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  • Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

    - by Mike Stiles
    The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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  • What is SharePoint Out of the Box?

    - by Bil Simser
    It’s always fun in the blog-o-sphere and SharePoint bloggers always keep the pot boiling. Bjorn Furuknap recently posted a blog entry titled Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint, quickly followed up by a rebuttal by Marc Anderson on his blog. Okay, now that we have all the players and the stage what’s the big deal? Bjorn started his post saying that you don’t use “out-of-the-box” (OOTB) SharePoint because it makes no sense. I have to disagree with his premise because what he calls OOTB is basically installing SharePoint and admiring it, but not using it. In his post he lays claim that modifying say the OOTB contacts list by removing (or I suppose adding) a column, now puts you in a situation where you’re no longer using the OOTB functionality. Really? Side note. Dear Internet, please stop comparing building software to building houses. Or comparing software architecture to building architecture. Or comparing web sites to making dinner. Are you trying to dumb down something so the general masses understand it? Comparing a technical skill to a construction operation isn’t the way to do this. Last time I checked, most people don’t know how to build houses and last time I checked people reading technical SharePoint blogs are generally technical people that understand the terms you use. Putting metaphors around software development to make it easy to understand is detrimental to the goal. </rant> Okay, where were we? Right, adding columns to lists means you are no longer using the OOTB functionality. Yeah, I still don’t get it. Another statement Bjorn makes is that using the OOTB functionality kills the flexibility SharePoint has in creating exactly what you want. IMHO this really flies in the absolute face of *where* SharePoint *really* shines. For the past year or so I’ve been leaning more and more towards OOTB solutions over custom development for the simple reason that its expensive to maintain systems and code and assets. SharePoint has enabled me to do this simply by providing the tools where I can give users what they need without cracking open up Visual Studio. This might be the fact that my day job is with a regulated company and there’s more scrutiny with spending money on anything new, but frankly that should be the position of any responsible developer, architect, manager, or PM. Do you really want to throw money away because some developer tells you that you need a custom web part when perhaps with some creative thinking or expectation setting with customers you can meet the need with what you already have. The way I read Bjorn’s terminology of “out-of-the-box” is install the software and tell people to go to a website and admire the OOTB system, but don’t change it! For those that know things like WordPress, DotNetNuke, SubText, Drupal or any of those content management/blogging systems, its akin to installing the software and setting up the “Hello World” blog post or page, then staring at it like it’s useful. “Yes, we are using WordPress!”. Then not adding a new post, creating a new category, or adding an About page. Perhaps I’m wrong in my interpretation. This leads us to what is OOTB SharePoint? To many people I’ve talked to the last few hours on twitter, email, etc. it is *not* just installing software but actually using it as it was fit for purpose. What’s the purpose of SharePoint then? It has many purposes, but using the OOTB templates Microsoft has given you the ability to collaborate on projects, author/share/publish documents, create pages, track items/contacts/tasks/etc. in a multi-user web based interface, and so on. Microsoft has pretty clear definitions of these different levels of SharePoint we’re talking about and I think it’s important for everyone to know what they are and what they mean. Personalization and Administration To me, this is the OOTB experience. You install the product and then are able to do things like create new lists, sites, edit and personalize pages, create new views, etc. Basically use the platform services available to you with Windows SharePoint Services (or SharePoint Foundation in 2010) to your full advantage. No code, no special tools needed, and very little user training required. Could you take someone who has never done anything in a website or piece of software and unleash them onto a site? Probably not. However I would argue that anyone who’s configured the Outlook reading layout or applied styles to a Word document probably won’t have too much difficulty in using SharePoint OUT OF THE BOX. Customization Here’s where things might get a bit murky but to me this is where you start looking at HTML/ASPX page code through SharePoint Designer, using jQuery scripts and plugging them into Web Part Pages via a Content Editor Web Part, and generally enhancing the site. The JavaScript debate might kick in here claiming it’s no different than C#, and frankly you can totally screw a site up with jQuery on a CEWP just as easily as you can with a C# delegate control deployed to the server file system. However (again, my blog, my opinion) the customization label comes in when I need to access the server (for example creating a custom theme) or have some kind of net-new element I add to the system that wasn’t there OOTB. It’s not content (like a new list or site), it’s code and does something functional. Development Here’s were the propeller hats come on and we’re talking algorithms and unit tests and compilers oh my. Software is deployed to the server, people are writing solutions after some kind of training (perhaps), there might be some specialized tools they use to craft and deploy the solutions, there’s the possibility of exceptions being thrown, etc. There are a lot of definitions here and just like customization it might get murky (do you let non-developers build solutions using development, i.e. jQuery/C#?). In my experience, it’s much more cost effective keeping solutions under the first two umbrellas than leaping into the third one. Arguably you could say that you can’t build useful solutions without *some* kind of code (even just some simple jQuery). I think you can get a *lot* of value just from using the OOTB experience and I don’t think you’re constraining your users that much. I’m not saying Marc or Bjorn are wrong. Like Obi-Wan stated, they’re both correct “from a certain point of view”. To me, SharePoint Out of the Box makes total sense and should not be dismissed. I just don’t agree with the premise that Bjorn is basing his statements on but that’s just my opinion and his is different and never the twain shall meet.

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  • Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

    - by Bil Simser
    Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

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  • Emit Knowledge - social network for knowledge sharing

    - by hajan
    Emit Knowledge, as the words refer - it's a social network for emitting / sharing knowledge from users by users. Those who can benefit the most out of this network is perhaps all of YOU who have something to share with others and contribute to the knowledge world. I've been closely communicating with the core team of this very, very interesting, brand new social network (with specific purpose!) about the concept, idea and the vision they have for their product and I can say with a lot of confidence that this network has real potential to become something from which we will all benefit. I won't speak much about that and would prefer to give you link and try it yourself - http://www.emitknowledge.com Mainly, through the past few months I've been testing this network and it is getting improved all the time. The user experience is great, you can easily find out what you need and it follows some known patterns that are common for all social networks. They have some real good ideas and plans that are already under development for the next updates of their product. You can do micro blogging or you can do regular normal blogging… it’s up to you, and the way it works, it is seamless. Here is a short Question and Answers (QA) interview I made with the lead of the team, Marijan Nikolovski: 1. Can you please explain us briefly, what is Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge is a brand new knowledge based social network, delivering quality content from users to users. We believe that people’s knowledge, experience and professional thoughts compose quality content, worth sharing among millions around the world. Therefore, we created the platform that matches people’s need to share and gain knowledge in the most suitable and comfortable way. Easy to work with, Emit Knowledge lets you to smoothly craft and emit knowledge around the globe. 2. How 'old' is Emit Knowledge? In hamster’s years we are almost five years old start-up :). Just kidding. We’ve released our public beta about three months ago. Our official release date is 27 of June 2012. 3. How did you come up with this idea? Everything started from a simple idea to solve a complex problem. We’ve seen that the social web has become polluted with data and is on the right track to lose its base principles – socialization and common cause. That was our start point. We’ve gathered the team, drew some sketches and started to mind map the idea. After several idea refactoring’s Emit Knowledge was born. 4. Is there any competition out there in the market? Currently we don't have any competitors that share the same cause. What makes our platform different is the ideology that our product promotes and the functionalities that our platform offers for easy socialization based on interests and knowledge sharing. 5. What are the main technologies used to build Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge was built on a heterogeneous pallet of technologies. Currently, we have four of separation: UI – Built on ASP.NET MVC3 and Knockout.js; Messaging infrastructure – Build on top of RabbitMQ; Background services – Our in-house solution for job distribution, orchestration and processing; Data storage – Build on top of MongoDB; What are the main reasons you've chosen ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 6. What are the main reasons for choosing ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 7. Did you use some of the latest Microsoft technologies? If yes, which ones? Yes, we like to rock the cutting edge tech house. Currently we are using Microsoft’s latest technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Web API (work in progress) and the best for the last; we are utilizing Windows Azure IaaS to the bone. 8. Can you please tell us shortly, what would be the benefit of regular bloggers in other blogging platforms to join Emit Knowledge? Well, unless you are some of the smoking ace gurus whose blogs are followed by a large number of users, our platform offers knowledge based segregated community equipped with tools that will enable both current and future users to expand their relations and to self-promote in the community based on their activity and knowledge sharing. 10. I see you are working very intensively and there is already integration with some third-party services to make the process of sharing and emitting knowledge easier, which services did you integrate until now and what do you plan do to next? We have “reemit” functionality for internal sharing and we also support external services like: Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook; For the regular bloggers we have an extra cream, Windows Live Writer support for easy blog posts emitting. 11. What should we expect next? Currently, we are working on a new fancy community feature. This means that we are going to support user groups to be formed. So for all existing communities and user groups out there, wait us a little bit, we are coming for rescue :). One of the top next features they are developing is the Community Feature. It means, if you have your own User Group, Community Group or any other Group on which you and your users are mostly blogging or sharing (emitting) knowledge in various ways, Emit Knowledge as a platform will help you have everything you need to promote your group, make new followers and host all the necessary stuff that you have had need of. I would invite you to try the network and start sharing knowledge in a way that will help you gather new followers and spread your knowledge faster, easier and in a more efficient way! Let’s Emit Knowledge!

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  • Christmas in the Clouds

    - by andrewbrust
    I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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  • Webcast Q&A: ING on How to Scale Role Management and Compliance

