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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, December 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, December 18, 2010Popular ReleasesHacker Passwords: HackerPasswords.zip: Source code, executable and documentationWatchersNET.SiteMap: WatchersNET.SiteMap 01.03.03: Whats NewSkin Object: You can now filter by Terms for Example use: <object id="dnnSITEMAPSL" codetype="dotnetnuke/server" codebase="SITEMAPSL"> <param name="TaxMode" value="terms" /> <param name="TaxTerms" value="TermName1,TermName2" /> </object> changes Tax Term Filter should work correct nowSubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.3: - Added .srt FileAssociation & Win7 ShowRecentCategory feature. - Applied UnifiedYeKe to fix Persian search problems. - Reduced file size of Persian subtitles for uploading @OSDB.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.3 ALPHA: 2.2.3 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in th...Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.0: - Lots of bug fixes - Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. - Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample - Updated to Json.net - BREAKING CHANGE: Some renames and changes with Authorizer, CanvasAuthorizer, and Authorization action filters - BREAKING CHANGE: Renamed ApiSecret to AppSecret to be consistent with Facbeook's rename of the property - Added additional authentication helper...WCF Community Site: WCF Web APIs 10.12.17: Welcome to the second release of WCF Web APIs on codeplex Here is what is new in this release. WCF Support for jQuery - create WCF web services that are easy to consume from JavaScript clients, in particular jQuery. Better support for using JsonValue as dynamic Support for JsonValue change notification events for databinding and other purposes Support for going between JsonValue and CLR types WCF HTTP - create HTTP / REST based web services. This is a minor release which contains fixe...LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.0: This is a working version of the LCSK for Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC 3 (using Razor View Engine). this is still provider based (with 1 provider Sql) and this is still using WebService and Windows Forms operator console. The solution is cleaner, with an installer to create tables etc. Let me know your feedbackOrchard Project: Orchard 0.9: Orchard Release Notes Build: 0.9.253 Published: 12/16/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install the Orchard tech preview using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard-Using-Web-PI.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.0.9.253.zip file. The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents of the Orch...SplendidCRM: SplendidCRM 5.0 Community Edition: SplendidCRM Software has adopted the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) for its Community Edition. This release includes the full set of SQL source code in the Community Edition, something that was previously only available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions. An article on the subject of Commercial Open-Source licensing has been posted at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/splendid-guide-article6.aspx.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 12-15-2010: This release contains a few minor bug fixes and hopefully the GDAL libraries for the 3.5 x86 build actually built to the correct directory this time.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 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, GU...Access Control Service Samples and Documentation (Labs): Samples-R3: Contains latest ACS samples (corresponding to R3 release) that show how to integrate ACS with web services, ASP.NET websites (Web Forms and MVC) and on how to interact with the ACS Management Service. The Readmes for these samples are available here.TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 5: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous ...Silverlight Contrib: Silverlight Contrib 2010.1.0: 2010.1.0 New FeaturesCompatibility Release for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010FlickrNet API Library: 3.1.4000: Newest release. Now contains dedicated Windows Phone 7 DLL as well as all previous DLLs. Also contains Windows Help file documentation now as standard.mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...New ProjectsAsyncSimpleDB: Async access via .Net to Amazon's SimpleDB.BCS Tester Man - The BCS Test Client: BCS Tester Man is a BCS Test Client that makes it easier for SharePoint BCS Model Developers to test Models and External Content Types. You'll no longer have to create and configure Business Data Web Parts or External Lists. It's developed in C#. UI is WPF with MVVM.Client-side Templated Script Control: Allows a developer to add a repeater-style templated list control to a web page that will be data bound client-side, and may respond to client events. The control may be data bound by a web service call on initialization, and may also have it's data source set via client code.Conquer Online Emulation: Project Emulation is a set of tools and libraries to use for creating your own 'emulation' of the servers used by Conquer Online.CSV Report Generator for SQL: C# application for exporting SQL queries into a CSV file for easy importing into Excel, Access, and any other programs that support CSV file importing. This application is handy for extraordinarily large query results that typically cause stability issues for other programs.DFTSPAB: For info see [url:http://creativx.net/forums/general-software/20760-take-ownership-set-permissions-back-up-file-all-one-utillity.html]Directories Creater: <dirCreater> create lots of directories in simple way! <c#> <vs2010>DNN Rad Tag Cloud: A module that uses Telerik's Tag Cloud control to display tags applied in a DotNetNuke install. dotFB : Facebook Graph API client library for .NET: dotFB is a facebook Graph API client library for Windows, Web and Phone Client.Ganaderia Santa Fe: RevisiónsdfsdGoogle Translate .NET: A .NET class library for the Google Translate API v2.I Wanna Make A Game: Fun project to make a 2D platformer written in C#. Written by students from the University of Waterloo, the project explores several computer science topics; from implementing a scripting language to efficient spatial computation.Neddle: Neddle is an open source, SCORM compliant learning management system (LMS) built on the .NET platform using C#.Przetwarzanie sygnalów: Program zaliczeniowy z przedmiotu "Wstep do przetwarzania obrazów i sygnalów"Quickfix message wrapper: Quickfix message strongly typed wrapper generator (T4 template) Reading List: Simple ASP .NET MVC application to manage a list of books scheduled to be read. The application queries Amazon web services for book titles to add to the list.reservierung: Project for the university for applied sciences DeggendorfRTP HTML Newsletter: This DotNetNuke module allows you to create templated HTML newsletters, and email to a specific DNN role. Newsletters are automatically archived for later access.SQL Server Master Data Services Utilities: A set of useful add-ons for SQL Server Master Data Services, including utilities for generating an MDS model, loading the model, writing a custom UI for model data and integrating the model with SharePoint BCS.testerekproject: bla bla blaTools for social network VKontakte: Tools for developing desktop applications for social network VKontakte.Virtualegis: Control de código para Virtualegis.

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• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: The Dangers of Casting Boxed Values

  - by James Michael Hare

  Starting a new series to parallel the Little Wonders series.  In this series, I will examine some of the small pitfalls that can occasionally trip up developers. Introduction: Of Casts and Conversions What happens when we try to assign from an int and a double and vice-versa? 1: double pi = 3.14; 2: int theAnswer = 42; 3:  4: // implicit widening conversion, compiles! 5: double doubleAnswer = theAnswer; 6:  7: // implicit narrowing conversion, compiler error! 8: int intPi = pi; As you can see from the comments above, a conversion from a value type where there is no potential data loss is can be done with an implicit conversion.  However, when converting from one value type to another may result in a loss of data, you must make the conversion explicit so the compiler knows you accept this risk.  That is why the conversion from double to int will not compile with an implicit conversion, we can make the conversion explicit by adding a cast: 1: // explicit narrowing conversion using a cast, compiler 2: // succeeds, but results may have data loss: 3: int intPi = (int)pi; So for value types, the conversions (implicit and explicit) both convert the original value to a new value of the given type.  With widening and narrowing references, however, this is not the case.  Converting reference types is a bit different from converting value types.  First of all when you perform a widening or narrowing you don’t really convert the instance of the object, you just convert the reference itself to the wider or narrower reference type, but both the original and new reference type both refer back to the same object. Secondly, widening and narrowing for reference types refers the going down and up the class hierarchy instead of referring to precision as in value types.  That is, a narrowing conversion for a reference type means you are going down the class hierarchy (for example from Shape to Square) whereas a widening conversion means you are going up the class hierarchy (from Square to Shape).  1: var square = new Square(); 2:  3: // implicitly convers because all squares are shapes 4: // (that is, all subclasses can be referenced by a superclass reference) 5: Shape myShape = square; 6:  7: // implicit conversion not possible, not all shapes are squares! 8: // (that is, not all superclasses can be referenced by a subclass reference) 9: Square mySquare = (Square) myShape; So we had to cast the Shape back to Square because at that point the compiler has no way of knowing until runtime whether the Shape in question is truly a Square.  But, because the compiler knows that it’s possible for a Shape to be a Square, it will compile.  However, if the object referenced by myShape is not truly a Square at runtime, you will get an invalid cast exception. Of course, there are other forms of conversions as well such as user-specified conversions and helper class conversions which are beyond the scope of this post.  The main thing we want to focus on is this seemingly innocuous casting method of widening and narrowing conversions that we come to depend on every day and, in some cases, can bite us if we don’t fully understand what is going on!  The Pitfall: Conversions on Boxed Value Types Can Fail What if you saw the following code and – knowing nothing else – you were asked if it was legal or not, what would you think: 1: // assuming x is defined above this and this 2: // assignment is syntactically legal. 3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: // convert 3.14 to int. 6: int truncated = (int)x; You may think that since x is obviously a double (can’t be a float) because 3.14 is a double literal, but this is inaccurate.  Our x could also be dynamic and this would work as well, or there could be user-defined conversions in play.  But there is another, even simpler option that can often bite us: what if x is object? 1: object x; 2:  3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: int truncated = (int) x; On the surface, this seems fine.  We have a double and we place it into an object which can be done implicitly through boxing (no cast) because all types inherit from object.  Then we cast it to int.  This theoretically should be possible because we know we can explicitly convert a double to an int through a conversion process which involves truncation. But here’s the pitfall: when casting an object to another type, we are casting a reference type, not a value type!  This means that it will attempt to see at runtime if the value boxed and referred to by x is of type int or derived from type int.  Since it obviously isn’t (it’s a double after all) we get an invalid cast exception! Now, you may say this looks awfully contrived, but in truth we can run into this a lot if we’re not careful.  Consider using an IDataReader to read from a database, and then attempting to select a result row of a particular column type: 1: using (var connection = new SqlConnection("some connection string")) 2: using (var command = new SqlCommand("select * from employee", connection)) 3: using (var reader = command.ExecuteReader()) 4: { 5: while (reader.Read()) 6: { 7: // if the salary is not an int32 in the SQL database, this is an error! 8: // doesn't matter if short, long, double, float, reader [] returns object! 9: total += (int) reader["annual_salary"]; 10: } 11: } Notice that since the reader indexer returns object, if we attempt to convert using a cast to a type, we have to make darn sure we use the true, actual type or this will fail!  If the SQL database column is a double, float, short, etc this will fail at runtime with an invalid cast exception because it attempts to convert the object reference! So, how do you get around this?  There are two ways, you could first cast the object to its actual type (double), and then do a narrowing cast to on the value to int.  Or you could use a helper class like Convert which analyzes the actual run-time type and will perform a conversion as long as the type implements IConvertible. 1: object x; 2:  3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: // if you want to cast, must cast out of object to double, then 6: // cast convert. 7: int truncated = (int)(double) x; 8:  9: // or you can call a helper class like Convert which examines runtime 10: // type of the value being converted 11: int anotherTruncated = Convert.ToInt32(x); Summary You should always be careful when performing a conversion cast from values boxed in object that you are actually casting to the true type (or a sub-type). Since casting from object is a widening of the reference, be careful that you either know the exact, explicit type you expect to be held in the object, or instead avoid the cast and use a helper class to perform a safe conversion to the type you desire. Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Pitfalls,Little Pitfalls,BlackRabbitCoder

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• SQL Spatial: Getting “nearest” calculations working properly

