to cheat a little. In the sample code for Farseer you can download there’s a project called DebugView XNA. This project contains the DebugViewXNA class which just handles iterating through all the bodies in the world and drawing the shapes. So we call the RenderDebugData method here of that class to draw everything correctly. In the case of this demo, we just want to draw Shapes so take a look at the source code for the DebugViewXNA class as to how it extracts all the vertices for the shapes created (in this case simple boxes) and draws them. You’ll learn a *lot* about how Farseer works just by looking at this class. That’s it, that’s all. Simple huh? Hope you enjoy the code and library. Physics is hard and requires some math skills to really grok. The Farseer Physics Engine makes it pretty easy to get up and running and start building games. In future posts we’ll get more in-depth with things you can do with the engine so this is just the beginning. Enjoy!

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• Navigation in Win8 Metro Style applications

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  In Windows 8, Touch is, as they say, a first class citizen. Now, to be honest: they also said that in Windows 7. However in Win8 this is actually true. Applications are meant to be used by touch. Yes, you can still use mouse, keyboard and pen and your apps should take that into account but touch is where you should focus on initially. Will all users have touch enabled devices? No, not in the first place. I don’t think touchscreens will be on every device sold next year. But in 5 years? Who knows? Don’t forget: if your app is successful it will be around for a long time and by that time touchscreens will be everywhere. Another reason to embrace touch is that it’s easier to develop a touch-oriented app and then to make sure that keyboard, nouse and pen work as doing it the other way around. Porting a mouse-based application to a touch based application almost never works. The reverse gives you much more chances for success. That being said, there are some things that you need to think about. Most people have more than one finger, while most users only use one mouse at the time. Still, most touch-developers translate their mouse-knowledge to the touch and think they did a good job. Martin Tirion from Microsoft said that since Touch is a new language people face the same challenges they do when learning a new real spoken language. The first thing people try when learning a new language is simply replace the words in their native language to the newly learned words. At first they don’t care about grammar. To a native speaker of that other language this sounds all wrong but they still will be able to understand what the intention was. If you don’t believe me: try Google translate to translate something for you from your language to another and then back and see what happens. The same thing happens with Touch. Most developers translate a mouse-click into a tap-event and think they’re done. Well matey, you’re not done. Not by far. There are things you can do with a mouse that you cannot do with touch. Think hover. A mouse has the ability to ‘slide’ over UI elements. Touch doesn’t (I know: with Pen you can do this but I’m talking about actual fingers here). A touch is either there or it isn’t. And right-click? Forget about it. A click is a click.  Yes, you have more than one finger but the machine doesn’t know which finger you use… The other way around is also true. Like I said: most users only have one mouse but they are likely to have more than one finger. So how do we take that into account? Thinking about this is really worth the time: you might come up with some surprisingly good ideas! Still: don’t forget that not every user has touch-enabled hardware so make sure your app is useable for both groups. Keep this in mind: we’re going to need it later on! Now. Apps should be easy to use. You don’t want your user to read through pages and pages of documentation before they can use the app. Imagine that spotter next to an airfield suddenly seeing a prototype of a Concorde 2 landing on the nearby runway. He probably wants to enter that information in our app NOW and not after he’s taken a 3 day course. Even if he still has to download the app, install it for the first time and then run it he should be on his way immediately. At least, fast enough to note down the details of that unique, rare and possibly exciting sighting he just did. So.. How do we do this? Well, I am not talking about games here. Games are in a league of their own. They fall outside the scope of the apps I am describing. But all the others can roughly be characterized as being one of two flavors: the navigation is either flat or hierarchical. That’s it. And if it’s hierarchical it’s no more than three levels deep. Not more. Your users will get lost otherwise and we don’t want that. Flat is simple. Just imagine we have one screen that is as high as our physical screen is and as wide as you need it to be. Don’t worry if it doesn’t fit on the screen: people can scroll to the right and left. Don’t combine up/down and left/right scrolling: it’s confusing. Next to that, since most users will hold their device in landscape mode it’s very natural to scroll horizontal. So let’s use that when we have a flat model. The same applies to the hierarchical model. Try to have at most three levels. If you need more space, find a way to group the items in such a way that you can fit it in three, very wide lanes. At the highest level we have the so called hub level. This is the entry point of the app and as such it should give the user an immediate feeling of what the app is all about. If your app has categories if items then you might show these categories here. And while you’re at it: also show 2 or 3 of the items itself here to give the user a taste of what lies beneath. If the user selects a category you go to the section part. Here you show several sections (again, go as wide as you need) with again some detail examples. After that: the details layer shows each item. By giving some samples of the underlaying layer you achieve several things: you make the layer attractive by showing several different things, you show some highlights so the user sees actual content and you provide a shortcut to the layers underneath. The image below is borrowed from the http://design.windows.com website which has tons and tons of examples: For our app we’ll use this layout. So what will we show? Well, let’s see what sorts of features our app has to offer. I’ll repeat them here: Note planes Add pictures of that plane Notify friends of new spots Share new spots on social media Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down the runway they take I am sure you can think of some more items but for now we'll use these. In the hub we’ll show something that represents “Spots”, “Friends”, “Social”. Apparently we have an inner list of spotter-friends that are in the app, while we also have to whole world in social. In the layer below we show something else, depending on what the user choose. When they choose “Spots” we’ll display the last spots, last spots by our friends (so we can actually jump from this category to the one next to it) and so on. When they choose a “spot” (or press the + icon in the App bar, which I’ll talk about next time) they go to the lowest and final level that shows details about that spot, including a picture, date and time and the notes belonging to that entry. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to organize your app this way. If you don’t have enough room in these three layers you probably could easily get away with grouping items. Take a look at our hub: we have three completely different things in one place. If you still can’t fit it all in in a logical and consistent way, chances are you are trying to do too much in this app. Go back to your mission statement, determine if it is specific enough and if your feature list helps that statement or makes it unclear. Go ahead. Give it a go! Next time we’ll talk about the look and feel, the charms and the app-bar….