    - by Tanu Sood
    Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certifications to Thousands of Applications on Wed, April 11th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Mark Robison, Enterprise Architect at ING for walking us through ING’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the phased implementation strategy, results & metrics, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies between Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) to enforce streamlined user and role management and scalable compliance. Mark was also kind enough to walk us through specific solutions features that helped ING manage the problem of role explosion and implement closed loop remediation. Our host speaker, Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle rounded off the presentation by discussing common use cases and deployment scenarios we see organizations implement to automate user/identity administration and enforce closed-loop scalable compliance. Neil also called out the specific features in Oracle Identity Analytics 11gR1 that cater to expediting and streamlining compliance processes such as access certifications. While we tackled a few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to here; our sincere thanks to Mark Robison for taking the time to respond to questions specific to ING’s implementation and strategy. Q. Did you include business friendly entitlment descriptions, or is the business seeing application descriptors A. We include very business friendly descriptions.  The OIA tool has the facility to allow this. Q. When doing attestation on job change, who is in the workflow to review and confirm that the employee should continue to have access? Is that a best practice?   A. The new and old manager  are in the workflow.  The tool can check for any Separation of Duties (SOD) violations with both having similiar accesses.  It may not be a best practice, but it is a reality of doing your old and new job for a transition period on a transfer. Q. What versions of OIM and OIA are being used at ING?   A. OIM 11gR1 and OIA 11gR1; the very latest versions available. Q. Are you using an entitlements / role catalog?   A. Yes. We use both roles and entitlements. Q. What specific unexpected benefits did the Identity Warehouse provide ING?   A. The most unanticipated was to help Legal Hold identify user ID's in the various applications.   Other benefits included providing a one stop shop for all aggregated ID information. Q. How fine grained are your application and entitlements? Did OIA, OIM support that level of granularity?   A. We have some very fine grained entitlements, but we role this up into approved Roles to allow for easier management.   For managing very fine grained entitlements, Oracle offers the Oracle Entitlement Server.  We currently do not own this software but are considering it. Q. Do you allow any individual access or is everything truly role based?   A. We are a hybrid environment with roles and individual positive and negative entitlements Q. Did you use an Agile methodology like scrum to deliver functionality during your project? A. We started with waterfall, but used an agile approach to provide benefits after the initial implementation Q. How did you handle rolling out the standard ID format to existing users? A. We just used the standard IDs for new users.  We have not taken on a project to address the existing nonstandard IDs. Q. To avoid role explosion, how do you deal with apps that require more than a couple of entitlement TYPES? For example, an app may have different levels of access and it may need to know the user's country/state to associate them with particular customers.   A. We focus on the functional user and craft the role around their daily job requirements.  The role captures the required application entitlements.  To keep role explosion down, we use role mining in OIA and also meet and interview the business.  It is an iterative process to get role consensus. Q. Great presentation! How many rounds of Certifications has ING performed so far?  A. Around 7 quarters and constant certifications on transfer. Q. Did you have executive support from the top down   A. Yes  The executive support was key to our success. Q. For your cloud instance are you using OIA or OIM as SaaS?  A. No.  We are just provisioning and deprovisioning to various Cloud providers.  (Service Now is an example) Q. How do you ensure a role owner does not get more priviliges as are intended and thus violates another role, e,g, a DBA Roles should not get tor rigt to run somethings as root, as this would affect the root role? A. We have SOD  checks.  Also all Roles are initially approved by external audit and the role owners have to certify the roles and any changes Q. What is your ratio of employees to roles?   A. We are still in process going through our various lines of business, so I do not have a final ratio.  From what we have seen, the ratio varies greatly depending on the Line of Business and the diversity of Job Functions.  For standardized lines of business such as call centers, the ratio is very good where we can have a single role that covers many employees.  For specialized lines of business like treasury, it can be one or two people per role. Q. Is ING using Oracle On Demand service ?   A. No Q. Do you have to implement or migrate to OIM in order to get the Identity Warehouse, or can OIA provide the identity warehouse as well if you haven't reached OIM yet? A. No, OIM deployment is not required to implement OIA’s Identity Warehouse but as you heard during the webcast, there are tremendous deployment synergies in deploying both OIA and OIM together. Q. When is the Security Governor product coming out? A. Oracle Security Governor for Healthcare is available today. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in the Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series: Toyota: Putting Customers First – Identity Platform as a Business Enabler Wednesday, May 16th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST Register Today You can also register for a live event at a city near you where Aberdeen’s Derek Brink will discuss the survey results from the recently published report “Analyzing Platform vs. Point Solution Approach in Identity”. And, you can do a quick (& free)  online assessment of your identity programs by benchmarking it against the 160 organizations surveyed  in the Aberdeen report, compliments of Oracle. Here’s the slide deck from our ING webcast: ING webcast platform View more presentations from OracleIDM

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  • &lt;%: %&gt;, HtmlEncode, IHtmlString and MvcHtmlString

    - by Shaun
    One of my colleague and friend, Robin is playing and struggling with the ASP.NET MVC 2 on a project these days while I’m struggling with a annoying client. Since it’s his first time to use ASP.NET MVC he was meetings with a lot of problem and I was very happy to share my experience to him. Yesterday he asked me when he attempted to insert a <br /> element into his page he found that the page was rendered like this which is bad. He found his <br /> was shown as a part of the string rather than creating a new line. After checked a bit in his code I found that it’s because he utilized a new ASP.NET markup supported in .NET 4.0 – “<%: %>”. If you have been using ASP.NET MVC 1 or in .NET 3.5 world it would be very common that using <%= %> to show something on the page from the backend code. But when you do it you must ensure that the string that are going to be displayed should be Html-safe, which means all the Html markups must be encoded. Otherwise this might cause an XSS (cross-site scripting) problem. So that you’d better use the code like this below to display anything on the page. In .NET 4.0 Microsoft introduced a new markup to solve this problem which is <%: %>. It will encode the content automatically so that you will no need to check and verify your code manually for the XSS issue mentioned below. But this also means that it will encode all things, include the Html element you want to be rendered. So I changed his code like this and it worked well. After helped him solved this problem and finished a spreadsheet for my boring project I considered a bit more on the <%: %>. Since it will encode all thing why it renders correctly when we use “<%: Html.TextBox(“name”) %>” to show a text box? As you know the Html.TextBox will render a “<input name="name" id="name" type="text"/>” element on the page. If <%: %> will encode everything it should not display a text box. So I dig into the source code of the MVC and found some comments in the class MvcHtmlString. 1: // In ASP.NET 4, a new syntax <%: %> is being introduced in WebForms pages, where <%: expression %> is equivalent to 2: // <%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(expression) %>. The intent of this is to reduce common causes of XSS vulnerabilities 3: // in WebForms pages (WebForms views in the case of MVC). This involves the addition of an interface 4: // System.Web.IHtmlString and a static method overload System.Web.HttpUtility::HtmlEncode(object). The interface 5: // definition is roughly: 6: // public interface IHtmlString { 7: // string ToHtmlString(); 8: // } 9: // And the HtmlEncode(object) logic is roughly: 10: // - If the input argument is an IHtmlString, return argument.ToHtmlString(), 11: // - Otherwise, return HtmlEncode(Convert.ToString(argument)). 12: // 13: // Unfortunately this has the effect that calling <%: Html.SomeHelper() %> in an MVC application running on .NET 4 14: // will end up encoding output that is already HTML-safe. As a result, we're changing out HTML helpers to return 15: // MvcHtmlString where appropriate. <%= Html.SomeHelper() %> will continue to work in both .NET 3.5 and .NET 4, but 16: // changing the return types to MvcHtmlString has the added benefit that <%: Html.SomeHelper() %> will also work 17: // properly in .NET 4 rather than resulting in a double-encoded output. MVC developers in .NET 4 will then be able 18: // to use the <%: %> syntax almost everywhere instead of having to remember where to use <%= %> and where to use 19: // <%: %>. This should help developers craft more secure web applications by default. 20: // 21: // To create an MvcHtmlString, use the static Create() method instead of calling the protected constructor. The comment said the encoding rule of the <%: %> would be: If the type of the content is IHtmlString it will NOT encode since the IHtmlString indicates that it’s Html-safe. Otherwise it will use HtmlEncode to encode the content. If we check the return type of the Html.TextBox method we will find that it’s MvcHtmlString, which was implemented the IHtmlString interface dynamically. That is the reason why the “<input name="name" id="name" type="text"/>” was not encoded by <%: %>. So if we want to tell ASP.NET MVC, or I should say the ASP.NET runtime that the content is Html-safe and no need, or should not be encoded we can convert the content into IHtmlString. So another resolution would be like this. Also we can create an extension method as well for better developing experience. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6:  7: namespace ShaunXu.Blogs.IHtmlStringIssue 8: { 9: public static class Helpers 10: { 11: public static MvcHtmlString IsHtmlSafe(this string content) 12: { 13: return MvcHtmlString.Create(content); 14: } 15: } 16: } Then the view would be like this. And the page rendered correctly.         Summary In this post I explained a bit about the new markup in .NET 4.0 – <%: %> and its usage. I also explained a bit about how to control the page content, whether it should be encoded or not. We can see the ASP.NET MVC gives us more points to control the web pages.   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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  • Android GridView with ads below

    - by ktambascio
    Hi, I'm trying to integrate ads (admob) into my Android app. It's mostly working, except for one issue with the layout. My layout consists of: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/com.example.photos"> <LinearLayout android:orientation="horizontal" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:id="@+id/status_layout"> <ImageView android:id="@+id/cardStatus" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" /> <TextView android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="@string/hello" android:id="@+id/cardStatusText" /> </LinearLayout> <GridView android:id="@+id/imageGridView" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:padding="10dp" android:verticalSpacing="10dp" android:horizontalSpacing="10dp" android:numColumns="auto_fit" android:columnWidth="100dp" android:stretchMode="columnWidth" android:gravity="center" android:layout_below="@id/status_layout" /> <!-- Place an AdMob ad at the bottom of the screen. --> <!-- It has white text on a black background. --> <!-- The description of the surrounding context is 'Android game'. --> <com.admob.android.ads.AdView android:id="@+id/ad" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" app:backgroundColor="#000000" app:primaryTextColor="#FFFFFF" app:secondaryTextColor="#CCCCCC" app:keywords="Android Photo" /> </RelativeLayout> The ads are shown at the bottom of the screen, just as I want. However, they seem to be overlayed or drawn on top of the bottom portion of the grid view. I would like the gridview to be shorter, so that the ad can fill the bottom portion of the screen, and not hide part of the gridview. The problem is most annoying when you scroll all the way to the bottom of the gridview, and you still cannot fully see the last row items in the grid due to the ad. I'm not sure if this is the standard way that AdMob ads work. If this is the case, adding some padding to the bottom of the grid (if that's possible) would due the trick. That way the user can scroll a bit further, and see the last row in addition to the ad. I just switched from using LinearLayout to RelativeLayout after reading some similar issues with ListViews. Now my ad is along the bottom instead of above the grid, so I'm getting closer. Thoughts? -Kevin

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  • PHP5.3 is not working with MySQL5.1 IIS7 Times out

    - by Thorn007
    I have set up PHP5.3, MySQL5.1, and IIS7 on Window 7 but php doesn't want to work with MySQL. I'm assuming it is a configuration error or an incomplete install on my part. MySQL5.1 is working PHP5.3 is working, phpinfo() shows info and that i have enabled MySQL IIS is setup and using fastCgiModule to run PHP IIS registers php.ini updates port 3306 is firewall free and open to the world php.ini is configured correctly I have added c:\php to the Windows systems PATH In the past I remember moving a file, libmysql.dll, to System32 but I doesn't look like that come with php5.3.1, as the driver comes built in now http://us3.php.net/manual/en/mysqlnd.install.php. (This has been giving me so much trouble I have been documenting my findings on my blog as http://inteldesigner.com/2010/code/having-problems-getting-php5-3-to-work-with-mysql5-1 ) NEED: I need to install PHP manually, don't want to use the quick installer or an older version I need to get PHP5.3 to work with MySQL5.1 so i can install Wordpress2.9 and Drupal7a Any links or suggestion would be great, I have already done everything on the iis web site, nothing is working. I'm guessing they have not updated for new software. BUGS/SOLUTION: The solution is here: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50172 thanks go to don.raman on the iis.net forums http://forums.iis.net/p/1164911/1933894.aspx SYMPTOMS: The php function mysql_connect() in conjunction with php5.3 locks up sever and returns error 500. (IPv6 is the problem see above link) TEST CODE: <?php $con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","***"); if (!$con) { die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error()); } // some code mysql_close($con); ?> ERRORS: From Browser: HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error C:\php\php-cgi.exe - The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout When i run php -f c:\public_html\index.php from the command line i got: PHP Warning: mysql_connect(): [2002] A connection attempt failed because the co nnected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in C:\public _html\index.php on line 10 Warning: mysql_connect(): [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connect ed party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in C:\public_html \index.php on line 10 PHP Warning: mysql_connect(): A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connectio n failed because connected host has failed to respond. in C:\public_html\index.php on line 10 Warning: mysql_connect(): A connection attempt failed because the connected part y did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection fai led because connected host has failed to respond. in C:\public_html\index.php on line 10 Could not connect: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did n ot properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed bec ause connected host has failed to respond. C:\Users\Kevin>

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  • Using PHP's IMAP library triggers Kaspersky's Antivirus