  - by Rob Farley

  If you’ve ever done spatial work with SQL Server, I hope you’ve come across the ‘nearest’ problem. You have five thousand stores around the world, and you want to identify the one that’s closest to a particular place. Maybe you want the store closest to the LobsterPot office in Adelaide, at -34.925806, 138.605073. Or our new US office, at 42.524929, -87.858244. Or maybe both! You know how to do this. You don’t want to use an aggregate MIN or MAX, because you want the whole row, telling you which store it is. You want to use TOP, and if you want to find the closest store for multiple locations, you use APPLY. Let’s do this (but I’m going to use addresses in AdventureWorks2012, as I don’t have a list of stores). Oh, and before I do, let’s make sure we have a spatial index in place. I’m going to use the default options. CREATE SPATIAL INDEX spin_Address ON Person.Address(SpatialLocation); And my actual query: WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Great! This is definitely working. I know both those City locations, even if the AddressLine1s don’t quite ring a bell. I’m sure I’ll be able to find them next time I’m in the area. But of course what I’m concerned about from a querying perspective is what’s happened behind the scenes – the execution plan. This isn’t pretty. It’s not using my index. It’s sucking every row out of the Address table TWICE (which sucks), and then it’s sorting them by the distance to find the smallest one. It’s not pretty, and it takes a while. Mind you, I do like the fact that it saw an indexed view it could use for the State and Country details – that’s pretty neat. But yeah – users of my nifty website aren’t going to like how long that query takes. The frustrating thing is that I know that I can use the index to find locations that are within a particular distance of my locations quite easily, and Microsoft recommends this for solving the ‘nearest’ problem, as described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/ff929109.aspx. Now, in the first example on this page, it says that the query there will use the spatial index. But when I run it on my machine, it does nothing of the sort. I’m not particularly impressed. But what we see here is that parallelism has kicked in. In my scenario, it’s split the data up into 4 threads, but it’s still slow, and not using my index. It’s disappointing. But I can persuade it with hints! If I tell it to FORCESEEK, or use my index, or even turn off the parallelism with MAXDOP 1, then I get the index being used, and it’s a thing of beauty! Part of the plan is here: It’s massive, and it’s ugly, and it uses a TVF… but it’s quick. The way it works is to hook into the GeodeticTessellation function, which is essentially finds where the point is, and works out through the spatial index cells that surround it. This then provides a framework to be able to see into the spatial index for the items we want. You can read more about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895265.aspx#tessellation – including a bunch of pretty diagrams. One of those times when we have a much more complex-looking plan, but just because of the good that’s going on. This tessellation stuff was introduced in SQL Server 2012. But my query isn’t using it. When I try to use the FORCESEEK hint on the Person.Address table, I get the friendly error: Msg 8622, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Query processor could not produce a query plan because of the hints defined in this query. Resubmit the query without specifying any hints and without using SET FORCEPLAN. And I’m almost tempted to just give up and move back to the old method of checking increasingly large circles around my location. After all, I can even leverage multiple OUTER APPLY clauses just like I did in my recent Lookup post. WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT     l.Name,     COALESCE(a1.AddressLine1,a2.AddressLine1,a3.AddressLine1),     COALESCE(a1.City,a2.City,a3.City),     s.Name AS [State],     c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 1000     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a1 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 5000     AND a1.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a2 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 20000     AND a2.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a3 JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = COALESCE(a1.StateProvinceID,a2.StateProvinceID,a3.StateProvinceID) JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; But this isn’t friendly-looking at all, and I’d use the method recommended by Isaac Kunen, who uses a table of numbers for the expanding circles. It feels old-school though, when I’m dealing with SQL 2012 (and later) versions. So why isn’t my query doing what it’s supposed to? Remember the query... WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Well, I just wasn’t reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929109.aspx properly. The following requirements must be met for a Nearest Neighbor query to use a spatial index: A spatial index must be present on one of the spatial columns and the STDistance() method must use that column in the WHERE and ORDER BY clauses. The TOP clause cannot contain a PERCENT statement. The WHERE clause must contain a STDistance() method. If there are multiple predicates in the WHERE clause then the predicate containing STDistance() method must be connected by an AND conjunction to the other predicates. The STDistance() method cannot be in an optional part of the WHERE clause. The first expression in the ORDER BY clause must use the STDistance() method. Sort order for the first STDistance() expression in the ORDER BY clause must be ASC. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. Let’s start from the top. 1. Needs a spatial index on one of the columns that’s in the STDistance call. Yup, got the index. 2. No ‘PERCENT’. Yeah, I don’t have that. 3. The WHERE clause needs to use STDistance(). Ok, but I’m not filtering, so that should be fine. 4. Yeah, I don’t have multiple predicates. 5. The first expression in the ORDER BY is my distance, that’s fine. 6. Sort order is ASC, because otherwise we’d be starting with the ones that are furthest away, and that’s tricky. 7. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. But I don’t have any NULL values, so that shouldn’t affect me either. ...but something’s wrong. I do actually need to satisfy #3. And I do need to make sure #7 is being handled properly, because there are some situations (eg, differing SRIDs) where STDistance can return NULL. It says so at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933808.aspx – “STDistance() always returns null if the spatial reference IDs (SRIDs) of the geography instances do not match.” So if I simply make sure that I’m filtering out the rows that return NULL… …then it’s blindingly fast, I get the right results, and I’ve got the complex-but-brilliant plan that I wanted. It just wasn’t overly intuitive, despite being documented. @rob_farley

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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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• All my emails to Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL are going to Spam, though I've implemented every validation

  - by Chetan

  Hi, I've implemented everything and checked everything (SPF, DomainKey, DKIM, reverse lookup), and only Gmail is allowing my emails to go to Inbox. Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL are all sending my messages to Spam. What am I doing wrong? Please help! Following are the headers of messages to Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL. I've changed names and domain names. The domain names I'm sending mail from are polluxapp.com and gemini.polluxapp.com. Yahoo: From Shift Licensing Tue Jan 26 21:55:14 2010 X-Apparently-To: [email protected] via 98.136.167.163; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:12 -0800 Return-Path: X-YahooFilteredBulk: 208.115.108.162 X-YMailISG: gPlFT1YWLDtTsHSCXAO2fxuGq5RdrsMxPffmkJFHiQyZW.2RGdDQ8OEpzWDYPS.MS_D5mvpu928sYN_86mQ2inD9zVLaVNyVVrmzIFCOHJO2gPwIG8c2L8WajG4ZRgoTwMFHkyEsefYtRLMg8AmHKnkS0PkPscwpVHtuUD91ghsTSqs4lxEMqhqw60US0cwMn_r_DrWNEUg_sESZsYeZpJcCCPL0wd6zcfKmtYaIkidsth3gWJPJgpwWtkgPvwsJUU_cmAQ8hAQ7RVM1usEs80PzihTLDR1yKc4RJCsesaf4NUO_yN1cPsbFyiaazKikC.eiQk4Z3VU.8O5Vd8i7mPNyOeAjyt7IgeA_ X-Originating-IP: [208.115.108.162] Authentication-Results: mta1035.mail.sk1.yahoo.com from=example.com; domainkeys=pass (ok); from=example.com; dkim=permerror (bad sig) Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO gemini.example.com) (208.115.108.162) by mta1035.mail.sk1.yahoo.com with SMTP; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:12 -0800 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini [127.0.0.1]) by gemini.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3984E21A0167 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:55:14 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=example.com; h=to :subject:from:content-type:message-id:date; s=mail; bh=bRIHfxE3S e+YeCrIOqziZsiESJA=; b=J+D56Czff+6wGjQycLEvHyT32+06Nngf+6h7Ep6DL SmmJv3ihiAFJIJiPxiwLNpUsOSHhwJYjYQtynbBnag40A6EUBIsucDR+VoEYD+Cc 9L0dV3QD5D77VpG9PnRQDQa91R+NPIt5og9xbYfUWJ1b/jXkZopb0VTM+H9tandM 24= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=example.com; h=to:subject :from:content-type:message-id:date; q=dns; s=mail; b=pO5YvvjGTXs 3Qa83Ibq9woLq5VSsxUD5uoSrjNrW9ICMmdWyJpb9oT5byFR9hMthomTmfGWkkh6 3VxtD0hb0HVonN+1iheqJ9QBBOctadLCAOPZV3mfA99XUu7Y0DR2qtkU/UkSe8In 5PENWFbwub88ZsRDiW3hCbNHl+UO8Jsc= Received: by gemini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 502) id 386DE21A0166; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:55:14 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] Subject: Shift License For James Xavier From: "Shift Licensing" Content-type: text/html Message-Id: <[email protected] Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:55:14 -0800 (PST) Content-Length: 282` Hotmail: X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MjtTQ0w9Ng== X-Message-Status: n:0 X-SID-PRA: [email protected] X-AUTH-Result: NONE X-Message-Info: 6sSXyD95QpWzUBaRfzf3NMbaiSGCCYGXSczlzLw49r01I25elu3oYM0V2uNa8BV2O7DOiFEeewTBKMtN+PW+ig== Received: from gemini.example.com ([208.115.108.162]) by snt0-mc4-f7.Snt0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini [127.0.0.1]) by gemini.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9431321A0167 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; s=mail; bh=DLF0k+uELpY6If5o3SWlSj 7j0vw=; b=nAMpb47xTVh73y6a2rf6V1rtYHuufr46dtuwWtHyFC85QKfZJReJJL oFIPjgEC28/1wSdy8VbfLG1g64W1hvnJjet3rcyv3ANNYxnFaiH5yt3SDEiLxydS gjCmNcZXyiVsWtpv7atVRO/t/Own+oFB9zz/9mj43Bhm4bnZ2cTno= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; q=dns; s=mail; b=sFpNxlskyz4MYT38 BA/rQ6ZAcQjhy7STkLPckrCDVVZcE4/zukHyARq7guMtYCCEjXoIbVEtNikPC97F cGpJGGZrppTGjx62N0flxG8hvwejiJYnUJF1EIP4JckGWyEI+21vtWLLQ27eegtN fs9OkIQ2iUPC/4u8N1eqiff0VZU= Received: by gemini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 504) id 8ED7221A0166; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] Subject: Testing this Message-Id: <[email protected] Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 (PST) From: [email protected] Return-Path: [email protected] X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jan 2010 21:18:54.0039 (UTC) FILETIME=[29CEE670:01CA9ECD] AOL: X-AOL-UID: 3158.1902377530 X-AOL-DATE: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 5:07:23 PM Eastern Standard Time Return-Path: Received: from rly-mg06.mx.aol.com (rly-mg06.mail.aol.com [172.20.83.112]) by air-mg06.mail.aol.com (v126.13) with ESMTP id MAILINMG061-a1d4b5f6787a4; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:07:22 -0500 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini.example.com [208.115.108.162]) by rly-mg06.mx.aol.com (v125.7) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINMG067-a1d4b5f6787a4; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:07:04 -0500 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini [127.0.0.1]) by gemini.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32B3821A0167 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; s=mail; bh=RL0GLHd3dZ8IlIHoHIhA/U cLtUE=; b=BKg4p3qnaIdFRjAbvUa+Hwcyc6W91v4B4hN95dVymJrxyUBycWMUSC nzKmJ5QllhCYjwO+S7GrRdmlFpjBaK8kt2qmdCyC2UuiDF6xY6MXx/DBF56QpYtZ YDY4kXdiEMSbooH14B4CCPhaCTdC1wCtV0diat3EANCLxSDYAYq5k= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; q=dns; s=mail; b=fDSjNpfWs7TfGXda uio8qbJIyD+UmPL+C0GM1VeeV8FADj6JiYIT1nT3iBwSHlrLFCJ1wxPbE4d9CGl8 gQkPIV6T4TL7ha052nur0EOWoBLoBAOmhTshF/gsIY+/KMibbIczuRyTgIGVV5Tw GZVGFddVFOYgee7SAu0KNFm7aIk= Received: by gemini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 504) id 2D5F521A0166; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] Subject: Testing Message-Id: <[email protected] Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0800 (PST) From: [email protected] X-AOL-IP: 208.115.108.162 X-AOL-SCOLL-AUTHENTICATION: mail_rly_antispam_dkim-d227.1 ; domain : gemini.example.com DKIM : pass X-Mailer: Unknown (No Version) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 07, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, September 07, 2012Popular ReleasesUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.0: Whats newThe media section has been overhauled to support HTML5 uploads, just drag and drop files in, even multiple files are supported on any HTML5 capable browser. The folder content overview is also much improved allowing you to filter it and perform common actions on your media items. The Rich Text Editor’s “Media” button now uses an embedder based on the open oEmbed standard (if you’re upgrading, enable the media button in the Rich Text Editor datatype settings and set TidyEditorConten...menu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.B INI Sharp Library: B INI Sharp Library v1.0.0.0 Final Realsed: The frist realsedActive Social Migrator: ActiveSocialMigrator 1.0.0 Beta: Beta release for the Active Social Migration tool.EntLib.com????????: ??????demo??-For SQL 2005-2008: EntLibShopping ???v3.0 - ??????demo??，?????SQL SERVER 2005/2008/2008 R2/2012 ??????。 ??（??）??????。 THANKS.Sistem LPK Pemkot Semarang: Panduan Penggunaan Sistem LPK: Panduan cara menggunakan Aplikasi Sistem LPK Bagian Pembangunan Kota SemarangActive Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.New ProjectsAdding 2013 Jewish Holidays for Outlook2003: Instruction: Copy the outlook.hol file to your compuer where Outlook2003 is installed. Double click the file, choose "Israel" and continue. That's it Agilcont System: Sistema de contabilidad para empresas privadas de preferencia para cajas que trabajan con efectivo en soles, dolares y con el material oroARB (A Request Broker): The idea is something like a Request Broker, but with some additional functionality.BATTLE.NET - SDK: This SDK provides the ability to use the Battle.net (Blizzard) Services for all supported Games such Diablo 3, World of Warcraft. Container Terminal System: SummaryDeclarative UX Streaming Data Language for the Cloud: Bringing a better communication paradigm for media and data..Get User Profile Information from SharePoint UserProfile Service: Used SharePoint object model to get the user profile information from the User Profile Service.Guess The City & State Windows 8 Source Code: Source code for Guess The City & State in Malaysia Windows 8 AppJquery Tree: This project is to demonstrate tree basic functionality.MCEBuddy 2.x: Convert and Remove Commercials for your Windows Media CenterMvcDesign: MvcDesign engine implementation projectMy Task Manager: This is a task manager module for DotNetNuke. I am using it to get started developing modules.MyAppwithbranches: MyAppwithbranchesProjecte prova: rpyGEO: pyGEO is a python package capable of parsing microarray data files. It also has a primitive plotting function.Scarlet Road: Scarlet Road is a top-down shooter. It's you against an unending horde of monsters.simplecounter: A simple counter, cick and counter.SiteEmpires: ????????Soundcloud Loader: Simple Tool for downloading Tracks from Soundcloud.Windows Phone Samples: Windows Phone code samples.