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• Rotating a NetBeans Visual Library Widget

  - by Geertjan

  Trying to create a widget which, when clicked, rotates slightly further on each subsequent click: Above, the bird where the mouse is visible has been clicked a few times and so has rotated a bit further on each click. The code isn't quite right yet and I'm hoping someone will take this code, try it out, and help with a nice solution! public class BirdScene extends Scene {     public BirdScene() {         addChild(new LayerWidget(this));         getActions().addAction(ActionFactory.createAcceptAction(new AcceptProvider() {             public ConnectorState isAcceptable(Widget widget, Point point, Transferable transferable) {                 Image dragImage = getImageFromTransferable(transferable);                 if (dragImage != null) {                     JComponent view = getView();                     Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) view.getGraphics();                     Rectangle visRect = view.getVisibleRect();                     view.paintImmediately(visRect.x, visRect.y, visRect.width, visRect.height);                     g2.drawImage(dragImage,                             AffineTransform.getTranslateInstance(point.getLocation().getX(),                             point.getLocation().getY()),                             null);                     return ConnectorState.ACCEPT;                 } else {                     return ConnectorState.REJECT;                 }             }             public void accept(Widget widget, final Point point, Transferable transferable) {                 addChild(new BirdWidget(getScene(), getImageFromTransferable(transferable), point));             }         }));     }     private Image getImageFromTransferable(Transferable transferable) {         Object o = null;         try {             o = transferable.getTransferData(DataFlavor.imageFlavor);         } catch (IOException ex) {         } catch (UnsupportedFlavorException ex) {         }         return o instanceof Image ? (Image) o : null;     }     private class BirdWidget extends IconNodeWidget {         private int theta = 0;         public BirdWidget(Scene scene, Image imageFromTransferable, Point point) {             super(scene);             setImage(imageFromTransferable);             setPreferredLocation(point);             setCheckClipping(true);             getActions().addAction(ActionFactory.createMoveAction());             getActions().addAction(ActionFactory.createSelectAction(new SelectProvider() {                 public boolean isAimingAllowed(Widget widget, Point localLocation, boolean invertSelection) {                     return true;                 }                 public boolean isSelectionAllowed(Widget widget, Point localLocation, boolean invertSelection) {                     return true;                 }                 public void select(final Widget widget, Point localLocation, boolean invertSelection) {                     theta = (theta + 100) % 360;                     repaint();                     getScene().validate();                 }             }));         }         @Override         public void paintWidget() {             final Image image = getImageWidget().getImage();             Graphics2D g = getGraphics();             g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON);             Rectangle bounds = getClientArea();             AffineTransform newXform = g.getTransform();             int xRot = image.getWidth(null) / 2;             int yRot = image.getWidth(null) / 2;             newXform.rotate(theta * Math.PI / 180, xRot, yRot);             g.setTransform(newXform);             g.drawImage(image, bounds.x, bounds.y, null);         }     } } The problem relates to refreshing the scene after the rotation. But it would help if someone would just take the code above, add it to their own application, try it out, see the problem for yourself, and develop it a bit further!

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