    - by TMG
    Hello, I just started today working with PHP's IMAP library, and while imap_fetchbody or imap_body are called, it is triggering my Kaspersky antivirus. The viruses are Trojan.Win32.Agent.dmyq and Trojan.Win32.FraudPack.aoda. I am running this off a local development machine with XAMPP and Kaspersky AV. Now, I am sure there are viruses there since there is spam in the box (who doesn't need a some viagra or vicodin these days?). And I know that since the raw body includes attachments and different mime-types, bad stuff can be in the body. So my question is: are there any risks using these libraries? I am assuming that the IMAP functions are retrieving the body, caching it to disk/memory and the AV scanning it sees the data. Is that correct? Are there any known security concerns using this library (I couldn't find any)? Does it clean up cached message parts perfectly or might viral files be sitting somewhere? Is there a better way to get plain text out of the body than this? Right now I am using the following code (credit to Kevin Steffer): function get_mime_type(&$structure) { $primary_mime_type = array("TEXT", "MULTIPART","MESSAGE", "APPLICATION", "AUDIO","IMAGE", "VIDEO", "OTHER"); if($structure->subtype) { return $primary_mime_type[(int) $structure->type] . '/' .$structure->subtype; } return "TEXT/PLAIN"; } function get_part($stream, $msg_number, $mime_type, $structure = false, $part_number = false) { if(!$structure) { $structure = imap_fetchstructure($stream, $msg_number); } if($structure) { if($mime_type == get_mime_type($structure)) { if(!$part_number) { $part_number = "1"; } $text = imap_fetchbody($stream, $msg_number, $part_number); if($structure->encoding == 3) { return imap_base64($text); } else if($structure->encoding == 4) { return imap_qprint($text); } else { return $text; } } if($structure->type == 1) /* multipart */ { while(list($index, $sub_structure) = each($structure->parts)) { if($part_number) { $prefix = $part_number . '.'; } $data = get_part($stream, $msg_number, $mime_type, $sub_structure,$prefix . ($index + 1)); if($data) { return $data; } } // END OF WHILE } // END OF MULTIPART } // END OF STRUTURE return false; } // END OF FUNCTION $connection = imap_open($server, $login, $password); $count = imap_num_msg($connection); for($i = 1; $i <= $count; $i++) { $header = imap_headerinfo($connection, $i); $from = $header->fromaddress; $to = $header->toaddress; $subject = $header->subject; $date = $header->date; $body = get_part($connection, $i, "TEXT/PLAIN"); }

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  • Thread not behaving correctly

    - by ivor
    Hello, I wonder if anyone can help me to understand where I could be going wrong with this code; Basically I'm working on a turorial and calling the class below from another class - and it is getting the following error; Exception in thread "Thread-1" java.lang.NullPointerException at org.newdawn.spaceinvaders.TCPChat.run(TCPChat.java:322) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) I realise the error is beibg flagged in another class- but I have tested the other class with a small class which sets up a separate thread - and it works fine, but as soon as I try and implement a new thread in this class - it causes all sorts of problems. Am I setting up the thread correctly in this class? Basically I can set up a thread in this class, with a test loop and it's fine, but when I bring in the functionality of the rest of the game it sometimes hangs, or does not display at all. Any suggestions on where I could be going wrong would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for looking. package org.newdawn.spaceinvaders; import java.awt.BorderLayout; import java.awt.Canvas; import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.Dimension; import java.awt.FlowLayout; import java.awt.Graphics2D; import java.awt.GridLayout; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import java.awt.event.KeyAdapter; import java.awt.event.KeyEvent; import java.awt.event.WindowAdapter; import java.awt.event.WindowEvent; import java.awt.image.BufferStrategy; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Scanner; import java.awt.*;//maybe not needed import javax.swing.*;//maybenot needed import java.util.Random; //import java.io.*; /** * The main hook of our game. This class with both act as a manager * for the display and central mediator for the game logic. * * Display management will consist of a loop that cycles round all * entities in the game asking them to move and then drawing them * in the appropriate place. With the help of an inner class it * will also allow the player to control the main ship. * * As a mediator it will be informed when entities within our game * detect events (e.g. alient killed, played died) and will take * appropriate game actions. * * @author Kevin Glass */ public class Game extends Canvas implements Runnable{ /** The stragey that allows us to use accelerate page flipping */ private BufferStrategy strategy; /** True if the game is currently "running", i.e. the game loop is looping */ private boolean gameRunning = true; /** The list of all the entities that exist in our game */ private ArrayList entities = new ArrayList(); /** The list of entities that need to be removed from the game this loop */ private ArrayList removeList = new ArrayList(); /** The entity representing the player */ private Entity ship; /** The speed at which the player's ship should move (pixels/sec) */ private double moveSpeed = 300; /** The time at which last fired a shot */ private long lastFire = 0; /** The interval between our players shot (ms) */ private long firingInterval = 500; /** The number of aliens left on the screen */ private int alienCount; /** The number of levels progressed */ private double levelCount; /** high score for the user */ private int highScore; /** high score for the user */ private String player = "bob"; //private GetUserInput getPlayer; /** The list of entities that need to be removed from the game this loop */ /** The message to display which waiting for a key press */ private String message = ""; /** True if we're holding up game play until a key has been pressed */ private boolean waitingForKeyPress = true; /** True if the left cursor key is currently pressed */ private boolean leftPressed = false; /** True if the right cursor key is currently pressed */ private boolean rightPressed = false; /** True if we are firing */ private boolean firePressed = false; /** True if game logic needs to be applied this loop, normally as a result of a game event */ private boolean logicRequiredThisLoop = false; //private Thread cThread = new Thread(this); //public Thread t = new Thread(this); //private Thread g = new Thread(this); void setHighscore(int setHS) { highScore = setHS; } public int getHighscore() { return highScore; } public void setPlayer(String setPlayer) { player = setPlayer; } public String getPlayer() { return player; } public void run() { //setup(); System.out.println("hello im running bob"); /*int count = 1; do { System.out.println("Count is: " + count); count++; try{Thread.sleep(1);} catch(InterruptedException e){} } while (count <= 2000000);*/ //Game g =new Game(); //Game g = this; // Start the main game loop, note: this method will not // return until the game has finished running. Hence we are // using the actual main thread to run the game. //setup(); //this.gameLoop(); //try{thread.sleep(1);} //catch{InterruptedException e} } /** * Construct our game and set it running. */ public Game () { //Thread t = new Thread(this);//set up new thread for invaders game //t.run();//run the run method of the game //Game g =new Game(); //setup(); //Thread t = new Thread(this); //thread.start(); //SwingUtilities.invokeLater(this); Thread er = new Thread(this); er.start(); } public void setup(){ //initialise highscore setHighscore(0); // create a frame to contain our game JFrame container = new JFrame("Space Invaders 101"); // get hold the content of the frame and set up the resolution of the game JPanel panel = (JPanel) container.getContentPane(); panel.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(800,600)); //panel.setLayout(null); // setup our canvas size and put it into the content of the frame setBounds(0,0,800,600); panel.add(this); // Tell AWT not to bother repainting our canvas since we're // going to do that our self in accelerated mode setIgnoreRepaint(true); // finally make the window visible container.pack(); container.setResizable(false); container.setVisible(true); // add a listener to respond to the user closing the window. If they // do we'd like to exit the game container.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() { public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) { //cThread.interrupt(); System.exit(0); } }); // add a key input system (defined below) to our canvas // so we can respond to key pressed addKeyListener(new KeyInputHandler()); // request the focus so key events come to us requestFocus(); // create the buffering strategy which will allow AWT // to manage our accelerated graphics createBufferStrategy(2); strategy = getBufferStrategy(); // initialise the entities in our game so there's something // to see at startup initEntities(); } /** * Start a fresh game, this should clear out any old data and * create a new set. */ private void startGame() { // clear out any existing entities and intialise a new set entities.clear(); initEntities(); //initialise highscore setHighscore(0); // blank out any keyboard settings we might currently have leftPressed = false; rightPressed = false; firePressed = false; } /** * Initialise the starting state of the entities (ship and aliens). Each * entitiy will be added to the overall list of entities in the game. */ //private void initEntities() { public void initEntities() { Random randomAlien = new Random(); // create the player ship and place it roughly in the center of the screen //ship = new ShipEntity(this,"sprites/ship.gif",370,550);//orignal ship = new ShipEntity(this,"sprites/ship.gif",700,300);//changed postioning to right hand side entities.add(ship); // create a block of aliens (5 rows, by 12 aliens, spaced evenly) alienCount = 0; levelCount = 1.02; for (int row=0;row<7;row++) {//altered number of rows for (int x=0;x<5;x++) { int r = randomAlien.nextInt(100);//loop added to produce random aliens if (r < 50){ //Entity alien = new AlienEntity(this,"sprites/alien.gif",/*100+*/(x*50),(50)+row*30); Entity alien = new AlienEntity(this,"sprites/alien.gif",100+(x*90),(12)+row*85); entities.add(alien); alienCount++; } } } } //private void initEntities() { public void initAlienEntities() { Random randomAlien = new Random(); // create the player ship and place it roughly in the center of the screen //ship = new ShipEntity(this,"sprites/ship.gif",370,550);//orignal //ship = new ShipEntity(this,"sprites/ship.gif",700,300);//changed postioning to right hand side //entities.add(ship); // create a block of aliens (5 rows, by 12 aliens, spaced evenly) alienCount = 0; levelCount = levelCount + 0.10;//this increases the speed on every level for (int row=0;row<7;row++) {//altered number of rows for (int x=0;x<5;x++) { int r = randomAlien.nextInt(100);//loop added to produce random aliens if (r < 50){//randome check to show alien //Entity alien = new AlienEntity(this,"sprites/alien.gif",/*100+*/(x*50),(50)+row*30); Entity alien = new AlienEntity(this,"sprites/alien.gif",-250+(x*90),(12)+row*85); entities.add(alien); alienCount++; } } } advanceAlienSpeed(levelCount); } /** * Notification from a game entity that the logic of the game * should be run at the next opportunity (normally as a result of some * game event) */ public void updateLogic() { logicRequiredThisLoop = true; } /** * Remove an entity from the game. The entity removed will * no longer move or be drawn. * * @param entity The entity that should be removed */ public void removeEntity(Entity entity) { removeList.add(entity); } /** * Notification that the player has died. */ public void notifyDeath() { message = "Oh no! They got you, try again?"; waitingForKeyPress = true; } /** * Notification that the player has won since all the aliens * are dead. */ public void notifyWin() { message = "Well done! You Win!"; waitingForKeyPress = true; } /** * Notification that an alien has been killed */ public void notifyAlienKilled() { // reduce the alient count, if there are none left, the player has won! alienCount--; if (alienCount == 0) { //notifyWin();win not relevant here... this.initAlienEntities();//call fresh batch of aliens } // if there are still some aliens left then they all need to get faster, so // speed up all the existing aliens advanceAlienSpeed(1.30); } public void advanceAlienSpeed(double speed) { // if there are still some aliens left then they all need to get faster, so // speed up all the existing aliens for (int i=0;i<entities.size();i++) { Entity entity = (Entity) entities.get(i); if (entity instanceof AlienEntity) { // speed up by 2% entity.setHorizontalMovement(entity.getHorizontalMovement() * speed); //entity.setVerticalMovement(entity.getVerticalMovement() * 1.02); } } } /** * Attempt to fire a shot from the player. Its called "try" * since we must first check that the player can fire at this * point, i.e. has he/she waited long enough between shots */ public void tryToFire() { // check that we have waiting long enough to fire if (System.currentTimeMillis() - lastFire < firingInterval) { return; } // if we waited long enough, create the shot entity, and record the time. lastFire = System.currentTimeMillis(); ShotEntity shot = new ShotEntity(this,"sprites/shot.gif",ship.getX()+10,ship.getY()-30); entities.add(shot); } /** * The main game loop. This loop is running during all game * play as is responsible for the following activities: * <p> * - Working out the speed of the game loop to update moves * - Moving the game entities * - Drawing the screen contents (entities, text) * - Updating game events * - Checking Input * <p> */ public void gameLoop() { long lastLoopTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); // keep looping round til the game ends while (gameRunning) { // work out how long its been since the last update, this // will be used to calculate how far the entities should // move this loop long delta = System.currentTimeMillis() - lastLoopTime; lastLoopTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); // Get hold of a graphics context for the accelerated // surface and blank it out Graphics2D g = (Graphics2D) strategy.getDrawGraphics(); g.setColor(Color.black); g.fillRect(0,0,800,600); // cycle round asking each entity to move itself if (!waitingForKeyPress) { for (int i=0;i<entities.size();i++) { Entity entity = (Entity) entities.get(i); entity.move(delta); } } // cycle round drawing all the entities we have in the game for (int i=0;i<entities.size();i++) { Entity entity = (Entity) entities.get(i); entity.draw(g); } // brute force collisions, compare every entity against // every other entity. If any of them collide notify // both entities that the collision has occured for (int p=0;p<entities.size();p++) { for (int s=p+1;s<entities.size();s++) { Entity me = (Entity) entities.get(p); Entity him = (Entity) entities.get(s); if (me.collidesWith(him)) { me.collidedWith(him); him.collidedWith(me); } } } // remove any entity that has been marked for clear up entities.removeAll(removeList); removeList.clear(); // if a game event has indicated that game logic should // be resolved, cycle round every entity requesting that // their personal logic should be considered. if (logicRequiredThisLoop) { //g.drawString("Press any key",(800-g.getFontMetrics().stringWidth("Press any key"))/2,300); for (int i=0;i<entities.size();i++) { Entity entity = (Entity) entities.get(i); entity.doLogic(); } logicRequiredThisLoop = false; } // if we're waiting for an "any key" press then draw the // current message //show highscore at top of screen //show name at top of screen g.setColor(Color.white); g.drawString("Player : "+getPlayer()+" : Score : "+getHighscore(),20,20); if (waitingForKeyPress) { g.setColor(Color.white); g.drawString(message,(800-g.getFontMetrics().stringWidth(message))/2,250); g.drawString("Press any key",(800-g.getFontMetrics().stringWidth("Press any key"))/2,300); } // finally, we've completed drawing so clear up the graphics // and flip the buffer over g.dispose(); strategy.show(); // resolve the movement of the ship. First assume the ship // isn't moving. If either cursor key is pressed then // update the movement appropraitely ship.setVerticalMovement(0);//set to vertical movement if ((leftPressed) && (!rightPressed)) { ship.setVerticalMovement(-moveSpeed);//**took out setHorizaontalMOvement } else if ((rightPressed) && (!leftPressed)) { ship.setVerticalMovement(moveSpeed);//**took out setHorizaontalMOvement } // if we're pressing fire, attempt to fire if (firePressed) { tryToFire(); } // finally pause for a bit. Note: this should run us at about // 100 fps but on windows this might vary each loop due to // a bad implementation of timer try { Thread.sleep(10); } catch (Exception e) {} } } /** * A class to handle keyboard input from the user. The class * handles both dynamic input during game play, i.e. left/right * and shoot, and more static type input (i.e. press any key to * continue) * * This has been implemented as an inner class more through * habbit then anything else. Its perfectly normal to implement * this as seperate class if slight less convienient. * * @author Kevin Glass */ private class KeyInputHandler extends KeyAdapter { /** The number of key presses we've had while waiting for an "any key" press */ private int pressCount = 1; /** * Notification from AWT that a key has been pressed. Note that * a key being pressed is equal to being pushed down but *NOT* * released. Thats where keyTyped() comes in. * * @param e The details of the key that was pressed */ public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) { // if we're waiting for an "any key" typed then we don't // want to do anything with just a "press" if (waitingForKeyPress) { return; } // if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_LEFT) { ////leftPressed = true; ///} //// if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_RIGHT) { //rightPressed = true; if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_UP) { leftPressed = true; } if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_DOWN) { rightPressed = true; } if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_SPACE) { firePressed = true; } } /** * Notification from AWT that a key has been released. * * @param e The details of the key that was released */ public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) { // if we're waiting for an "any key" typed then we don't // want to do anything with just a "released" if (waitingForKeyPress) { return; } if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_UP) {//changed from VK_LEFT leftPressed = false; } if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_DOWN) {//changed from VK_RIGHT rightPressed = false; } if (e.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK_SPACE) { firePressed = false; } } /** * Notification from AWT that a key has been typed. Note that * typing a key means to both press and then release it. * * @param e The details of the key that was typed. */ public void keyTyped(KeyEvent e) { // if we're waiting for a "any key" type then // check if we've recieved any recently. We may // have had a keyType() event from the user releasing // the shoot or move keys, hence the use of the "pressCount" // counter. if (waitingForKeyPress) { if (pressCount == 1) { // since we've now recieved our key typed // event we can mark it as such and start // our new game waitingForKeyPress = false; startGame(); pressCount = 0; } else { pressCount++; } } // if we hit escape, then quit the game if (e.getKeyChar() == 27) { //cThread.interrupt(); System.exit(0); } } } /** * The entry point into the game. We'll simply create an * instance of class which will start the display and game * loop. * * @param argv The arguments that are passed into our game */ //public static void main(String argv[]) { //Game g =new Game(); // Start the main game loop, note: this method will not // return until the game has finished running. Hence we are // using the actual main thread to run the game. //g.gameLoop(); //} }