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• User Experience Highlights in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools: Direct from Jeff Robbins

  - by mvaughan

  By Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience  This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on the user experience (UX) highlights in various Oracle product families. The last posted interview was with Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy on upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite user experience highlights. You’ll see themes around productivity and efficiency, and get an early look at the latest mobile offerings coming through these product lines. Today’s post is on the user experience in PeopleSoft and PeopleTools. To learn more about what’s ahead, attend PeopleSoft or PeopleTools OpenWorld presentations.This interview is with Jeff Robbins, Senior Director, PeopleSoft Development. Jeff Robbins Q: How would you describe the vision you have for the user experience of PeopleSoft?A: Intuitive – Specifically, customers use PeopleSoft to help their employees do their day-to-day work, and the UI (user interface) has been helpful and assistive in that effort. If it’s not obvious what they need to do a task, then the UI isn’t working. So the application needs to make it simple for users to find information they need, complete a task, do all the things they are responsible for, and it really helps when the UI just makes sense. Productive – PeopleSoft is a tool used to support people to do their work, and a lot of users are measured by how much work they’re able to get done per hour, per day, etc. The UI needs to help them be as productive as possible, and can’t make them waste time or energy. The UI needs to reflect the type of work necessary for a task -- if it's data entry, the UI needs to assist the user to get information into the system. For analysts, the UI needs help users assess or analyze information in a particular way. Innovative – The concept of the UI being innovative is something we’ve been working on for years. It’s not just that we want to be seen as innovative, the fact is that companies are asking their employees to do more than they’ve ever asked before. More often companies want to roll out processes as employee or manager self-service, where an employee is responsible to review and maintain their own data. So we’ve had to reinvent, and ask,  “How can we modify the ways an employee interacts with our applications so that they can be more productive and efficient – even with tasks that are entirely unfamiliar?”  Our focus on innovation has forced us to design new ways for users to interact with the entire application.Q: How are the UX features you have delivered so far resonating with customers?  A: Resonating very well. We’re hearing tremendous responses from users, managers, decision-makers -- who are very happy with the improved user experience. Many of the individual features resonate well. Some have really hit home, others are better than they used to be but show us that there’s still room for improvement.A couple innovations really stand out; features that have a significant effect on how users interact with PeopleSoft.First, the deployment of PeopleSoft in a way that’s more like a consumer website with the PeopleSoft Home page and Dashboards.  This new approach is very web-centric, where users feel they’re coming to a website rather than logging into an enterprise application.  There’s lots of information from all around the organization collected in a way that feels very familiar to users. In order to do your job, you can come to this web site rather than having to learn how to log into an application and figure out a complicated menu. Companies can host these really rich web sites for employees that are home pages for accessing critical tasks and information. The UI elements of incorporating search into the whole navigation process is another hit. Rather than having to log in and choose a task from a menu, users come to the web site and begin a task by simply searching for data: themselves, another employee, a customer record, whatever.  The search results include the data along with a set of actions the user might take, completely eliminating the need to hunt through a complicated system menu. Search-centric navigation is really sitting well with customers who are trying to deploy an intuitive set of systems. Q: Are any UX highlights more popular than you expected them to be?  A: We introduced a feature called Pivot Grid in the last release, which is a combination of an interactive grid, like an Excel Pivot Table, along with a dynamic visual chart that automatically graphs the data. I wasn’t certain at first how extensively this would be used. It looked like an innovative tool, but it wasn’t clear how it would be incorporated in business process applications. The fact is that everyone who sees Pivot Grids is thrilled with that kind of interactivity.  It reflects the amount of analytical thinking customers are asking employees to do. Employees can’t just enter data any more. They must interact with it, analyze it, and make decisions. Pivot Grids fit into this way of working. Q: What can you tell us about PeopleSoft’s mobile offerings?A: A lot of customers are finding that mobile is the chief priority in their organization.  They tell us they want their employees to be able to access company information from their mobile devices.  Of course, not everyone has the same requirements, so we’re working to make sure we can help our customers accomplish what they’re trying to do.  We’ve already delivered a number of mobile features.  For instance, PeopleSoft home pages, dashboards and workcenters all work well on an iPad, straight out of the box.  We’ve delivered a number of key functions and tasks for mobile workers – those who are responsible for using a mobile device to manage inventory, for example.  Customers tell us they also need a holistic strategy, one that allows their employees to access nearly every task from a mobile device.  While we don’t expect users to do extensive data entry from their smartphone, it makes sense that they have access to company information and systems while away from their desk.  That’s where our strategy is going now.  We plan to unveil a number of new mobile offerings at OpenWorld.  Some will be available then, some shortly after. Q: What else are you working on now that you think is going to be exciting to customers at Oracle OpenWorld?A: Our next release -- the big thing is PeopleSoft 9.2, and we’ll be talking about the huge amount of work that’s gone into the next versions. A new toolset, 8.53, will be coming, and there’s a lot to talk about there, and the next generation of PeopleSoft 9.2.  We have a ton of new stuff coming.Q: What do you want PeopleSoft customers to know? A: We have been focusing on the user experience in PeopleSoft as a very high priority for the last 4 years, and it’s had interesting effects. One thing is that the application is better, more usable.  We’ve made visible improvements. Another aspect is that in customers’ minds, the PeopleSoft brand is being reinvigorated. Customers invested in PeopleSoft years ago, and then they weren’t sure where PeopleSoft was going.  This investment in the UI and overall user experience keeps PeopleSoft current, innovative and fresh.  Customers  are able to take advantage of a lot of new features, even on the older applications, simply by upgrading their PeopleTools. The interest in that ability has been tremendous. Knowing they have a lot of these features available -- right now, that’s pretty huge. There’s been a tremendous amount of positive response, just on the fact that we’re focusing on the user experience. Editor’s note: For more on PeopleSoft and PeopleTools user experience highlights, visit the Usable Apps web site.To find out more about these enhancements at Openworld, be sure to check out these sessions: GEN8928     General Session: PeopleSoft Update and Product RoadmapCON9183     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Technology Roadmap CON8932     New Functional PeopleSoft PeopleTools Capabilities for the Line-of-Business UserCON9196     PeopleSoft PeopleTools Roadmap: Mobile ApplicationsCON9186     Case Study: Delivering a Groundbreaking User Interface with PeopleSoft PeopleTools

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• jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation

  - by hajan

  Many developers have already asked me about this. How to make XHTML valid the web page which uses jQuery Templates. Maybe you have already tried, and I don't know what are your results but here is my opinion regarding this. By default, Visual Studio.NET adds the xhtml1-transitional.dtd schema <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> So, if you try to validate your page which has jQuery Templates against this schema, your page won't be XHTML valid. Why? It's because when creating templates, we use HTML tags inside <script> ... </script> block. Yes, I know that the script block has type="text/html" but it's not supported in this schema, thus it's not valid. Let's try validate the following code Code <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head>     <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>          <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         $(function () {             var attendees = [                 { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] },                 { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] }             ];             $("#myTemplate").tmpl(attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList");         });     </script>     <script id="myTemplate" type="text/html">          <li>             ${Name} ${Surname}             {{if speaker}}                 (<font color="red">speaks</font>)             {{else}}                 (attendee)             {{/if}}         </li>     </script>      </head>     <body>     <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> To validate it, go to http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input and copy paste the code rendered on client-side browser (it’s almost the same, only the template is rendered inside OL so LI tags are created for each item). Press CHECK and you will get: Result: 1 Errors, 2 warning(s)  The error message says: Validation Output: 1 Error Line 21, Column 13: document type does not allow element "li" here <li> Yes, the <li> HTML element is not allowed inside the <script>, so how to make it valid? FIRST: Using <![CDATA][…]]> The first thing that came in my mind was the CDATA. So, by wrapping any HTML tag which is in script blog, inside <![CDATA[ ........ ]]> it will make our code valid. However, the problem is that the template won't render since the template tags {} cannot get evaluated if they are inside CDATA. Ok, lets try with another approach. SECOND: HTML5 validation Well, if we just remove the strikethrough part bellow of the !DOPCTYPE <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> our template is going to be checked as HTML5 and will be valid. Ok, there is another approach I've also tried: THIRD: Separate template to an external file We can separate the template to external file. I didn’t show how to do this previously, so here is the example. 1. Add HTML file with name Template.html in your ASPX website. 2. Place your defined template there without <script> tag Content inside Template.html <li>     ${Name} ${Surname}     {{if speaker}}         (<font color="red">speaks</font>)     {{else}}         (attendee)     {{/if}} </li> 3. Call the HTML file using $.get() jQuery ajax method and render the template with data using $.tmpl() function. $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) {     $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); So the complete code is: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head>     <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script>          <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         $(function () {             var attendees = [                 { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] },                 { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] }             ];             $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) {                 $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList");             });         });     </script>      </head>     <body>     <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Result: Passed If you have any additional methods for XHTML validation, you can share it :). Thanks,Hajan