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  • Ubuntu Server, 2 Ethernet Devices, Same Gateway - Want to force internet traffic through 1 device (or at least allow it to work!)

    - by Chris Drumgoole
    I have a Ubuntu 10.04 Server with 2 ethernet devices, eth0 and eth1. eth0 has a static IP of 192.168.1.210 eth1 has a static IP if 192.168.1.211 The DHCP server (which also serves as the internet gateway) sits at 192.168.1.1. The issue I have right now is when I have both plugged in, I can connect to both IPs over SSH internally, but I can't connect to the internet from the server. If I unplug one of the devices (e.g. eth1), then it works, no problem. (Also, I get the same result when I run sudo ifconfig eth1 down). Question, how can I configure it so that I can have both devices eth0 and eth1 play nice on the same network, but allow internet access as well? (I am open to either enforcing all inet traffic going through a single device, or through both, I'm flexible). From my google searching, it seems I could have a unique (or not popular) problem, so haven't been able to find a solution. Is this something that people generally don't do? The reason I want to make use of both ethernet devices is because I want to run different local traffic services on on both to split the load, so to speak... Thanks in advance. UPDATE Contents of /etc/network/interfaces: # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp # The secondary network interface #auto eth1 #iface eth1 inet dhcp (Note: above, I commented out the last 2 lines because I thought that was causing issues... but it didn't solve it) netstat -rn Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface 192.168.1.0 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0 UPDATE 2 I made a change to the /etc/network/interfaces file as suggested by Kevin. Before I display the file contents and the route table, when I am logged into the server (through SSH), I can not ping an external server, so this is the same issue I was experiencing that led to me posting this question. I ran a /etc/init.d/networking restart after making the file changes. Contents of /etc/network/interfaces: # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback # The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp address 192.168.1.210 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1 # The secondary network interface auto eth1 iface eth1 inet dhcp address 192.168.1.211 netmask 255.255.255.0 ifconfig output eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 78:2b:cb:4c:02:7f inet addr:192.168.1.210 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::7a2b:cbff:fe4c:27f/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:6397 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:683 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:538881 (538.8 KB) TX bytes:85597 (85.5 KB) Interrupt:36 Memory:da000000-da012800 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 78:2b:cb:4c:02:80 inet addr:192.168.1.211 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::7a2b:cbff:fe4c:280/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:5799 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:8 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:484436 (484.4 KB) TX bytes:1184 (1.1 KB) Interrupt:48 Memory:dc000000-dc012800 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:635 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:635 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:38154 (38.1 KB) TX bytes:38154 (38.1 KB) netstat -rn Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

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  • Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community

    There we go! I finally managed to push myself forward and pick up an old, actually too old, idea since I ever arrived here in Mauritius more than six years ago. I'm talking about a community for all kind of ICT connected people. In the past (back in Germany), I used to be involved in various community activities. For example, I was part of the Microsoft Community Leader/Influencer Program (CLIP) in Germany due to an FAQ on Visual FoxPro, actually Active FoxPro Pages (AFP) to be more precise. Then in 2003/2004 I addressed the responsible person of the dFPUG user group in Speyer in order to assist him in organising monthly user group meetings. Well, he handed over management completely, and attended our meetings regularly. Why did it take you so long? Well, I don't want to bother you with the details but short version is that I was too busy on either job (building up new companies) or private life (got married and we have two lovely children, eh 'monsters') or even both. But now is the time where I was starting to look for new fields given the fact that I gained some spare time. My businesses are up and running, the kids are in school, and I am finally in a position where I can commit myself again to community activities. And I love to do that! Why a new user group? Good question... And 'easy' to answer. Since back in 2007 I did my usual research, eh Google searches, to see whether there existing user groups in Mauritius and in which field of interest. And yes, there are! If I recall this correctly, then there are communities for PHP, Drupal, Python (just recently), Oracle, and Linux (which used to be even two). But... either they do not exist anymore, they are dormant, or there is only a low heart-beat, frankly speaking. And yes, I went to meetings of the Linux User Group Meta (Mauritius) back in 2010/2011 and just recently. I really like the setup and the way the LUGM is organised. It's just that I have a slightly different point of view on how a user group or community should organise itself and how to approach future members. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing others doing a very good job, I'm only saying that I'd like to do it differently. The last meeting of the LUGM was awesome; read my feedback about it. Ok, so what's up with 'Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community' or short: MSCC? As I've already written in my article on 'Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion' I think it is essential in a world of IT to stay 'connected' with a good number of other people in the same field. There is so much dynamic and every day's news that it is almost impossible to keep on track with all of them. The MSCC is going to provide a common platform to exchange experience and share knowledge between each other. You might be a newbie and want to know what to expect working as a software developer, or as a database administrator, or maybe as an IT systems administrator, or you're an experienced geek that loves to share your ideas or solutions that you implemented to solve a specific problem, or you're the business (or HR) guy that is looking for 'fresh' blood to enforce your existing team. Or... you're just interested and you'd like to communicate with like-minded people. Meetup of 26.06.2013 @ L'arabica: Of course there are laptops around. Free WiFi, power outlet, coffee, code and Linux in one go. The MSCC is technology-agnostic and spans an umbrella over any kind of technology. Simply because you can't ignore other technologies anymore in a connected IT world as we have. A front-end developer for iOS applications should have the chance to connect with a Python back-end coder and eventually with a DBA for MySQL or PostgreSQL and exchange their experience. Furthermore, I'm a huge fan of cross-platform development, and it is very pleasant to have pure Web developers - with all that HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and JS libraries stuff - and passionate C# or Java coders at the same table. This diversity of knowledge can assist and boost your personal situation. And last but not least, there are projects and open positions 'flying' around... People might like to hear others opinion about an employer or get new impulses on how to tackle down an issue at their workspace, etc. This is about community. And that's how I see the MSCC in general - free of any limitations be it by programming language or technology. Having the chance to exchange experience and to discuss certain aspects of technology saves you time and money, and it's a pleasure to enjoy. Compared to dusty books and remote online resources. It's human! Organising meetups (meetings, get-together, gatherings - you name it!) As of writing this article, the MSCC is currently meeting every Wednesday for the weekly 'Code & Coffee' session at various locations (suggestions are welcome!) in Mauritius. This might change in the future eventually but especially at the beginning I think it is very important to create awareness in the Mauritian IT world. Yes, we are here! Come and join us! ;-) The MSCC's main online presence is located at Meetup.com because it allows me to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments very easily, and any member can have a look who else is involved so that an exchange of contacts is given at any time. In combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there is a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Trello is also available as free smartphone app. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians! Recent updates The MSCC is now officially participating in the O'Reilly UK User Group programm and we are allowed to request review or recension copies of recent titles. Additionally, we have a discount code for any books or ebooks that you might like to order on shop.oreilly.com. More applications for user group sponsorship programms are pending and I'm looking forward to a couple of announcement very soon. And... we need some kind of 'corporate identity' - Over at the MSCC website there is a call for action (or better said a contest with prizes) to create a unique design for the MSCC. This would include a decent colour palette, a logo, graphical banners for Meetup, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and of course badges for our craftsmen to add to their personal blogs and websites. Please spread the word and contribute. Thanks!