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• Metro: Promises

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe the Promise class in the WinJS library. You can use promises whenever you need to perform an asynchronous operation such as retrieving data from a remote website or a file from the file system. Promises are used extensively in the WinJS library. Asynchronous Programming Some code executes immediately, some code requires time to complete or might never complete at all. For example, retrieving the value of a local variable is an immediate operation. Retrieving data from a remote website takes longer or might not complete at all. When an operation might take a long time to complete, you should write your code so that it executes asynchronously. Instead of waiting for an operation to complete, you should start the operation and then do something else until you receive a signal that the operation is complete. An analogy. Some telephone customer service lines require you to wait on hold – listening to really bad music – until a customer service representative is available. This is synchronous programming and very wasteful of your time. Some newer customer service lines enable you to enter your telephone number so the customer service representative can call you back when a customer representative becomes available. This approach is much less wasteful of your time because you can do useful things while waiting for the callback. There are several patterns that you can use to write code which executes asynchronously. The most popular pattern in JavaScript is the callback pattern. When you call a function which might take a long time to return a result, you pass a callback function to the function. For example, the following code (which uses jQuery) includes a function named getFlickrPhotos which returns photos from the Flickr website which match a set of tags (such as “dog” and “funny”): function getFlickrPhotos(tags, callback) { $.getJSON( "http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?jsoncallback=?", { tags: tags, tagmode: "all", format: "json" }, function (data) { if (callback) { callback(data.items); } } ); } getFlickrPhotos("funny, dogs", function(data) { $.each(data, function(index, item) { console.log(item); }); }); The getFlickr() function includes a callback parameter. When you call the getFlickr() function, you pass a function to the callback parameter which gets executed when the getFlicker() function finishes retrieving the list of photos from the Flickr web service. In the code above, the callback function simply iterates through the results and writes each result to the console. Using callbacks is a natural way to perform asynchronous programming with JavaScript. Instead of waiting for an operation to complete, sitting there and listening to really bad music, you can get a callback when the operation is complete. Using Promises The CommonJS website defines a promise like this (http://wiki.commonjs.org/wiki/Promises): “Promises provide a well-defined interface for interacting with an object that represents the result of an action that is performed asynchronously, and may or may not be finished at any given point in time. By utilizing a standard interface, different components can return promises for asynchronous actions and consumers can utilize the promises in a predictable manner.” A promise provides a standard pattern for specifying callbacks. In the WinJS library, when you create a promise, you can specify three callbacks: a complete callback, a failure callback, and a progress callback. Promises are used extensively in the WinJS library. The methods in the animation library, the control library, and the binding library all use promises. For example, the xhr() method included in the WinJS base library returns a promise. The xhr() method wraps calls to the standard XmlHttpRequest object in a promise. The following code illustrates how you can use the xhr() method to perform an Ajax request which retrieves a file named Photos.txt: var options = { url: "/data/photos.txt" }; WinJS.xhr(options).then( function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("success"); var data = JSON.parse(xmlHttpRequest.responseText); console.log(data); }, function(xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("fail"); }, function(xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("progress"); } ) The WinJS.xhr() method returns a promise. The Promise class includes a then() method which accepts three callback functions: a complete callback, an error callback, and a progress callback: Promise.then(completeCallback, errorCallback, progressCallback) In the code above, three anonymous functions are passed to the then() method. The three callbacks simply write a message to the JavaScript Console. The complete callback also dumps all of the data retrieved from the photos.txt file. Creating Promises You can create your own promises by creating a new instance of the Promise class. The constructor for the Promise class requires a function which accepts three parameters: a complete, error, and progress function parameter. For example, the code below illustrates how you can create a method named wait10Seconds() which returns a promise. The progress function is called every second and the complete function is not called until 10 seconds have passed: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; function wait10Seconds() { return new WinJS.Promise(function (complete, error, progress) { var seconds = 0; var intervalId = window.setInterval(function () { seconds++; progress(seconds); if (seconds > 9) { window.clearInterval(intervalId); complete(); } }, 1000); }); } app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { wait10Seconds().then( function () { console.log("complete") }, function () { console.log("error") }, function (seconds) { console.log("progress:" + seconds) } ); } } app.start(); })(); All of the work happens in the constructor function for the promise. The window.setInterval() method is used to execute code every second. Every second, the progress() callback method is called. If more than 10 seconds have passed then the complete() callback method is called and the clearInterval() method is called. When you execute the code above, you can see the output in the Visual Studio JavaScript Console. Creating a Timeout Promise In the previous section, we created a custom Promise which uses the window.setInterval() method to complete the promise after 10 seconds. We really did not need to create a custom promise because the Promise class already includes a static method for returning promises which complete after a certain interval. The code below illustrates how you can use the timeout() method. The timeout() method returns a promise which completes after a certain number of milliseconds. WinJS.Promise.timeout(3000).then( function(){console.log("complete")}, function(){console.log("error")}, function(){console.log("progress")} ); In the code above, the Promise completes after 3 seconds (3000 milliseconds). The Promise returned by the timeout() method does not support progress events. Therefore, the only message written to the console is the message “complete” after 10 seconds. Canceling Promises Some promises, but not all, support cancellation. When you cancel a promise, the promise’s error callback is executed. For example, the following code uses the WinJS.xhr() method to perform an Ajax request. However, immediately after the Ajax request is made, the request is cancelled. // Specify Ajax request options var options = { url: "/data/photos.txt" }; // Make the Ajax request var request = WinJS.xhr(options).then( function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("success"); }, function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("fail"); }, function (xmlHttpRequest) { console.log("progress"); } ); // Cancel the Ajax request request.cancel(); When you run the code above, the message “fail” is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console. Composing Promises You can build promises out of other promises. In other words, you can compose promises. There are two static methods of the Promise class which you can use to compose promises: the join() method and the any() method. When you join promises, a promise is complete when all of the joined promises are complete. When you use the any() method, a promise is complete when any of the promises complete. The following code illustrates how to use the join() method. A new promise is created out of two timeout promises. The new promise does not complete until both of the timeout promises complete: WinJS.Promise.join([WinJS.Promise.timeout(1000), WinJS.Promise.timeout(5000)]) .then(function () { console.log("complete"); }); The message “complete” will not be written to the JavaScript Console until both promises passed to the join() method completes. The message won’t be written for 5 seconds (5,000 milliseconds). The any() method completes when any promise passed to the any() method completes: WinJS.Promise.any([WinJS.Promise.timeout(1000), WinJS.Promise.timeout(5000)]) .then(function () { console.log("complete"); }); The code above writes the message “complete” to the JavaScript Console after 1 second (1,000 milliseconds). The message is written to the JavaScript console immediately after the first promise completes and before the second promise completes. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe WinJS promises. First, we discussed how promises enable you to easily write code which performs asynchronous actions. You learned how to use a promise when performing an Ajax request. Next, we discussed how you can create your own promises. You learned how to create a new promise by creating a constructor function with complete, error, and progress parameters. Finally, you learned about several advanced methods of promises. You learned how to use the timeout() method to create promises which complete after an interval of time. You also learned how to cancel promises and compose promises from other promises.

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• Code Camp 2011 – Summary

  - by hajan

  Waiting whole twelve months to come this year’s Code Camp 2011 event was something which all Microsoft technologies (and even non-Microsoft techs.) developers were doing in the past year. Last year’s success was enough big to be heard and to influence everything around our developer community and beyond. Code Camp 2011 was nothing else but a invincible success which will remain in our memory for a long time from now. Darko Milevski (president of MKDOT.NET UG and SharePoint MVP) said something interesting at the event keynote that up to now we were looking at the past by saying what we did… now we will focus on the future and how to develop our community more and more in the future days, weeks, months and I hope so for many years… Even though it was held only two days ago (26th of November 2011), I already feel the nostalgia for everything that happened there and for the excellent time we have spent all together. ORGANIZED BY ENTHUSIASTS AND EXPERTS Code Camp 2011 was organized by number of community enthusiasts and experts who have unselfishly contributed with all their free time to make the best of this event. The event was organized by a known community group called MKDOT.NET User Group, name of a user group which is known not only in Macedonia, but also in many countries abroad. Organization mainly consists of software developers, technical leaders, team leaders in several known companies in Macedonia, as well as Microsoft MVPs. SPEAKERS There were 24 speakers at five parallel tracks. At Code Camp 2011 we had two groups of speakers: Professional Experts in various technologies and Student Speakers. The new interesting thing here is the Student Speakers, which draw attention a lot, especially to other students who were interested to see what their colleagues are going to speak about and how do they use Microsoft technologies in different coding scenarios and practices, in different topics. From the rest of the professional speakers, there were 7 Microsoft MVPs: Two ASP.NET/IIS MVPs, Two C# MVPs, and One MVP in SharePoint, SQL Server and Exchange Server. I must say that besides the MVP Speakers, who definitely did a great job as always… there were other excellent speakers as well, which were speaking on various technologies, such as: Web Development, Windows Phone Development, XNA, Windows 8, Games Development, Entity Framework, Event-driven programming, SOLID, SQLCLR, T-SQL, e.t.c. SESSIONS There were 25 sessions mainly all related to Microsoft technologies, but ranging from Windows 8, WP7, ASP.NET till Games Development, XNA and Event-driven programming. Sessions were going in five parallel tracks named as Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Student track. Five presentations in each track, each with level 300 or 400. More info MY SESSION (ASP.NET MVC Best Practices) I must say that from the big number of speaking engagements I have had, this was one of my best performances and definitely I have set new records of attendees at my sessions and probably overall. I spoke on topic ASP.NET MVC Best Practices, where I have shown tips, tricks, guidelines and best practices on what to use and what to avoid by developing with one of the best web development frameworks nowadays, ASP.NET MVC. I had approximately 350+ attendees, the hall was full so that there was no room for staying at feet. Besides .NET developers, there were a lot of other technology oriented developers, who has also received the presentation very well and I really hope I gave them reason to think about ASP.NET as one of the best options for web development nowadays (if you ask me, it’s the best one ;-)). I have included 10 tips in using ASP.NET MVC each of them followed by a demo. Besides these 10 tips, I have briefly introduced the concept of ASP.NET MVC for those that haven’t been working with the framework and at the end some bonus tips. I must say there was lot of laugh for some funny sentences I have stated, like “If you code ASP.NET MVC, girls will love you more” – same goes for girls, only replace girls with boys :). [LINK TO SESSION WILL GO HERE, ONCE SESSIONS ARE AVAILABLE ON MK CODECAMP WEBSITE] VOLUNTEERS Without strong organization, such events wouldn’t be able to gather hundreds of attendees at one place and still stay perfectly organized to the smallest details, without dedicated organization and volunteers. I would like to dedicate this space in my blog to them and to say one big THANK YOU for supporting us before the event and during the whole day in the event. With such young and dedicated volunteers, we couldn’t achieve anything but great results. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION! NETWORKING One of the main reasons why we do such events is to gather all professionals in one place. Networking is what everyone wants because through this way of networking, we can meet incredible people in one place. It is amazing feeling to share your knowledge with others and exchange thoughts on various topics. Meet and talk to interesting people. I have had very special moments with many attendees especially after my presentation. Special Thank You to all of them who come to meet me in person, whether to ask a question, say congrats for my session or simply meet me and just smile :)… everything counts! Thank You! TWITTER During the event, twitter was one of the most useful event-wide communication tool where everyone could tweet with hash tag #mkcodecamp or #mkdotnet and say what he/she wants to say about the current state and happenings at that moment… In my next blog post I will list the top craziest tweets that were posted at this event… FUTURE OF MKDOT.NET Having such strong community around MKDOT.NET, the future seems very bright. The initial plans are to have sub-groups in several technologies, however all these sub-groups will belong to the MKDOT.NET UG which will be, somehow, the HEAD of these sub-groups. We are doing this to provide better divisions by technologies and organize ourselves better since our community is very big, around 500 members in MKDOT.NET.We will have five sub-groups:- Web User Group (Lead:Hajan Selmani - me)- Mobile User Group (Lead: Filip Kerazovski)- Visual C# User Group (Lead: Vekoslav Stefanovski)- SharePoint User Group (Lead: Darko Milevski)- Dynamics User Group (Lead: Vladimir Senih) SUMMARY Online registered attendees: ~1.200 Event attendees: ~800 Number of members in organization: 40+ Organized by: MKDOT.NET User Group Number of tracks: 5 Number of speakers: 24 Number of sessions: 25 Event official website: http://codecamp.mkdot.net Total number of sponsors: 20 Platinum Sponsors: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik Place held: FON University City and Country: Skopje, Macedonia THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE BEST EVENT IN MACEDONIA, CODE CAMP 2011. Regards, Hajan

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• B2B and B2C alike… but a little different – Oracle Commerce named Leader in Forrester B2B Commerce Wave