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 19, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 19, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Visual Studio UnitTest Coverage Analyzer: Analyzing Visual Studio Unittest Coverage Exported XML filecrudwork is a library of reuseable classes for developing .NET applications: crudwork is a collection of reuseable .NET classes and features. If you searched for StpLibrary and landed here, you're in the right place. Origi...CWU Animated AVL Tree Tutorial: This is a silverlight demo of a self-balancing AVL tree. On the original team were CWU undergraduates Eric Brown, Barend Venter, Nick Rushton, Arry...DotNetNuke® Skin Modern: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Standards" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. The skin utilizes both the telerik...DotNetNuke® Skin Monster: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Jon Edwards of SlumtownHero.co.za. This package uses totally tab...DotNetNuke® Skin Synapse: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Exionyte Solutions. This package features 2 colors with 4...earthworm: Earthworm is a pet project intended as a repository of data access logic, including some ORM, state management and bridging the gap between connect...ema: EMA is a place for collaborative effort to implement a PowerGrid game engine. For more info on PowerGrid the board game see: http://www.boardgamege...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: Extending capabilities of existing SharePoint 2007 Web Parts by inheriting and alterFreedomCraft: Craft development siteG.B SecondLife Sculpter: This is a Sculptor for "secondlife"InfoPath Error Viewer: InfoPath Error Viewer provides an intuitive list to show all errors in the entire InfoPath form. You'll no longer have to find the validation error...LEET (LEET Enhances Exploratory Testing): LEET is a capture-replay tool based on Microsoft’s User Interface Automation Framework. It is targeted at agile teams, and provides support for us...Linq To Entity: Linq,Linq to Entity,EntityMACFBTest: This is a test for a Facebook application.MetaProperties: MetaProperties helps you to create event driven architectures in .NET. It saves you time and it helps you avoid mistakes. It's compatible with WPF ...ownztec web: projeto da ownztec.comParallel Programming Guide: Content for the latest patterns & practices book on design patterns for parallel programming. Downloadable book outline and draft chapters as well ...Perseus - Sistema de Matrícula On-Line: Sistema de matrícula desenvolvido pelo 5º período de Desenvolvimento Web da FACECLA.Project Tru Tiên: Project EL tru tiên, ZhuxianProSysPlus.Net Framework: How do I get the ease and efficiency of my work in VFP (R.I.P. 2010)? The answer is here: the ProSysPlus.Net Framework. Why is it open source? Wh...Quick Anime Renamer: Originally included with AniPlayer X, Quick Anime Renamer easily renames your anime files into a "cleaner" format so you wont get retinal detachment.Simple XNA Button: This is a project of a helper for instancing Simple Buttons in XNA with a ButtonPanel. Its got various features like. Load a Panel from a Plain Tex...SteelVersion - Monitor your .NET Application versioning: SteelVersion helps you to find and store versioning information about .NET assemblies ("Explorer" mode). It also makes it easier to continuously ch...Stellar Results: Astronomical Tracking System for IUPUI CSCI506 - Fall 2007, Team2TheHunterGetsTheDeer: first AIwandal: wandalWeb App Data Architect's CodeCAN: Contains different types of code samples to explore different types of technical solutions/patterns from an architect's point of view.Yet Another GPS: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows MobileNew ReleasesASP.Net Client Dependency Framework: v1.0 RC1: ASP.Net Client Dependency has progressed to release candidate 1. With the community feedback and bug reports we've been able to make some great upd...C# FTP Library: FTPLib v1.0.1.1: This release has a couple of small bug fixes as well as the new abilities to specify a port to connect to and to create a new directory with the Cr...crudwork is a library of reuseable classes for developing .NET applications: crudwork 2.2.0.1: crudwork 2.2.0.1 (initial version)DotNetNuke® Skin Modern: Modern Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Standards" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. The skin utilizes both the telerik...DotNetNuke® Skinning Extensions: Nav Menu Demo Skins: This very basic skin demonstrates: 1. How to force NAV menu to generate an unordered list menu 2. The creation of a sub menu, both horizontal and ...DotNetNuke® XML: 04.03.05: XML/XSL Module 04.03.05 Release Candidate This is a maintainace release. Full Quallified Namespace avoids conflicts with Namespaces used by Teler...eCommerce by Onex Community Edition: Installer of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0: Installer of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0 Last changes: Added integration with Paypal Corrected of adding photos and attachments to products ...eCommerce by Onex Community Edition: Source code of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0: Changes in version 1.0: Added integration with Paypal Corrected of adding photos and attachments to products Fixed problem with cancellation of...Employee Info Starter Kit: v2.2.0 (Visual Studio 2005-2008): This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (CRUD) the employee info of a com...Employee Info Starter Kit: v4.0.0.alpha (Visual Studio 2010): Employee Info Starter Kit is a ASP.NET based web application, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and d...Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.4: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.4). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. Once you have ext...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: ContentQueryAdvanced: This .wsp file contains a single web part ContentQueryAdvanced. This web part inherits from ContentQuery web part and adds a ToolPart field for a ...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: Source Code: Zip file includes all the source code used to extend Content Query Web Part, adding a Tool Part field to insert a CAML query/filter/sortFacebook Developer Toolkit: Version 3.02: Updated copyright. No new functionality. Version 3.1 in the works.fleXdoc: template-based server-side document generator (docx): fleXdoc 1.0 (final): fleXdoc consists of a webservice and a (test)client for the service. Make sure you also download the testclient: you can use it to test the install...InfoPath Error Viewer: InfoPath Error Viewer 1.0: This is an intial version of this tool. You can: 1. View all errors in a list. 2. Locate to a binding control of an error field. 3. See the detai...LEET (LEET Enhances Exploratory Testing): LEET Alpha: The first public release of LEET includes the ability to record tests from running GUIs, assist in writing tests manually from a running GUI, edit ...Linq To Entity: Linq to Entity: The Entity Framework enables developers to work with data in the form of domain-specific objects and properties, such as customers and customer add...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.8.56699: Fixed peformance and memory usage. Fixed Letitbit provider. Added detecting IMDB, NFO, TV.com... links in RSS Monitor. Supported password len...MetaProperties: MetaProperties 1.0.0.0: This is a multi-targeted release of MetaProperties for the desktop and Silverlight versions of the .NET framework. The desktop version is fully ...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 2: Added a cancelable Stream.CopyTo. Depends on Nito.Linq 0.2. Please report any issues via the Issue Tracker.Project Server 2007 Timesheet AutoStatus Plus: AutoStatusPlus 1.0.1.0: AutoStatusPlus 1.0.1.0 Supported Systems x86 and x64 Project Server 2007 deployments with or without MOSS 2007 Recommended Patchlevels WSS 3.0: ...Project Tru Tiên: Elements-test V1: Mô tả Bản elements.data - có full ID của bản Elemens.data Tru tiên 2 VIệt Nam (V37) - có full ID của bản Elements.data server offline tru tiên (hiệ...Quick Anime Renamer: Quick Anime Renamer v0.1: AniPlayer X v1.4.5 - started 3/18/2010Initial Release!QuickieB2B: Quickie v1.0b: QuickieB2B - made for DEV4FUN competition organized by Microsoft CroatiaSilverlight 3.0 Advanced ToolTipService: Advanced ToolTipService v2.0.2: This release is compiled against the Silverlight 3.0 runtime. A demonstration on how to set the ToolTip content to a property of the DataContext o...Simple XNA Button: XNA Button 1.0: The Main Project. this uses XNA 3.0 but it can be build with lower versions of XNA Framework. This was made using Visual Studio 2008.StoryQ: StoryQ 2.0.3 Library and Converter UI: New features in this release: Tagging and a tag-capable rich html report. The code generator is capable of generating entire classes This relea...The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Version 1.0: Version 1.0VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30318.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWord Index extracts words or sentences from Word document according to patterns: Word Index 1.0.1.0 (For Word 2007 and Word 2003): Word Index for Word 2007 & 2003 : WordIndex.msi (Win-Installer Setup for Word Index) Source code : wordindex.codeplex.comV1.0.1.0.zip : (Source co...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS-Alfa.1: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows MobileMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQOpen Data App Framework (ODAF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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  • That Escalated Quickly

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging  - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with  > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

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  • Are Chromebooks the New Netbooks, and What Does That Mean?

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Netbooks — small, cheap, slow laptops — were once very popular. They fell out of favor — people bought them because they seemed cheap and portable, but the actual experience was lackluster. Most netbooks now sit unused. Windows netbooks have vanished from stores today, but there’s a new super-cheap laptop — the Chromebook. Chromebook sales numbers are impressive, but their usage statistics tell a different story. Are Chromebooks just the new netbook? The Problem With Netbooks Netbooks seemed appealing, especially in an age before tablets and lightweight ultrabooks. You could buy a netbook for $200 or so and have a portable device that let you get on the Internet. The name “netbook” spelled that out — it was a portable device for getting on the ‘net. They weren’t really that great. The original netbook was a lightweight Asus Eee PC that ran Linux alone and had a small amount of fast flash storage. Netbooks eventually ran heavier Windows XP operating systems — Windows Vista was out, but it was just too bloated to run on netbooks. Manufacturers added slow magnetic hard drives, bloatware, and even DVD drives! They couldn’t run most Windows software very well. The build quality was poor and their keyboards were tiny and cramped. People liked the idea of a lightweight device that let them get on the Internet and loved the cheap price, but the actual experience wasn’t great. Chromebook Sales Chromebook sales numbers seem surprisingly high. NPD reported that Chromebooks were 21% of all notebooks sold in the US in 2013. If you combine laptop and tablet sales into a single statistic, Chromebooks were 9.6% of all those devices sold. That’s 2/3 as many Chromebooks sold as iPads in the US! Of Amazon’s best-selling laptop computers, two of the top three are Chromebooks. These definitely look like successful products. Unlike netbooks, Chromebooks are taking off in a big way in the education market. Many schools are buying Chromebooks for their students instead of more expensive Windows laptops. They’re easier to manage and lock down than Windows laptops, but — more importantly for cash-strapped schools — they’re very cheap. Netbooks never had this sort of momentum in schools. Chromebook Usage Statistics Here’s where the rosy picture of Chromebooks starts to become more realistic. StatCounter’s browser usage statistics show how widely used different operating systems are. For example, Windows 7 has the highest share with 35.71% of web activity in April, 2014. The chart doesn’t even show Chrome OS at all, although there is an “Other” number near the bottom. Click the Download Data link to download a CSV file and we can view more detailed information. Chrome OS only accounted for 0.38% of web usage in April, 2014. Desktop Linux, which people often shrug at, accounted for 1.52% in the same month. To its credit, Chrome OS usage has increased. Chromebooks were widely mocked back in November, 2013 when the sales numbers came out. After all, they only accounted for 0.11% of web usage globally in November, 2013! But Chrome OS numbers have been improving: Nov, 2013: 0.11% Dec, 2013: 0.22% Jan, 2014: 0.31% Feb, 2014: 0.35% Mar, 2014: 0.36% Apr, 2014: 0.38% Chrome OS is climbing, but it’s definitely still in the “Other” category. It isn’t as high as we’d expect to see it with those types of sales numbers. Chromebooks vs. Netbooks Chromebooks are more limited devices than traditional PCs. You can do quite a few things, but you have to do it all using Chrome or Chrome apps. Most people won’t be enabling developer mode and installing a Linux desktop. You don’t have access to the powerful desktop software available for Windows and even Mac OS X. On the other hand, these Chromebooks are less compromised than netbooks in many ways. They come with a lightweight operating system designed for portable, mobile devices. They don’t come packed with any bloatware, like the bloatware you’ll find on competing Windows PCs and the original netbooks. They’re cheaper because the manufacturer doesn’t have to pay for a Windows license. There’s no need for antivirus software weighing the operating system down. They’re larger than the original netbooks, with many of them being 11.6-inches instead of the original 8-inch bodies many older netbooks came with. They have larger, more comfortable keyboards and fast solid-state storage. Really, Chromebooks are what netbooks wanted to be. People didn’t buy netbooks to use typical Windows software — they just wanted a lightweight PC. Of course, for many people, the real successor to netbooks is tablets. If all you want is a portable device to throw in a bag so you can get online, maybe a tablet is better. Where Does This Leave Chromebooks? So, are Chromebooks the new netbooks? It’s a bit early to answer that question. Chromebooks are definitely not out of the competition — their sales look good and their usage share is increasing. On the other hand, Chrome OS is still pretty far behind. They’re not catching fire like tablets did. Maybe netbooks were just before their time and Chromebooks were what they were always meant to be. Just as Microsoft’s Windows XP tablets failed, Windows XP netbooks also failed. Tablets took off with a more refined operating system on better hardware years later. “Netbooks” — or Chromebooks — are now taking off with a more purpose-built operating system on better hardware, too. It’s hard to count Chromebooks out because they provide a much better experience than netbooks ever did. If you’re one of the people who wants to use old Windows desktop apps on your portable laptop, you may think netbooks were better — but most people don’t want that. But maybe people either want a full desktop PC experience or a full mobile tablet experience. Is there a place for a laptop with a keyboard that can only view websites? We’ll have to wait and see. Image Credit: Kevin Jarret on Flickr, Clive Darra on Flickr, Sean Freese on Flickr

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  • Full-text Indexing Books Online

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    While preparing for a recent SQL Saturday presentation, I was struck by a crazy idea (shocking, I know): Could someone import the content of SQL Server Books Online into a database and apply full-text indexing to it?  The answer is yes, and it's really quite easy to do. The first step is finding the installed help files.  If you have SQL Server 2012, BOL is installed under the Microsoft Help Library.  You can find the install location by opening SQL Server Books Online and clicking the gear icon for the Help Library Manager.  When the new window pops up click the Settings link, you'll get the following: You'll see the path under Library Location. Once you navigate to that path you'll have to drill down a little further, to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary\content\Microsoft\store.  This is where the help file content is kept if you downloaded it for offline use. Depending on which products you've downloaded help for, you may see a few hundred files.  Fortunately they're named well and you can easily find the "SQL_Server_Denali_Books_Online_" files.  We are interested in the .MSHC files only, and can skip the Installation and Developer Reference files. Despite the .MHSC extension, these files are compressed with the standard Zip format, so your favorite archive utility (WinZip, 7Zip, WinRar, etc.) can open them.  When you do, you'll see a few thousand files in the archive.  We are only interested in the .htm files, but there's no harm in extracting all of them to a folder.  7zip provides a command-line utility and the following will extract to a D:\SQLHelp folder previously created: 7z e –oD:\SQLHelp "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary\content\Microsoft\store\SQL_Server_Denali_Books_Online_B780_SQL_110_en-us_1.2.mshc" *.htm Well that's great Rob, but how do I put all those files into a full-text index? I'll tell you in a second, but first we have to set up a few things on the database side.  I'll be using a database named Explore (you can certainly change that) and the following setup is a fragment of the script I used in my presentation: USE Explore; GO CREATE SCHEMA help AUTHORIZATION dbo; GO -- Create default fulltext catalog for later FT indexes CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG FTC AS DEFAULT; GO CREATE TABLE help.files(file_id int not null IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT PK_help_files PRIMARY KEY, path varchar(256) not null CONSTRAINT UNQ_help_files_path UNIQUE, doc_type varchar(6) DEFAULT('.xml'), content varbinary(max) not null); CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON help.files(content TYPE COLUMN doc_type LANGUAGE 1033) KEY INDEX PK_help_files; This will give you a table, default full-text catalog, and full-text index on that table for the content you're going to insert.  I'll be using the command line again for this, it's the easiest method I know: for %a in (D:\SQLHelp\*.htm) do sqlcmd -S. -E -d Explore -Q"set nocount on;insert help.files(path,content) select '%a', cast(c as varbinary(max)) from openrowset(bulk '%a', SINGLE_CLOB) as c(c)" You'll need to copy and run that as one line in a command prompt.  I'll explain what this does while you run it and watch several thousand files get imported: The "for" command allows you to loop over a collection of items.  In this case we want all the .htm files in the D:\SQLHelp folder.  For each file it finds, it will assign the full path and file name to the %a variable.  In the "do" clause, we'll specify another command to be run for each iteration of the loop.  I make a call to "sqlcmd" in order to run a SQL statement.  I pass in the name of the server (-S.), where "." represents the local default instance. I specify -d Explore as the database, and -E for trusted connection.  I then use -Q to run a query that I enclose in double quotes. The query uses OPENROWSET(BULK…SINGLE_CLOB) to open the file as a data source, and to treat it as a single character large object.  In order for full-text indexing to work properly, I have to convert the text content to varbinary. I then INSERT these contents along with the full path of the file into the help.files table created earlier.  This process continues for each file in the folder, creating one new row in the table. And that's it! 5 SQL Statements and 2 command line statements to unzip and import SQL Server Books Online!  In case you're wondering why I didn't use FILESTREAM or FILETABLE, it's simply because I haven't learned them…yet. I may return to this blog after I figure that out and update it with the steps to do so.  I believe that will make it even easier. In the spirit of exploration, I'll leave you to work on some fulltext queries of this content.  I also recommend playing around with the sys.dm_fts_xxxx DMVs (I particularly like sys.dm_fts_index_keywords, it's pretty interesting).  There are additional example queries in the download material for my presentation linked above. Many thanks to Kevin Boles (t) for his advice on (re)checking the content of the help files.  Don't let that .htm extension fool you! The 2012 help files are actually XML, and you'd need to specify '.xml' in your document type column in order to extract the full-text keywords.  (You probably noticed this in the default definition for the doc_type column.)  You can query sys.fulltext_document_types to get a complete list of the types that can be full-text indexed. I also need to thank Hilary Cotter for giving me the original idea. I believe he used MSDN content in a full-text index for an article from waaaaaaaaaaay back, that I can't find now, and had forgotten about until just a few days ago.  He is also co-author of Pro Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008, which I highly recommend.  He also has some FTS articles on Simple Talk: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features/ http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features,-part-2/

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 05, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 05, 2013Popular ReleasesEvent-Based Components AppBuilder: AB3.Iteration.53: Iteration 53 (Feature): Allow drag&drop of existing component (flow, step) from component list to chart. Duplicate names are automatically recognized and solved. By the color of the draged component you can see what kind of component (flow or step) is currently draged. New: AddExistingComponentFlow, PartDragDropEventHandler, ExistingStepPreparerLearning JQuery 1.3 And Above Examples: jQuery Demo whats got Added in 1.8: Getting Startedhttp://jqdemos.darshanmarathe.com Getting JQueryJQuery CDN Google Click Microsoft Click Media Temple Click Creating your first page Show/Hide JavaScript fundamentals JavaScript as a Scripting language JavaScript as a functional programming language JavaScript as a dynamic programming language Selectors CSS Selectors Attribute Selectors Custom Selectors Form Selectors Events Page Load/Ready Events Binding Events Compund Events Tricks and other fundas Effects Inline css Modi...Pulse: Pulse 0.6.7.3: Pulse is now accepting donations. To donate by Bitcoin or PayPal see https://pulse.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Donations Lots of updates in v0.6.7.3: (Feature) New option allows you to disable wallpaper changing when a full screen application is running. This way Pulse doesn't slow down/lag your videos and games :) (Fix) Some users were getting Wallbase errors when logging in. This has been fixed. (Feature) Right click a provider and you can now make a copy of it by selecting the "Dupl...Upida.Net: Upida.Net 2.2: Example "MyClients" fixed and updated Redundant libraries removed in examples References fixed in examplesCompare .NET Objects: Version 1.7.3.0: Fix for problem with enum showing type in the breadcrumb Changed skip of same class from GetHashCode to use ReferenceEquals Applied patch 15082 from FarrisMoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.1: Release 1.11.1 =========== =Bug Fixes= =========== Added more tile blocks (Clouds, crimstone) Added items (binoculars, rope, Pirahna Gun) Added ores (Lead, Tin) Chests now work, I broke them yesterday. =============== =Known Issues= =============== I am having trouble with new background walls. So you will see a red outline for crimson then a pink inside. Same with where I think the queen bee lives.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.19: NEW: Added Option to login as Guest NEW: Added Menu Option to delete an Forum Account NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org links FIXED: Fixed Ripping of http://forum.babeunion.com ForumsBeetle.js: Beetle.js v0.9: Beetle.js Beta v0.9DNN® Form and List: DNN Form and List 06.00.07: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.06 Changes to 6.0.7•Fixed an error in datatypes.config that caused calculated fields to be missing in 6.0.6 Changes to 6.0.6•Add in Sql to remove 'text on row' setting for UserDefinedTable to make SQL Azure compatible. •Add new azureCompatible element to manifest. •Added a fix for importing templates. Changes to 6.0.2•Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 •Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext C...Trace Reader for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Trace Reader (1.2013.10.3): Fix a bug when the first caracter of a description line is '[' Add search featureSimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.03: SourceCode and Sample .Net Framework 3.5 AnyCPU compile.Application Architecture Guidelines: App Architecture Guidelines 3.0.8: This document is an overview of software qualities, principles, patterns, practices, tools and libraries.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.6: 2013.09.30 Ver5.9.6 (1)SMTP???????、???????????????? (2)WinAPI??????? (3)Web???????CGI???????????????????????Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.2: Mostly internal code tweaks. added -nosize switch to turn off the size- and gzip-calculations done after minification. removed the comments in the build targets script for the old AjaxMin build task (discussion #458831). Fixed an issue with extended Unicode characters encoded inside a string literal with adjacent \uHHHH\uHHHH sequences. Fixed an IndexOutOfRange exception when encountering a CSS identifier that's a single underscore character (_). In previous builds, the net35 and net20...AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2013 Release (Updated) Version 7.1002September 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Important UpdateThis release has been updated to fix two issues: Upda...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha is for testers to figure out if we got the NEW api plugged in ok. thanksVisual Log Parser: VisualLogParser: Portable Visual Log Parser for Dotnet 4.0AudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download ends. word lis...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1309.28: Fix a bug, where WPP crash when running on a computer where Windows was installed in another language than Fr, En or De, and launching the Update Creation Wizard. Fix a bug, where WPP crash if some Multi-Thread job are launch with more than 64 items. Add a button to abort "Install This Update" wizard. Allow WPP to remember which columns are shown last time. Make URL clickable on the Update Information Tab. Add a new feature, when Double-Clicking on an update, the default action exec...Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...New ProjectsC# GUI Oscillocope: c# oscilloscope gui programmingDefinitive Business Management: Business ManagementEnough Connectivity: Enough Connectivity eases the access to Bluetooth and other devices that are connected via the SerialPort on Netduino, .NET Gadgeteer or .NET Micro Framework.Excel add-in for the Intel Math Kernel Library: Expose Intel MKL functionality in Excel.Fix SP 2013 Multitenant Missing BCS and SSS Links: This Project fixes 3 issues in SP 2013 Enterprise Multitenancygaragemanagement: Auto Garage Management SoftwareHost: YibushanrenIRSystem: it's a development project for user activitiesKSP Vessel Viewer: A tiny tool to display craft-file informationLerniXml: Learning XML (+ related technologies)lkasdjlkaslkdljkasd: aPersonal Accountant: Simple and flexible web service for personal finance accounting.Quan Ly Nha Hang: Qu?n lý nhà hàngTicTacToe Ultimate: Services for Score board for Tic Tac Toe game like, but harder and more interesting.Unconfused Bills .net: Unconfuse your bills with this Google Calendar integrated budgeting toolVisual Studio 2010 Extensions - Mike Parks & Cory Cissell: Source code to the extensions Cory and I made a few years back.