  - by Katrina Gosek

  We weren’t surprised to see Oracle Commerce positioned as a Leader in Forrester Research, Inc.’s first Commerce Wave focused on B2B, “The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Suites, Q4 2013,” released earlier this month. We believe that the report validates much of what we’ve heard from our largest customers – the world’s largest distribution, manufacturing and high-tech customers who sell billions of dollars of goods and services to other businesses through their Web channels. More importantly, we feel that the report confirms something very important: B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… but a little different. B2B and B2C Commerce are alike… Clearly, B2C experiences have set expectations for B2B. Every B2B buyer is a consumer at home and brings the same expectations to a website selling electronic components, aftermarket parts, or MRO products. Forrester calls these rich consumer-based capabilities that help B2B customers do their jobs “table stakes”: front-office content, community, and commerce features that meet customer expectations for 24x7x365 ordering, real-time customer service, and expedited shipping — both online and on mobile devices: “Whether they are just beginning to sell online or are in the late stages of launching a next-generation site, B2B eCommerce operations today must: offer a customer experience standard comparable to what leading b2c sites now offer; address the growing influence that mobile devices are having in the workplace; make a qualitative and quantitative business case that drives sustained investment.” Just five years ago, many of our B2B customers’ online business comprised only 5-10% of their total revenue. Today, when we speak to those same brands, we hear about double and triple digit growth in their online channels. Many have seen the percentage of the business they perform in their web channels cross the 30-50% threshold. You can hear first-hand from several Oracle Commerce B2B customers about the success they are seeing, and what they’re trying to accomplish (Carolina Biological, Premier Farnell, DeliXL, Elsevier). It seems that this market momentum is likely the reason Forrester broke out the separate B2B Commerce Wave from the B2C Wave. In fact, B2B is becoming the larger force in commerce, expected to collect twice the online dollars of B2C this year ($559 billion). But a little different… Despite the similarities, there is a key and very important difference between B2C and B2B. Unlike a consumer shopping for shoes, a business shopper buying from a distributor or manufacturer is coming to the Web channel as a part of their job. So in addition to a rich, consumer-like experience this shopper expects, these B2B buyers need quoting tools and complex pricing capabilities, like eProcurement, bulk order entry, and other self-service tools such as account, contract and organization management. Forrester also is emphasizing three additional “back-end” tools and capabilities their clients say they need to drive growth in their B2B online channels: i) product information management (PIM), which provides a single system of record for large part lists and product catalogs; ii) web content management (WCM), needed to manage large volumes of unstructured marketing information, and iii) order management systems (OMS), which manage and orchestrate the complex B2B order life cycle from quote through approval, submission to manufacturing, distribution and delivery. We would like to expand on each of these 3 areas: As Forrester suggests, back-end PIM is definitely needed by B2B Commerce providers. Most B2B companies have made significant investments in enterprise-grade PIMs, given the importance of product data management for aggregation and syndication of content, product attribution, analytics, and handling of complex workflows. While in principle it may sound appealing to have a PIM as part of a commerce offering (especially for SMBs who have to do more with less), our customers have typically found that PIM in a commerce platform is largely redundant with what they already have in-place, and is not fully-featured or robust enough to handle the complexity of the product data sets that B2B distributors and manufacturers usually handle. To meet the PIM needs for commerce, Oracle offers enterprise PIM (Product Hub/Fusion PIM) and a robust enterprise data quality product (EDQP) integrated with the Oracle Commerce solution. These are key differentiators of our offering and these capabilities are becoming even more tightly integrated with Oracle Commerce over time. For Commerce, what customers really need is a robust product catalog and content management system for enabling business users to further enrich and ready catalog and content data to be presented and sold online.  This has been a significant area of investment in the Oracle Commerce platform , which continue to get stronger. We see this combination of capabilities as best meeting the needs of our customers for a commerce platform without adding a largely redundant, less functional PIM in the commerce front-end.  On the topic of web content management, we were pleased to see Forrester cite Oracle’s differentiated digital experience capability in this area and the “unique opportunity in the market to lead the convergence of commerce and content management with the amalgamation of Oracle Commerce with WebCenter Sites (formally FatWire).” Strong content management capabilities are critical for distributors and manufacturers who are frequently serving an engineering audience coming to their websites to conduct product research in search of technical data sheets, drawings, videos and more. The convergence of content, commerce, and experience is critical for B2B brands selling online. Regarding order management, Forrester notes that many businesses use their existing back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage order life cycles.  We hear the same from most of our B2B customers, as they already have an ERP system—if not several of them—and are not interested in yet another one. So what do we take away from the Wave results? Forrester notes that the Oracle Commerce Platform “has always had strong B2B commerce capabilities and Oracle certainly has an exhaustive list of B2B customers using the solution.”  What makes us excited about developing leading B2B solutions are the close relationships with our customers and the clear opportunity in the market – which we'll address in an exciting new release planned for the next 12 months. Oracle has one of the world’s largest B2B customer bases, providing leading solutions across key business-to-business functions – from marketing, sales automation, and service to master data management, and ERP. To learn more about Oracle’s Commerce product vision and strategy, visit our website and check out these other B2B Commerce Resources: -       2013 B2B Commerce Trends Report -       B2B Commerce Whitepaper: Consumerization, Complexity, Change -       B2B Commerce Webcast: What Industry Trend Setters Do Right -       Internet Retailer, Web Drives Sales for B2B Companies -       Internet Retailer Article, The Web Means Business: B2B Companies Beef Up Their Websites,        borrowing from b2c retailers and breaking new ground -       Internet Retailer Article, B2B e-Commerce is poised for growth

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• Mac OS X Server Open Directory does not push Software Update settings to clients

  - by joxl

  I have an Xserve G5 running Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 configured as an Open Directory master. I have also enabled and configured Software Update service on the machine. The SUS is configured to serve Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard clients (see http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10297359#10297359) The clients bound to the OD are a variety of Mac's running OS X 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6. In Workgroup Manager, I have created 3 machine groups for each client OS. Each group is configured with a custom SUS URL, and the managed client computers are members accordingly (see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10493154#10493154) My problem is that the server pushes the SUS settings to some of the client machines, but not all. When I first configured all this stuff on the server (a few weeks ago) I was closely monitoring a few of the client machines to confirm that they received the custom settings. I noticed that some of the clients (10.4/5/6 alike) seemed to get the settings immediately, others didn't show the new settings until after a reboot. As I said, results are mixed across OS's, but some clients will not "sync" at all. My immediate thought was to unbind/rebind the problematic machines. I did this on several client computers with no success. For example, today I was working on one of the Tiger clients. I noticed it was not pointed at my local SUS, so I checked the OD binding; it was fine. Just to be sure I unbound the machine. Next, I checked WM and confirmed the computer record was gone. I noticed the machine group still had a residual (broken?) member from the unbound client; I manually removed this. Finally, I re-bound the client to OD and re-added the machine to it's correct group in WM. Unfortunately, the client still pings apple's SUS for updates. Just to play it safe I rebooted the client, but to no avail, it will not see my local SUS. To confirm that there is nothing wrong with the server, or the client's connection to it, forcefully pointed the machine at my SUS: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL "$LOCAL_SUS_URL" and the machine successfully updated off my local server. Great, successful updates, but problem not solved. I've done exhaustive reading on discussions.apple.com (not saying I read everything, I'm just saying I have read a lot) without a good answer. The discouraging thing is that a lot of OD problems I've read about only result in the sysadmin completely reinstalling the server, or OD, or some other similarly heavy-handed operation. At this point, I am not willing to go that route. I still have hope that I can find the reason for this flaky behavior. If anyone can point me in a helpful direction it would be much appreciated. EDIT: Indeed, some files are being pushed to the client: # from client machine: $ sudo find /Library -type f -name com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Managed Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist A few weeks ago, prior to my (previously mentioned) modifications, the SUS was still running "stock". Which meant it could not serve SL (10.6) machines. At that time, the Software Update settings were setup in WM under User Groups. This didn't make any sense because some users work on multiple machines with different OS's. Before creating Machine Groups in WM, I deleted all the SU settings from the User Group Preferences. This just makes the whole thing more confusing, because when I see a file here: /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist I assume it's still remaining from the "old" settings, because I wouldn't think a Machine Setting belongs there. Despite all the com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist hanging around under the Managed Preferences, why does the client machine still call home to Apple and not my SUS? # on client machine: $ date Tue Jan 25 17:01:46 EST 2011 $ softwareupdate --list Software Update Tool Copyright 2002-2005 Apple No new software available. switch terminals... # on server: $ tail -n1 /var/log/swupd/swupd_access_log 10.x.x.x - - [25/Jan/2011:15:54:29 -0500] XXXX POST "/cgi-bin/SoftwareUpdateServerStats" 200 13 ... Notice the date of the client softwareupdate and the latest access to the SUS server; the server never heard a peep from that client.

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• On StringComparison Values

  - by Jesse

  When you use the .NET Framework’s String.Equals and String.Compare methods do you use an overloStringComparison enumeration value? If not, you should be because the value provided for that StringComparison argument can have a big impact on the results of your string comparison. The StringComparison enumeration defines values that fall into three different major categories: Culture-sensitive comparison using a specific culture, defaulted to the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture value (StringComparison.CurrentCulture and StringComparison.CurrentCutlureIgnoreCase) Invariant culture comparison (StringComparison.InvariantCulture and StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) Ordinal (byte-by-byte) comparison of  (StringComparison.Ordinal and StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) There is a lot of great material available that detail the technical ins and outs of these different string comparison approaches. If you’re at all interested in the topic these two MSDN articles are worth a read: Best Practices For Using Strings in the .NET Framework: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465121.aspx How To Compare Strings: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc165449.aspx Those articles cover the technical details of string comparison well enough that I’m not going to reiterate them here other than to say that the upshot is that you typically want to use the culture-sensitive comparison whenever you’re comparing strings that were entered by or will be displayed to users and the ordinal comparison in nearly all other cases. So where does that leave the invariant culture comparisons? The “Best Practices For Using Strings in the .NET Framework” article has the following to say: “On balance, the invariant culture has very few properties that make it useful for comparison. It does comparison in a linguistically relevant manner, which prevents it from guaranteeing full symbolic equivalence, but it is not the choice for display in any culture. One of the few reasons to use StringComparison.InvariantCulture for comparison is to persist ordered data for a cross-culturally identical display. For example, if a large data file that contains a list of sorted identifiers for display accompanies an application, adding to this list would require an insertion with invariant-style sorting.” I don’t know about you, but I feel like that paragraph is a bit lacking. Are there really any “real world” reasons to use the invariant culture comparison? I think the answer to this question is, “yes”, but in order to understand why we should first think about what the invariant culture comparison really does. The invariant culture comparison is really just a culture-sensitive comparison using a special invariant culture (Michael Kaplan has a great post on the history of the invariant culture on his blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2004/12/29/344136.aspx). This means that the invariant culture comparison will apply the linguistic customs defined by the invariant culture which are guaranteed not to differ between different machines or execution contexts. This sort of consistently does prove useful if you needed to maintain a list of strings that are sorted in a meaningful and consistent way regardless of the user viewing them or the machine on which they are being viewed. Example: Prototype Names Let’s say that you work for a large multi-national toy company with branch offices in 10 different countries. Each year the company would work on 15-25 new toy prototypes each of which is assigned a “code name” while it is under development. Coming up with fun new code names is a big part of the company culture that everyone really enjoys, so to be fair the CEO of the company spent a lot of time coming up with a prototype naming scheme that would be fun for everyone to participate in, fair to all of the different branch locations, and accessible to all members of the organization regardless of the country they were from and the language that they spoke. Each new prototype will get a code name that begins with a letter following the previously created name using the alphabetical order of the Latin/Roman alphabet. Each new year prototype names would start back at “A”. The country that leads the prototype development effort gets to choose the name in their native language. (An appropriate Romanization system will be used for countries where the primary language is not written in the Latin/Roman alphabet. For example, the Pinyin system could be used for Chinese). To avoid repeating names, a list of all current and past prototype names will be maintained on each branch location’s company intranet site. Assuming that maintaining a single pre-sorted list is not feasible among all of the highly distributed intranet implementations, what string comparison method would you use to sort each year’s list of prototype names so that the list is both meaningful and consistent regardless of the country within which the list is being viewed? Sorting the list with a culture-sensitive comparison using the default configured culture on each country’s intranet server the list would probably work most of the time, but subtle differences between cultures could mean that two different people would see a list that was sorted slightly differently. The CEO wants the prototype names to be a unifying aspect of company culture and is adamant that everyone see the the same list sorted in the same order and there’s no way to guarantee a consistent sort across different cultures using the culture-sensitive string comparison rules. The culture-sensitive sort would produce a meaningful list for the specific user viewing it, but it wouldn’t always be consistent between different users. Sorting with the ordinal comparison would certainly be consistent regardless of the user viewing it, but would it be meaningful? Let’s say that the current year’s prototype name list looks like this: Antílope (Spanish) Babouin (French) Cahoun (Czech) Diamond (English) Flosse (German) If you were to sort this list using ordinal rules you’d end up with: Antílope Babouin Diamond Flosse Cahoun This sort is no good because the entry for “C” appears the bottom of the list after “F”. This is because the Czech entry for the letter “C” makes use of a diacritic (accent mark). The ordinal string comparison does a byte-by-byte comparison of the code points that make up each character in the string and the code point for the “C” with the diacritic mark is higher than any letter without a diacritic mark, which pushes that entry to the bottom of the sorted list. The CEO wants each country to be able to create prototype names in their native language, which means we need to allow for names that might begin with letters that have diacritics, so ordinal sorting kills the meaningfulness of the list. As it turns out, this situation is actually well-suited for the invariant culture comparison. The invariant culture accounts for linguistically relevant factors like the use of diacritics but will provide a consistent sort across all machines that perform the sort. Now that we’ve walked through this example, the following line from the “Best Practices For Using Strings in the .NET Framework” makes a lot more sense: One of the few reasons to use StringComparison.InvariantCulture for comparison is to persist ordered data for a cross-culturally identical display That line describes the prototype name example perfectly: we need a way to persist ordered data for a cross-culturally identical display. While this example is 100% made-up, I think it illustrates that there are indeed real-world situations where the invariant culture comparison is useful.