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  • BizTalk: Internals: the Partner Direct Ports and the Orchestration Chains

    - by Leonid Ganeline
    Partner Direct Port is one of the BizTalk hidden gems. It opens simple ways to the several messaging patterns. This article based on the Kevin Lam’s blog article. The article is pretty detailed but it still leaves several unclear pieces. So I have created a sample and will show how it works from different perspectives. Requirements We should create an orchestration chain where the messages should be routed from the first stage to the second stage. The messages should not be modified. All messages has the same message type. Common artifacts Source code can be downloaded here. It is interesting but all orchestrations use only one port type. It is possible because all ports are one-way ports and use only one operation. I have added a B orchestration. It helps to test the sample, showing all test messages in channel. The Receive shape Filter is empty. A Receive Port (R_Shema1Direct) is a plain Direct Port. As you can see, a subscription expression of this direct port has only one part, the MessageType for our test schema: A Filer is empty but, as you know, a link from the Receive shape to the Port creates this MessageType expression. I use only one Physical Receive File port to send a message to all processes. Each orchestration outputs a Trace.WriteLine(“<Orchestration Name>”). Forward Binding This sample has three orchestrations: A_1, A_21 and A_22. A_1 is a sender, A_21 and A_22 are receivers. Here is a subscription of the A_1 orchestration: It has two parts A MessageType. The same was for the B orchestration. A ReceivePortID. There was no such parameter for the B orchestration. It was created because I have bound the orchestration port with Physical Receive File port. This binding means the PortID parameter is added to the subscription. How to set up the ports? All ports involved in the message exchange should be the same port type. It forces us to use the same operation and the same message type for the bound ports. This step as absolutely contra-intuitive. We have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the sending orchestration, A_1. The first strange thing is it is not a partner orchestration we have to choose but an orchestration port. But the most strange thing is we have to choose exactly this orchestration and exactly this port.It is not a port from the partner, receive orchestrations, A_21 or A_22, but it is A_1 orchestration and S_SentFromA_1 port. Now we have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the received orchestrations, A_21 and A_22. Nothing strange is here except a parameter name. We choose the port of the sender, A_1 orchestration and S_SentFromA_1 port. As you can see the Partner Orchestration parameter for the sender and receiver orchestrations is the same. Testing I dropped a test file in a file folder. There we go: A dropped file was received by B and by A_1 A_1 sent a message forward. A message was received by B, A_21, A_22 Let’s look at a context of a message sent by A_1 on the second step: A MessageType part. It is quite expected. A PartnerService, a ParnerPort, an Operation. All those parameters were set up in the Partner Orchestration parameter on both bound ports.     Now let’s see a subscription of the A_21 and A_22 orchestrations. Now it makes sense. That’s why we have chosen such a strange value for the Partner Orchestration parameter of the sending orchestration. Inverse Binding This sample has three orchestrations: A_11, A_12 and A_2. A_11 and A_12 are senders, A_2 is receiver. How to set up the ports? All ports involved in the message exchange should be the same port type. It forces us to use the same operation and the same message type for the bound ports. This step as absolutely contra-intuitive. We have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for a receiving orchestration, A_2. The first strange thing is it is not a partner orchestration we have to choose but an orchestration port. But the most strange thing is we have to choose exactly this orchestration and exactly this port.It is not a port from the partner, sent orchestrations, A_11 or A_12, but it is A_2 orchestration and R_SentToA_2 port. Now we have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the sending orchestrations, A_11 and A_12. Nothing strange is here except a parameter name. We choose the port of the sender, A_2 orchestration and R_SentToA_2 port. Testing I dropped a test file in a file folder. There we go: A dropped file was received by B, A_11 and by A_12 A_11 and A_12 sent two messages forward. The messages were received by B, A_2 Let’s see what was a context of a message sent by A_1 on the second step: A MessageType part. It is quite expected. A PartnerService, a ParnerPort, an Operation. All those parameters were set up in the Partner Orchestration parameter on both bound ports. Here is a subscription of the A_2 orchestration. Models I had a hard time trying to explain the Partner Direct Ports in simple terms. I have finished with this model: Forward Binding Receivers know a Sender. Sender doesn’t know Receivers. Publishers know a Subscriber. Subscriber doesn’t know Publishers. 1 –> 1 1 –> M Inverse Binding Senders know a Receiver. Receiver doesn’t know Senders. Subscribers know a Publisher. Publisher doesn’t know Subscribers. 1 –> 1 M –> 1 Notes   Orchestration chain It’s worth to note, the Partner Direct Port Binding creates a chain opened from one side and closed from another. The Forward Binding: A new Receiver can be added at run-time. The Sender can not be changed without design-time changes in Receivers. The Inverse Binding: A new Sender can be added at run-time. The Receiver can not be changed without design-time changes in Senders.

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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 Sunday, October 20, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 20, 2013Popular ReleasesKerbalAlarmClock: v2.6.1.0 Release: Version 2.6.1.0 Recompiled it for 0.21 Added Crew Alarms (track Kerbal rather than Vessel) Added Distance Target Alarms - distance from target vessel or altitude above planet Added Launch Rendezvous Alarm (under Ascending/Descending Node for Landed craft) - MechJeb2 code - thanks r4m0n Allow restoration of Nodes that you have passed (useful for interplanetary burns) Added missing Dres Transfer Model data - thanks Voneiden Added view only version of Alarm clock to both Space Center...MSBuild Extension Pack: October 2013: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack October 2013 release provides a collection of over 480 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GUI...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.49: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org links NEW: Added Support for "ImgNext.com" links NEW: Added Support for "HostUrImage.com" links NEW: Added Support for "3XVintage.com" linksMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.583b: As before release but fixed for no movie poster sourcesNew* Both - Added 'An' as option to ignore in title * Movie - Renaming - added %Z - Sorttitle to Legend * Movie - Renaming - added %O - Audio Channels to Legend * Movie - Remove a poster source from priority list. Reset List back to defaults. * Made Media Companion truly portable application. Fixed* Movie - browse for Poster Or Fanart, allows for jpg, tbn, png and bmp images * Movie - Alt Fanart Browser - Url or Browse window now fully...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.3.1: Release 1.11.3.1 ================ = New Features = ================ Added markers for Copper Cache, Silver Cache and the Enchanted Sword. ============= = Bug Fixes = ============= Use Official Colors now no longer tries to change the Draw Wires option instead. World reading was breaking for people with a stock 1.2 Terraria version. Changed world name reading so it does not crash the program if you load MoreTerra while Terraria is saving the world. =================== = Feature Removal = =...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Cloud Design Patterns: 1st drop of Cloud Design Patterns project. It contains 14 patterns with 6 related guidance.Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 and v1.3 beta 2 Support for Windows 8.1 RTM and VS2013 RTM Xaml: New property: AutoLoadPluginTypes to help control which stock plugins are loaded by default (requires AutoLoadPlugins = true). Support for SystemMediaTransportControls on Windows 8.1 JS: Support for visual markers in the timeline. JS: Support for markers collection and markerreached event. JS: New ChaptersPlugin to automatically populate timeline with chapter tracks. JS: Audio an...Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 8: Fix - Fixed not writing string quotes when QuoteName is falsePowerShell Community Extensions: 3.1 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 3.1 Release NotesOct 17, 2013 This version of PSCX supports Windows PowerShell 3.0 and 4.0 See the ReleaseNotes.txt download above for more information.SQL Power Doc: Version 1.0.2.1: Misc. bug fixes Added logic to resolve members of a Windows Group server login Added columns to Excel workbooks to show definitions for server permissions, server roles, database permissions, and database rolesSocial Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.9): This new version includes: - Download latest status update and use it as vertex tooltip - Limit the timelines to parse to me, my friends or both - Fixed some reported bugs about the fan page and group importer - Fixed the login bug reported latelyTerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v7.1 [Terraria Inventory Editor]: You can now backspace in number fields Items added in 1.2.0.3 no longer corrupt player files Buff durations capped at 9999999 Item stacks capped at 9999999 Version info added Prefix IDs corrected Shoe and Eye color box are now properly clickable Moved Bank and Safe into their own tab Users will now be notified of new updatesPython Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0: PTVS 2.0 We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 RTM. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, IPython, and cross platform and cross language debugging support. QUICK VIDEO OVERVIEW For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this v...CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.8.2: Solved scrolling problem after DocumentFormatting Implemented "format as you type" --- To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.09: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.8.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This new release contains bug fixes and feature enhancements. There are some potential breaking changes in this release as some features of the Help File Builder have been moved into...C++ REST SDK (codename "Casablanca"): C++ REST SDK 1.3.0: This release fixes multiple customer reported issues as well as the following: Full support for Dev12 binaries and project files Full support for Windows XP New sample highlighting the Client and Server APIs : BlackJack Expose underlying native handle to set custom options on http_client Improvements to Listener Library Note: Dev10 binaries have been dropped as of this release, however the Dev10 project files are still available in the Source CodeAD ACL Scanner: 1.3.2: Minor bug fixed: Powershell 4.0 will report: Select—Object: Parameter cannot be processed because the parameter name p is ambiguous.Fast YouTube Downloader: YouTube Downloader 2.2.0: YouTube Downloader 2.2.0VidCoder: 1.5.8 Beta: Added hardware acceleration options: Bicubic OpenCL scaling algorithm, QSV decoding/encoding and DXVA decoding. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5834. Updated VidCoder setup icon. Fixed crash when choosing the mp4v2 container on x86 and opening on x64. Warning: the hardware acceleration features require specific hardware or file types to work correctly: QSV: Need an Intel processor that supports Quick Sync Video encoding, with a monitor hooked up to the Intel HD Graphics output and the lat...New ProjectsAdd2Nums: Add2Nums is a VB.NET project that takes 2 numbers, computes their sum and outputs the result. Developed by Justin Mifsud as part of Assignment 1 (7COM0152)Athir: GPAO El_AthirCS-MIC - C# Math Input Control: CS-MIC is a .NET library written in C# designed to give developers easy access to expression parsing.HLS Video Player: An open source over-the-network video player for HLS (Hinkle Light Show)Project Stark: This is a secret project available only to the project owners for the time being.Run ++: Run Plus Plus is a tool that enables you to custom the commands in the "Run" dialog.SimpleAddition: This is a simple ASP.NET in VB.NET page that allows users to enter 2 numbers, and display their sum. SWE 681 Go Fish: Project

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  • Most simple way to do holiday calculation?