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• 13.10 - Weird WiFi connection problems - WMP300N - Broadcom BCM4321

  - by user1898041

  Just installed 13.10 on my desktop and I really like it. After having problems with getting the wifi to work, I installed it connected to the internet with an ethernet cable and added in the 3rd party software and updates as per the installation procedure. After installation was completed, I saw the wifi icon in the upper right hand corner, but it was not seeing any wifi networks. Some Googling brought me to use the 'Additional Drivers' application. It found the WMP300N Broadcom BDM4321 based pci wifi card and installed the proprietary Broadcom STA wireless driver, which may have been installed before. I'm not sure. Here is the weird part: when I start my system, wifi seems to be in some sort of suspended state where the system sees that the card exists but the card will not detect any wifi networks. It will work after booting once I 'Additional Drivers' application and then start FireFox. I know it seems weird, but this is the process I've got down to get the card to recognize wifi networks. After those applications are open for a few seconds, the card starts to function like normal (although maintaining the wifi connection is problem but most likely a seperate issue). The reason this is a problem is because this is supposed to just be a headless box managed through SSH. Here are the readouts from the common network diagnosis programs BEFORE I open 'Additional Drivers' and 'FireFox'. All commands were done with sudo. lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express DRAM Controller (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02) 00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 6 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2) 01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet (rev b0) 03:00.0 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB368 IDE controller 05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11b/g/n (rev 01) 05:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0) - lshw *-network description: Ethernet interface product: Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: b0 serial: 00:22:15:00:a8:12 capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1 driverversion=2.1.3 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:46 memory:feac0000-feafffff memory:feaa0000-feabffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: BCM4321 802.11b/g/n vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0 logical name: eth1 version: 01 serial: 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.141 (r415941) latency=64 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:16 memory:febfc000-febfffff - ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:22:15:00:a8:12 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 inet6 addr: fe80::223:69ff:fed8:2b16/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) Interrupt:16 Base address:0xc000 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:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:24 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:1856 (1.8 KB) TX bytes:1856 (1.8 KB) - iwconfig eth1 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:off/any Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=200 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off - iwlist scan eth1 No scan results - Here are the various commands AFTER I open 'Additional Drivers' and 'FireFox' lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express DRAM Controller (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82G35 Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1a.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02) 00:1a.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 02) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 02) 00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 92) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801IR (ICH9R) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801IR/IO/IH (ICH9R/DO/DH) 6 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT216 [GeForce GT 220] (rev a2) 01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet (rev b0) 03:00.0 IDE interface: JMicron Technology Corp. JMB368 IDE controller 05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4321 802.11b/g/n (rev 01) 05:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0) - lshw *-network description: Ethernet interface product: Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Qualcomm Atheros physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: b0 serial: 00:22:15:00:a8:12 capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=atl1 driverversion=2.1.3 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:46 memory:feac0000-feafffff memory:feaa0000-feabffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: BCM4321 802.11b/g/n vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:05:00.0 logical name: eth1 version: 01 serial: 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=wl0 driverversion=6.30.223.141 (r415941) ip=192.168.1.103 latency=64 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abg resources: irq:16 memory:febfc000-febfffff - ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:22:15:00:a8:12 UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B) eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:23:69:d8:2b:16 inet addr:192.168.1.103 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::223:69ff:fed8:2b16/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:85 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:11901 TX packets:132 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:52641 (52.6 KB) TX bytes:19058 (19.0 KB) Interrupt:16 Base address:0xc000 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:65536 Metric:1 RX packets:76 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:76 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:6084 (6.0 KB) TX bytes:6084 (6.0 KB) - iwconfig eth1 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:"BU" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447 GHz Access Point: 00:26:F2:1F:81:02 Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=200 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=59/70 Signal level=-51 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 - iwlist scan A LOT OF SSIDs FOUND! - I'd like to have this problem fixed, but I'm not quite sure where to go. Been Googling a lot and can't seem to find anyone else with this problem.

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• Wrapping ASP.NET Client Callbacks

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Client Callbacks are probably the less known (and I dare say, less loved) of all the AJAX options in ASP.NET, which also include the UpdatePanel, Page Methods and Web Services. The reason for that, I believe, is it’s relative complexity: Get a reference to a JavaScript function; Dynamically register function that calls the above reference; Have a JavaScript handler call the registered function. However, it has some the nice advantage of being self-contained, that is, doesn’t need additional files, such as web services, JavaScript libraries, etc, or static methods declared on a page, or any kind of attributes. So, here’s what I want to do: Have a DOM element which exposes a method that is executed server side, passing it a string and returning a string; Have a server-side event that handles the client-side call; Have two client-side user-supplied callback functions for handling the success and error results. I’m going to develop a custom control without user interface that does the registration of the client JavaScript method as well as a server-side event that can be hooked by some handler on a page. My markup will look like this: 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1:  2:  3: function onCallbackSuccess(result, context) 4: { 5: } 6:  7: function onCallbackError(error, context) 8: { 9: } 10:  </script> 2: <my:CallbackControl runat="server" ID="callback" SendAllData="true" OnCallback="OnCallback"/> The control itself looks like this: 1: public class CallbackControl : Control, ICallbackEventHandler 2: { 3: #region Public constructor 4: public CallbackControl() 5: { 6: this.SendAllData = false; 7: this.Async = true; 8: } 9: #endregion 10:  11: #region Public properties and events 12: public event EventHandler<CallbackEventArgs> Callback; 13:  14: [DefaultValue(true)] 15: public Boolean Async 16: { 17: get; 18: set; 19: } 20:  21: [DefaultValue(false)] 22: public Boolean SendAllData 23: { 24: get; 25: set; 26: } 27:  28: #endregion 29:  30: #region Protected override methods 31:  32: protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) 33: { 34: writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Id, this.ClientID); 35: writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Span); 36:  37: base.Render(writer); 38:  39: writer.RenderEndTag(); 40: } 41:  42: protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) 43: { 44: String reference = this.Page.ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference(this, "arg", "onCallbackSuccess", "context", "onCallbackError", this.Async); 45: String script = String.Concat("\ndocument.getElementById('", this.ClientID, "').callback = function(arg, context, onCallbackSuccess, onCallbackError){", ((this.SendAllData == true) ? "__theFormPostCollection.length = 0; __theFormPostData = ''; WebForm_InitCallback(); " : String.Empty), reference, ";};\n"); 46:  47: this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(this.GetType(), String.Concat("callback", this.ClientID), script, true); 48:  49: base.OnInit(e); 50: } 51:  52: #endregion 53:  54: #region Protected virtual methods 55: protected virtual void OnCallback(CallbackEventArgs args) 56: { 57: EventHandler<CallbackEventArgs> handler = this.Callback; 58:  59: if (handler != null) 60: { 61: handler(this, args); 62: } 63: } 64:  65: #endregion 66:  67: #region ICallbackEventHandler Members 68:  69: String ICallbackEventHandler.GetCallbackResult() 70: { 71: CallbackEventArgs args = new CallbackEventArgs(this.Context.Items["Data"] as String); 72:  73: this.OnCallback(args); 74:  75: return (args.Result); 76: } 77:  78: void ICallbackEventHandler.RaiseCallbackEvent(String eventArgument) 79: { 80: this.Context.Items["Data"] = eventArgument; 81: } 82:  83: #endregion 84: } And the event argument class: 1: [Serializable] 2: public class CallbackEventArgs : EventArgs 3: { 4: public CallbackEventArgs(String argument) 5: { 6: this.Argument = argument; 7: this.Result = String.Empty; 8: } 9:  10: public String Argument 11: { 12: get; 13: private set; 14: } 15:  16: public String Result 17: { 18: get; 19: set; 20: } 21: } You will notice two properties on the CallbackControl: Async: indicates if the call should be made asynchronously or synchronously (the default); SendAllData: indicates if the callback call will include the view and control state of all of the controls on the page, so that, on the server side, they will have their properties set when the Callback event is fired. The CallbackEventArgs class exposes two properties: Argument: the read-only argument passed to the client-side function; Result: the result to return to the client-side callback function, set from the Callback event handler. An example of an handler for the Callback event would be: 1: protected void OnCallback(Object sender, CallbackEventArgs e) 2: { 3: e.Result = String.Join(String.Empty, e.Argument.Reverse()); 4: } Finally, in order to fire the Callback event from the client, you only need this: 1: <input type="text" id="input"/> 2: <input type="button" value="Get Result" onclick="document.getElementById('callback').callback(callback(document.getElementById('input').value, 'context', onCallbackSuccess, onCallbackError))"/> The syntax of the callback function is: arg: some string argument; context: some context that will be passed to the callback functions (success or failure); callbackSuccessFunction: some function that will be called when the callback succeeds; callbackFailureFunction: some function that will be called if the callback fails for some reason. Give it a try and see if it helps!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 13, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, May 13, 2010New ProjectsC# 4.0: VS 2010Collaborative Rich Text Edit Prototype Silverlight on Windows Azure: Working like Google Doc but based on Silverlight/Windows Azure. Multiple users can edit one rich text document simultaneously. This is a POC and my...Consulting Assigment: Proyecto de consultoría para el curso Gestión de proyectos de la UCRCS 105 MP Splitter: Simple program to help with splitting up MPs for grading.DipEngine - graphic engine written on Xen for XNA: DIPEngine makes it easier for developers to use it in your game. It's developed in C# and using Xen for XNADotNetAgent: Agent FrameworkExtending C# editor - Outlining, classification: Extensions to VS C# editor current feautereset. Outlining for switch, for(each), if etc. statements. Classification types for method parameters and...Floe IRC Client: Floe is an IRC client written entirely in C#, using the .NET 4.0 framework with WPF technology. It is inspired largely by both XChat and mIRC, and ...Gestalt.Net: Gestalt.Net is a simple to use library for application configuration. It allows for more flexibility, easier to use, and more powerful than the app...GIM.OnlineChess: An implementation of online long-term chessGoogleTrail: Create and Export using the google map to develop the Trek Trails and Export Those Trails as Garmin Custom Map Compatible MapsGrassidi: What could Grassidi be?HodsAudio: Personal web based music library.Hospital Manage System: Free Hospital Manage SystemHtml Reader: Html Reader makes it easier for WPF WebBrowser users to access the Document property, and retrieve information from HTML pages. 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Note: The .NET Framework v4.0 is required to run this app. It can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details....Fluent Assertions: Release 1.2.1: This is small release with two improvements: You can now use the Enumeration() extension method on a Func<IEnumerable> before calling ShouldThrow<T...Gestalt.Net: Gestalt.Net 1.0: Initial release of Gestalt.Net, a simple to use library for application configuration. It allows for more flexibility, easier to use, and more powe...GPdotNET - Tree Based Genetic Programming Tool: GPdotNETv0.9: This is the same version as previous, but compiled with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. You no longer need CTP of ParallelFX.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201005122025): New features: (None) Bug fix: (None) Improvements: HKGolden Express now parse JSON data rather than XML document from HKGolden API. This shoul...Jobping Url Shortener: Deploy Code 0.3: Contains only the files for running 0.3 version of the code.Jobping Url Shortener: Source Code 0.3: Feature added: Restriction placed on the domains that the shortener will shorten. Our installation will only shorten www.jobping.com urls. Bug Fix...KooBoo Image Galery: Beta 1: This is the first release and it is divided in some parts Module Install - Is the admin module and an default view Plugin - returns the galery as...LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.8.5: Changes in release 0.8.5 Allow for multiple updatetypes. Add search by Company. Show profiles of all people in an update .MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.13.58780: Fixed Uploading.com dead links detection; Fixed links detection at pages and in FilesTube results; Fixed RSS channel checking; Enabled by def...Microsoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V0.8 - N-Layer DDD Sample App (VS.2010 RTM compat): Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Unity Applic...MoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets): MoonyDesk: MoonyDesk alpha releaseMSNSharp Application with Video Conferencing Feature: MSNVideoChat: Msn Video Chat Application's exe and screenshot is attached.NazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Binary: FxCop compliant codebaseNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Signed Binary: Signed binaryNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Signed Source: Signed sourceNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Source: FxCop compliant codebasepatterns & practices Web Client Developer Guidance: Web Client Software Factory 2010 Guide: If the right-side pane of the chm file is not displayed correctly, do the following: 1) Download WCSF2010Guide.chm file. 2) Start the windows explo...Powershell Scripts for Admins: BizTalk PowerShell Module: BizTalk PowerShell Module Available commands : Get-Applications Start-Application Stop-Application Get-HostInstances Start-HostInstance Stop-Hos...Reusable Library: V1.0.8: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerReusable Library Demo: V1.0.6: A demonstration of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerRobot Shootans: Robot Shootans 0.9: This is the second public release of the game. All instructions for play are in the game itself. Known issues: Bullet collision is still a little...Rx Contrib: V1.2: - Bug fix - API changes public static ReactiveQueue<T> CreateConcurrentQueue( ConcurrentPublicationBehavior concurrentPublicationBeha...SqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources: SqlDiffFramework 1.0.1.0: Maintenance Release An embedded user control inadvertently assumed US regional and language settings; with non-US settings the application crashed ...Transcriber: Transcriber V0.5.0: Pre-releaseUpgrade Log Parser for SharePoint 2010: Upgrade Log Parser for SharePoint 2010: Introduction I did an upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010 and SP2010 generated such a large log file and I really didn't feel like scrolling ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30512.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.0a: Renamed vld dll files. Problem with MSVC 2010 Unicode library fixed.VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 24 Beta: Build 24 (beta) New: Added "Open Modified File..." to Solution Explorer context menus. VsTortoise.SolutionExplorerSelectedItemsOpenModifiedFile com...WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.05.00: Whats New Custom Tags: Tag Name and Tag Url can be localized New Option to set Start Date to grab Search Referrals from New Option to Choose th...Wavelet analysis: Wavelet analysis: Первая публичная версия проекта.XNA Shooter Engine: ModelViewer Alpha 1 Preview: ModelViewer is a utility for previewing HLSL shaders and XNA BasicEffects using the XSE rendering engine. It can also be used with the Microsoft XN...Yet another developer blog - Examples: XML and XSLT transformation in ASP.NET MVC example: This sample application shows how to perform XSL transformation of XML file in ASP.NET MVC (using dedicated HtmlHelper extensions or ActionResult)....Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemRawrBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelwhitejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMicrosoft Biology FoundationFarseer Physics EngineShake - C# Make