    - by brainfrog
    I want to make a little free calendar program to help me and others calculate how much time we have got left in a project. I mean real working time, not just time. Time in a raw form is not saying much. Typically when my boss tells me that I have time until 05-05-2011 it doesn't tell me really how much time I have to do my job. You know...so many things stop me from work: A) beeing at home, not at work (so called "free time" or "spare time"). That is in my case I work exactly 8 hours a day and then the cleaning ladies throw me out of the office with their incredible loud industrial vacuum cleaners every evening (my boss accepts that as an excuse to go home in time, regularly). B) weekends, or more precisely saturdays and sundays C) official holiday rescuing me from having to go to work. what I want to do is make a little utility which tells me how many working hours I really have in a given time period. The first two things A and B are pretty easy to implement. But the last thing C scares my pants off. Holidays. OOOHHH man. You know what that means. Chaos. Pure chaos. The huge question is: HOW TO CALCULATE HOLIDAYS?! Since I want my program to be useful for anyone anywhere in the world, I can't just hardcode all holidays for my little town. So which options do I have? I) I could hand-craft downloadable lists of holidays. Users search them within the application and download them from an webserver. Or I ship all of them in the package. But I would get very, very old if I tried that by myself for every country, state and town. II) I make an initial data sheet with holidays for my town, and don't care about the rest. However, I make that sheet with an how-to public, so that everyone who feels like beeing very nice can provide holiday data for his country / region / whatever. Those are made public on a webserver and everyone can get the data packages he/she needs for the app. III) ? I care a lot about usability. I don't want to make an ugly linux hack style hard to use app that only computer freaks can use. So you need to tell me more about holiday science. I was never really clever at this. I assume every single country in the world has it's own set of holidays. In every country there may be several states. For example the US has some, and Germany has also some states. Holidays vary from state to state. But I know from an good programmer he told me never assume anything. So the questions about holiday science are: Which categories do I need to make holiday-data-packs searchable? A guy from India should find quickly his holiday data pack, and a guy from Sillicon Valley should find his pack as equally fast. It makes most sense to me to filter for COUNTRY STATE WHATEVER. Like a drill-down-search. Did I miss something? What would be the best data format to hold holiday information? A holiday has a start and end date and a name. That should be enough. Would I put all this stuff in thousands of XML files? How would you go about this? Any hint / help is highly welcome! Thanks to everyone!

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  • What is "elegant" code?

    - by Breton
    I see a lot of lip service and talk about the most "elegant" way to do this or that. I think if you spend enough time programming you begin to obtain a sort of intuitive feel for what it is we call "elegance". But I'm curious. Even if we can look at a bit of code, and say instinctively "That's elegant", or "That's messy", I wonder if any of us really understands what that means. Is there a precise definition for this "elegance" we keep referring to? If there is, what is it? Now, what I mean by a precise definition, is a series of statements which can be used to derive questions about a peice of code, or a program as a whole, and determine objectively, or as objectively as possible, whether that code is "elegant" or not. May I assert, that perhaps no such definition exists, and it's all just personal preference. In this case, I ask you a slightly different question: Is there a better word for "elegance", or a better set of attributes to use for judging code quality that is perhaps more objective than merely appealing to individual intuition and taste? Perhaps code quality is a matter of taste, and the answer to both of my questions is "no". But I can't help but feel that we could be doing better than just expressing wishy washy feelings about our code quality. For example, user interface design is something that to a broad range of people looks for all the world like a field of study that oughtta be 100% subjective matter of taste. But this is shockingly and brutally not the case, and there are in fact many objective measures that can be applied to a user interface to determine its quality. A series of tests could be written to give a definitive and repeatable score to user interface quality. (See GOMS, for instance). Now, okay. is Elegance simply "code quality" or is it something more? Is it something that can be measured? Or is it a matter of taste? Does our profession have room for taste? Maybe I'm asking the wrong questions altogether. Help me out here. Bonus Round If there is such a thing as elegance in code, and that concept is useful, do you think that justifies classifying the field of programming as an "Art" capital A, or merely a "craft". Or is it just an engineering field populated by a bunch of wishful thinking humans? Consider this question in the light of your thoughts about the elegance question. Please note that there is a distinction between code which is considered "art" in itself, and code that was written merely in the service of creating an artful program. When I ask this question, I ask if the code itself justifies calling programming an art. Bounty Note I liked the answers to this question so much, I think I'd like to make a photographic essay book from it. Released as a free PDF, and published on some kind of on demand printing service of course, such as "zazz" or "tiggle" or "printley" or something . I'd like some more answers, please!

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  • Mule xml to soap problem

    - by kevfuzz
    Hi, I'm not sure if there many Mule users on here but I'm hoping someone might be able to help me! I'm having a problem calling a webservice from Mule using Axis. I've created a fairly simple example where I have xml in a file being read by Mule, it's then transformed into a Document and sent to the webservice. The relevant code in the mule config looks like this: <inbound> <file:inbound-endpoint path="./files/initial" transformer-refs="FileToString xmlToDom" connector-ref="fileConnector" /> </inbound> <outbound> <pass-through-router> <axis:outbound-endpoint address="http://localhost:8081/holidayService?method=echoXXXX" synchronous="true" style="DOCUMENT" use="LITERAL" /> </pass-through-router> </outbound> However the call for the webservice fails as the above config is generating a SOAP message with an tag just after the tag and closes it just before the tag. The generated SOAP message looks like this: POST /holidayService?method=echoXXXX HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: text/xml X-MULE_ENDPOINT: http://localhost:8081/holidayService?method=echoXXXX SOAPAction: http://localhost:8081/holidayService?method=echoXXXX directory: D:\bea\weblogic92\samples\domains\wl_server\files\processed filename: HolidayRequest.xml method: echoXXXX originalFilename: HolidayRequest.xml style: document use: literal User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1 Host: 127.0.0.1:8081 Content-Length: 1183 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <soapenv:Header> <mule:header soapenv:actor="http://www.muleumo.org/providers/soap/1.0" soapenv:mustUnderstand="0" xmlns:mule="http://www.muleumo.org/providers/soap/1.0"> <mule:MULE_CORRELATION_ID>D:\bea\weblogic92\samples\domains\wl_server\files\processed\HolidayRequest.xml</mule:MULE_CORRELATION_ID> <mule:MULE_CORRELATION_GROUP_SIZE>-1</mule:MULE_CORRELATION_GROUP_SIZE> <mule:MULE_CORRELATION_SEQUENCE>-1</mule:MULE_CORRELATION_SEQUENCE> </mule:header> </soapenv:Header> <soapenv:Body> <value0 xsi:type="ns1:DocumentImpl" xmlns="" xmlns:ns1="http://dom.internal.xerces.apache.org.sun.com"> <sch:HolidayRequest xmlns:sch="http://mycompany.com/hr/schemas"> <sch:Holiday> <sch:StartDate>2009-08-13</sch:StartDate> <sch:EndDate>1988-12-12</sch:EndDate> </sch:Holiday> <sch:Employee> <sch:Number>3434</sch:Number> <sch:FirstName>John</sch:FirstName> <sch:LastName>Smith</sch:LastName> </sch:Employee> </sch:HolidayRequest> </value0> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> The webservice works fine in SOAPUI without the tag and from what I've read on the Mule website I don't know why it's being inserted. Any help would be much appreciated, Kevin.

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  • jQuery hold form submit until "continue" button pressed

    - by Seán McCabe
    I am trying to submit a form, which I have had working, but have now modified it to include a modal jQuery UI box, so that it won't submit until the user presses "continue". I've had various problems with this, including getting the form to hold until that button is pressed, but I think I have found a solution to that, but implementing it, I am getting a SyntaxError which I can't find the source of. With the help of kevin B managed to find the answer was the form was submitting, but the returned JSON response wasn't quite formatted right. The response was that the form wasn't being submitted, so that problem is still occurring. So updated the code with the provided feedback, now need to find out why the form isnt submitting. I know its something to do with the 2nd function isnt recognising the submit button has been pressed, so need to know how to submit that form data without the form needing to be submitted again. Below is the new code: function submitData() { $("#submitProvData").submit(function(event) { event.preventDefault(); var gTotal, sTotal, dfd; var dfd = new $.Deferred(); $('html,body').animate({ scrollTop: 0 }, 'fast'); $("#submitProvData input").css("border", "1px solid #aaaaaa"); $("#submitProvData input[readonly='readonly']").css("border", "none"); sTotal = $('#summaryTotal').val(); gTotal = $('#gptotal').val(); if(gTotal !== 'sTotal'){ $("#newsupinvbox").append('<div id="newsupinvdiagbox" title="Warning - Totals do not match" class="hidden"><p>Press "Continue", to submit the invoice flagged for attention.</p> <br /><p class="italic">or</p><br /> <p>Press "Correct" to correct the discrepancy.</p></div>') //CREATE DIV //SET $("#newsupinvdiagbox").dialog({ resizable: false, autoOpen:false, modal: true, draggable: false, width:380, height:240, closeOnEscape: false, position: ['center',20], buttons: { 'Continue': function() { $(this).dialog('close'); reData(); }, // end continue button 'Correct': function() { $(this).dialog('close'); return false; } //end cancel button }//end buttons });//end dialog $('#newsupinvdiagbox').dialog('open'); } return false; }); } function reData() { console.log('submitted'); $("#submitProvData").submit(function(resubmit){ console.log('form submit'); var formData; formData = new FormData($(this)[0]); $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "functions/invoicing_upload_provider.php", data: formData, async: false, success: function(result) { $.each($.parseJSON(result), function(item, value){ if(item == 'Success'){ $('#newsupinv_window_message_success_mes').html('The provider invoice was uploaded successfully.'); $('#newsupinv_window_message_success').fadeIn(300, function (){ reset(); }).delay(2500).fadeOut(700); } else if(item == 'Error'){ $('#newsupinv_window_message_error_mes').html(value); $('#newsupinv_window_message_error').fadeIn(300).delay(3000).fadeOut(700); } else if(item == 'Warning'){ $('#newsupinv_window_message_warning_mes').html(value); $('#newsupinv_window_message_warning').fadeIn(300, function (){ reset(); }).delay(2500).fadeOut(700); } }); }, error: function() { $('#newsupinv_window_message_error_mes').html("An error occured, the form was not submitted"); $('#newsupinv_window_message_error').fadeIn(300); $('#newsupinv_window_message_error').delay(3000).fadeOut(700); }, cache: false, contentType: false, processData: false }); }); }

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