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• Setup and Use SpecFlow BDD with DevExpress XAF

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  Let’s get started with using the SpecFlow BDD syntax for writing tests with the DevExpress XAF EasyTest scripting syntax.  In order for this to work you will need to download and install the prerequisites listed below.  Once they are installed follow the steps outlined below and enjoy. Prerequisites Install the following items: DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) found here SpecFlow found here Liekhus BDD/XAF Testing library found here Assumptions I am going to assume at this point that you have created your XAF application and have your Module, Win.Module and Win ready for usage.  You should have also set any attributes and/or settings as you see fit. Setup So where to start. Create a new testing project within your solution. I typically call this with a similar naming convention as used by XAF, my project name .FunctionalTests (i.e. AlbumManager.FunctionalTests). Add the following references to your project.  It should look like the reference list below. DevExpress.Data.v11.x DevExpress.Persistent.Base.v11.x DevExpress.Persistent.BaseImpl.v11.x DevExpress.Xpo.v11.2 Liekhus.Testing.BDD.Core Liekhus.Testing.BDD.DevExpress TechTalk.SpecFlow TestExecutor.v11.x (found in %Program Files%\DevExpress 2011.x\eXpressApp Framework\Tools\EasyTest Right click the TestExecutor reference and set the “Copy Local” setting to True.  This forces the TestExecutor executable to be available in the bin directory which is where the EasyTest script will be executed further down in the process. Add an Application Configuration File (app.config) to your test application.  You will need to make a few modifications to have SpecFlow generate Microsoft style unit tests.  First add the section handler for SpecFlow and then set your choice of testing framework.  I prefer MS Tests for my projects. Add the EasyTest configuration file to your project.  Add a new XML file and call it Config.xml. Open the properties window for the Config.xml file and set the “Copy to Ouput Directory” to “Copy Always”. You will setup the Config file according to the specifications of the EasyTest library my mapping to your executable and other settings.  You can find the details for the configuration of EasyTest here.  My file looks like this Create a new folder in your test project called “StepDefinitions”.  Add a new SpecFlow Step Definition file item under the StepDefinitions folder.  I typically call this class StepDefinition.cs. Have your step definition inherit from the Liekhus.Testing.BDD.DevExpress.StepDefinition class.  This will give you the default behaviors for your test in the next section. OK.  Now that we have done this series of steps, we will work on simplifying this.  This is an early preview of this new project and is not fully ready for consumption.  If you would like to experiment with it, please feel free.  Our goals are to make this a installable project on it’s own with it’s own project templates and default settings.  This will be coming in later versions.  Currently this project is in Alpha release. Let’s write our first test Remove the basic test that is created for you. We will not use the default test but rather create our own SpecFlow “Feature” files. Add a new item to your project and select the SpecFlow Feature file under C#. Name your feature file as you do your class files after the test they are performing. Writing a feature file uses the Cucumber syntax of Given… When… Then.  Think of it in these terms.  Givens are the pre-conditions for the test.  The Whens are the actual steps for the test being performed.  The Thens are the verification steps that confirm your test either passed or failed.  All of these steps are generated into a an EasyTest format and executed against your XAF project.  You can find more on the Cucumber syntax by using the Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls.  This document has several good styles of tests, plus you can get your fill of Chuck Norris vs Ninjas.  Pretty humorous document but full of great content. My first test is going to test the entry of a new Album into the application and is outlined below. The Feature section at the top is more for your documentation purposes.  Try to be descriptive of the test so that it makes sense to the next person behind you.  The Scenario outline is described in the Ninja Scrolls, but think of it as test template.  You can write one test outline and have multiple datasets (Scenarios) executed against that test.  Here are the steps of my test and their descriptions Given I am starting a new test – tells our test to create a new EasyTest file And (Given) the application is open – tells EasyTest to open our application defined in the Config.xml When I am at the “Albums” screen – tells XAF to navigate to the Albums list view And (When) I click the “New:Album” button – tells XAF to click the New Album button on the ribbon And (When) I enter the following information – tells XAF to find the field on the screen and put the value in that field And (When) I click the “Save and Close” button – tells XAF to click the “Save and Close” button on the detail window Then I verify results as “user” – tells the testing framework to execute the EasyTest as your configured user Once you compile and prepare your tests you should see the following in your Test View.  For each of your CreateNewAlbum lines in your scenarios, you will see a new test ready to execute. From here you will use your testing framework of choice to execute the test.  This in turn will execute the EasyTest framework to call back into your XAF application and test your business application. Again, please remember that this is an early preview and we are still working out the details.  Please let us know if you have any comments/questions/concerns. Thanks and happy testing.

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• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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• Blogging tips for SQL Server professionals

  - by jamiet

  For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and Simon Sabin’s recent post Blogging – how do you do it? has prompted me to get around to completing it. So, here I present a compendium of tips that I’ve picked up from authoring a fair few blog posts over the past 6 years. Feedburner Feedburner.com is a service that can consume your blog’s default RSS feed and provide another, replacement, feed that has exactly the same content. You can then supply that replacement feed on your blog site for other people to consume in their RSS readers. Why would you want to do this? Well, two reasons actually: It makes your blog portable. If you ever want to move your blog to a different URL you don’t have to tell your subscribers to move to a different feed. The feedburner feed is a pointer to your blog content rather than being a copy of it. Feedburner will collect stats telling you how many people are subscribed to your feed, which RSS readers they use, stuff like that. Here’s a sample screenshot for http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/: It also tells you what your most viewed posts are: Web stats like these are notoriously inaccurate but then again the method of measurement here is not important, what IS important is that it gives you a trustworthy ranking of your blog posts and (in my opinion) knowing which are your most popular posts is more important than knowing exactly how many views each post has had. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Feedburner provides and I recommend every new blogger to try it! Monitor subscribers using Google Reader If for some reason Feedburner is not to your taste or (more likely) you already have an established RSS feed that you do not want to change then Google provide another way in which you can monitor your readership in the shape of their online RSS reader, Google Reader. It provides, for every RSS feed, a collection of stats including the number of Google Reader users that have subscribed to that RSS feed. This is really valuable information and in fact I have been recording this statistic for mine and a number of other blogs for a few years now and as such I can produce the following chart that indicates how readership is trending for those blogs over time: [Good news for my fellow SQLBlog bloggers.] As Stephen Few readily points out, its not the numbers that are important but the trend. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) SEO (or “How do I get my blog to show up in Google”) is a massive area of expertise which I don’t want (and am unable) to cover in much detail here but there are some simple rules of thumb that will help: Tags – If your blog engine offers the ability to add tags to your blog post, use them. Invariably those tags go into the meta section of the page HTML and search engines lap that stuff up. For example, from my recent post Microsoft publish Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Guidance: Title – Search engines take notice of web page titles as well so make them specific and descriptive (e.g. “Configuring dtsConfig connection strings”) rather than esoteric and meaningless in a vain attempt to be humorous (e.g. “Last night a DJ saved my ETL batch”)! Title(2) – Make your title even more search engine friendly by mentioning high level subject areas, not dissimilar to Twitter hashtags. For example, if you look at all of my posts related to SSIS you will notice that nearly all contain the word “SSIS” in the title even if I had to shoehorn it in there by putting it in square brackets or similar. Another tip, if you ARE putting words into your titles in this artificial manner then put them at the end so that they’re not that prominent in search engine results; they’re there for the search engines to consume, not for human beings. Images – Always add titles and alternate text (ALT attribute) to images in your blog post. If you use Windows 7 or Windows Vista then you can use Live Writer (which Simon recommended) makes this easy for you. Headings – If you want to highlight section headings use heading tags (e.g. <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc…) rather than just formatting the text appropriately – again, Live makes this easy. These tags give your blog posts structure that is understood by search engines and RSS readers alike. (I believe it makes them more amenable to CSS as well – though that’s not something I know too much about). If you check the HTML source for the blog post you’re reading right now you’ll be able to scan through and see where I have used heading tags. Microsoft provide a free tool called the SEO Toolkit that will analyse your blog site (for free) and tell you what things you should change to improve SEO. Go read more and download for free at Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. Did I mention that it was free? Miscellaneous Tips If you are including code in your blog post then ensure it is formatted correctly. Use SQL Server Central’s T-SQL prettifier for formatting T-SQL code. Use images and videos. Personally speaking there’s nothing I like less when reading a blog than paragraph after paragraph of text. Images make your blog more appealing which means people are more likely to read what you have written. Be original. Don’t plagiarise other people’s content and don’t simply rewrite the contents of Books Online. Every time you publish a blog post tweet a link to it. Include hashtags in your tweet that are more likely to grab people’s attention. That’s probably enough for now - I hope this blog post proves useful to someone out there. If you would appreciate a related session at a forthcoming SQLBits conference then please let me know. This will likely be my last blog post for 2010 so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has commented on, linked to or read any of my blog posts in that time. 2011 is shaping up to be a very interesting for SQL Server observers with the impending release of SQL Server code-named Denali and I promise I’ll have lots more content on that as the year progresses. Happy New Year. @Jamiet

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• Udev webcam rule read, but not respected?

  - by user89305

  I have two usb-webcams on them machine, but at bot they some switch /dev/video number. The solution to this problem seems to be new udev rule. I have added this rule in/etc/udev/rules.d/jj-video.rules: Fix webcam 1 KERNEL=="video1", SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1d6b", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0001", SYMLINK+="webcam1" Fix webcam 2 KERNEL=="video2", SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux", ATTR{name}=="Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000", KERNELS=="0000:00:1d.0", SUBSYSTEMS=="pci", DRIVERS=="uhci_hcd", ATTRS{vendor}=="0x8086", ATTRS##{device}=="0x2658", SYMLINK+="webcam2" but the symlinks are not created. I have tried many different combinations in this file. The present ones are just my lates attempts. I found the parameters in: jjk@eee-old:~$ udevadm info -a -p $(udevadm info -q path -p /class/video4linux/video1) Udevadm info starts with the device specified by the devpath and then walks up the chain of parent devices. It prints for every device found, all possible attributes in the udev rules key format. A rule to match, can be composed by the attributes of the device and the attributes from one single parent device. looking at device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/video4linux/video1': KERNEL=="video1" SUBSYSTEM=="video4linux" DRIVER=="" ATTR{name}=="Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000" ATTR{index}=="0" ATTR{button}=="0" looking at parent device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0': KERNELS=="2-2:1.0" SUBSYSTEMS=="usb" DRIVERS=="Philips webcam" ATTRS{bInterfaceNumber}=="00" ATTRS{bAlternateSetting}==" 9" ATTRS{bNumEndpoints}=="02" ATTRS{bInterfaceClass}=="0a" ATTRS{bInterfaceSubClass}=="ff" ATTRS{bInterfaceProtocol}=="00" ATTRS{supports_autosuspend}=="0" looking at parent device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2': KERNELS=="2-2" SUBSYSTEMS=="usb" DRIVERS=="usb" ATTRS{configuration}=="" ATTRS{bNumInterfaces}==" 3" ATTRS{bConfigurationValue}=="1" ATTRS{bmAttributes}=="a0" ATTRS{bMaxPower}=="500mA" ATTRS{urbnum}=="371076" ATTRS{idVendor}=="046d" ATTRS{idProduct}=="08b0" ATTRS{bcdDevice}=="0002" ATTRS{bDeviceClass}=="00" ATTRS{bDeviceSubClass}=="00" ATTRS{bDeviceProtocol}=="00" ATTRS{bNumConfigurations}=="1" ATTRS{bMaxPacketSize0}=="8" ATTRS{speed}=="12" ATTRS{busnum}=="2" ATTRS{devnum}=="2" ATTRS{devpath}=="2" ATTRS{version}==" 1.10" ATTRS{maxchild}=="0" ATTRS{quirks}=="0x0" ATTRS{avoid_reset_quirk}=="0" ATTRS{authorized}=="1" ATTRS{serial}=="01402100A5000000" looking at parent device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2': KERNELS=="usb2" SUBSYSTEMS=="usb" DRIVERS=="usb" ATTRS{configuration}=="" ATTRS{bNumInterfaces}==" 1" ATTRS{bConfigurationValue}=="1" ATTRS{bmAttributes}=="e0" ATTRS{bMaxPower}==" 0mA" ATTRS{urbnum}=="34" ATTRS{idVendor}=="1d6b" ATTRS{idProduct}=="0001" ATTRS{bcdDevice}=="0302" ATTRS{bDeviceClass}=="09" ATTRS{bDeviceSubClass}=="00" ATTRS{bDeviceProtocol}=="00" ATTRS{bNumConfigurations}=="1" ATTRS{bMaxPacketSize0}=="64" ATTRS{speed}=="12" ATTRS{busnum}=="2" ATTRS{devnum}=="1" ATTRS{devpath}=="0" ATTRS{version}==" 1.10" ATTRS{maxchild}=="2" ATTRS{quirks}=="0x0" ATTRS{avoid_reset_quirk}=="0" ATTRS{authorized}=="1" ATTRS{manufacturer}=="Linux 3.2.0-29-generic uhci_hcd" ATTRS{product}=="UHCI Host Controller" ATTRS{serial}=="0000:00:1d.0" ATTRS{authorized_default}=="1" looking at parent device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0': KERNELS=="0000:00:1d.0" SUBSYSTEMS=="pci" DRIVERS=="uhci_hcd" ATTRS{vendor}=="0x8086" ATTRS{device}=="0x2658" ATTRS{subsystem_vendor}=="0x1043" ATTRS{subsystem_device}=="0x82d8" ATTRS{class}=="0x0c0300" ATTRS{irq}=="23" ATTRS{local_cpus}=="ff" ATTRS{local_cpulist}=="0-7" ATTRS{dma_mask_bits}=="32" ATTRS{consistent_dma_mask_bits}=="32" ATTRS{broken_parity_status}=="0" ATTRS{msi_bus}=="" looking at parent device '/devices/pci0000:00': KERNELS=="pci0000:00" SUBSYSTEMS=="" DRIVERS=="" jjk@eee-old:~$ And tested the setup: sudo udevadm --debug test /sys/class/video4linux/video1 main: runtime dir '/run/udev' run_command: calling: test adm_test: version 175 This program is for debugging only, it does not run any program, specified by a RUN key. It may show incorrect results, because some values may be different, or not available at a simulation run. parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-crda.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-fuse.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-gnupg.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-hplip.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-ia64.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-inputattach.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libgphoto2-2.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-libsane.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-ppc.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/40-xserver-xorg-video-intel.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/42-qemu-usb.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/50-firmware.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/55-dm.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/56-hpmud_support.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-cdrom_id.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-pcmcia.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-alsa.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-input.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-serial.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage-dm.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage-tape.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/61-accelerometer.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/64-xorg-xkb.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/66-xorg-synaptics-quirks.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/69-cd-sensors.rules' as rules file add_rule: IMPORT found builtin 'usb_id', replacing /lib/udev/rules.d/69-cd-sensors.rules:76 parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/69-libmtp.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/69-xorg-vmmouse.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/69-xserver-xorg-input-wacom.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-cd.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/70-printers.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/75-cd-aliases-generator.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/75-net-description.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/75-probe_mtd.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/75-tty-description.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-ericsson-mbm.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-longcheer-port-types.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-nokia-port-types.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-pcmcia-device-blacklist.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-platform-serial-whitelist.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-qdl-device-blacklist.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-simtech-port-types.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-usb-device-blacklist.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-x22x-port-types.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-mm-zte-port-types.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/77-nm-olpc-mesh.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/78-graphics-card.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/78-sound-card.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/80-drivers.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/80-mm-candidate.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/80-udisks.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/85-brltty.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/85-hdparm.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/85-keyboard-configuration.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/85-regulatory.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/85-usbmuxd.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/90-alsa-restore.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/90-alsa-ucm.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/90-libgpod.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/90-pulseaudio.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-cd-devices.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-keyboard-force-release.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-keymap.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-udev-late.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-battery-recall-dell.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-battery-recall-fujitsu.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-battery-recall-gateway.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-battery-recall-ibm.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-battery-recall-lenovo.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-battery-recall-toshiba.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-csr.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-hid.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/95-upower-wup.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/lib/udev/rules.d/97-bluetooth-hid2hci.rules' as rules file parse_file: reading '/etc/udev/rules.d/jj-video.rules' as rules file udev_rules_new: rules use 259284 bytes tokens (21607 * 12 bytes), 37913 bytes buffer udev_rules_new: temporary index used 67520 bytes (3376 * 20 bytes) udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x215103e0 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/video4linux/video1' udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x21510758 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/video4linux/video1' udev_device_read_db: device 0x21510758 filled with db file data udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x21510e10 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0' udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x21511b10 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2' udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x215132f8 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2' udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x21513650 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0' udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x21513980 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00' udev_rules_apply_to_event: GROUP 44 /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules:29 udev_rules_apply_to_event: IMPORT 'v4l_id /dev/video1' /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules:7 udev_event_spawn: starting 'v4l_id /dev/video1' spawn_read: 'v4l_id /dev/video1'(out) 'ID_V4L_VERSION=2' spawn_read: 'v4l_id /dev/video1'(out) 'ID_V4L_PRODUCT=Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000' spawn_read: 'v4l_id /dev/video1'(out) 'ID_V4L_CAPABILITIES=:capture:' spawn_wait: 'v4l_id /dev/video1' [2609] exit with return code 0 udev_rules_apply_to_event: IMPORT builtin 'usb_id' /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules:9 builtin_usb_id: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0: if_class 10 protocol 0 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_VENDOR=046d udev_builtin_add_property: ID_VENDOR_ENC=046d udev_builtin_add_property: ID_VENDOR_ID=046d udev_builtin_add_property: ID_MODEL=08b0 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_MODEL_ENC=08b0 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_MODEL_ID=08b0 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_REVISION=0002 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_SERIAL=046d_08b0_01402100A5000000 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_SERIAL_SHORT=01402100A5000000 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_TYPE=generic udev_builtin_add_property: ID_BUS=usb udev_builtin_add_property: ID_USB_INTERFACES=:0aff00:010100:010200: udev_builtin_add_property: ID_USB_INTERFACE_NUM=00 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_USB_DRIVER=Philips webcam udev_rules_apply_to_event: LINK 'v4l/by-id/usb-046d_08b0_01402100A5000000-video-index0' /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules:10 udev_rules_apply_to_event: IMPORT builtin 'path_id' /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules:16 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_PATH=pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0 udev_builtin_add_property: ID_PATH_TAG=pci-0000_00_1d_0-usb-0_2_1_0 udev_rules_apply_to_event: LINK 'v4l/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0-video-index0' /lib/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-v4l.rules:17 udev_rules_apply_to_event: RUN 'udev-acl --action=$env{ACTION} --device=$env{DEVNAME}' /lib/udev/rules.d/70-udev-acl.rules:74 udev_rules_apply_to_event: LINK 'webcam1' /etc/udev/rules.d/jj-video.rules:2 udev_event_execute_rules: no node name set, will use kernel supplied name 'video1' udev_node_add: creating device node '/dev/video1', devnum=81:1, mode=0660, uid=0, gid=44 udev_node_mknod: preserve file '/dev/video1', because it has correct dev_t udev_node_mknod: preserve permissions /dev/video1, 020660, uid=0, gid=44 node_symlink: preserve already existing symlink '/dev/char/81:1' to '../video1' link_find_prioritized: found 'c81:2' claiming '/run/udev/links/v4l\x2fby-id\x2fusb-046d_08b0_01402100A5000000-video-index0' udev_device_new_from_syspath: device 0x21516748 has devpath '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-2/3-2:1.0/video4linux/video2' udev_device_read_db: device 0x21516748 filled with db file data link_find_prioritized: found 'c81:1' claiming '/run/udev/links/v4l\x2fby-id\x2fusb-046d_08b0_01402100A5000000-video-index0' link_update: creating link '/dev/v4l/by-id/usb-046d_08b0_01402100A5000000-video-index0' to '/dev/video1' node_symlink: atomically replace '/dev/v4l/by-id/usb-046d_08b0_01402100A5000000-video-index0' link_find_prioritized: found 'c81:1' claiming '/run/udev/links/v4l\x2fby-path\x2fpci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0-video-index0' link_update: creating link '/dev/v4l/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0-video-index0' to '/dev/video1' node_symlink: preserve already existing symlink '/dev/v4l/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0-video-index0' to '../../video1' link_find_prioritized: found 'c81:1' claiming '/run/udev/links/webcam1' link_update: creating link '/dev/webcam1' to '/dev/video1' node_symlink: preserve already existing symlink '/dev/webcam1' to 'video1' udev_device_update_db: created db file '/run/udev/data/c81:1' for '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/video4linux/video1' ACTION=add COLORD_DEVICE=1 COLORD_KIND=camera DEVLINKS=/dev/v4l/by-id/usb-046d_08b0_01402100A5000000-video-index0 /dev/v4l/by-path/pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0-video-index0 /dev/webcam1 DEVNAME=/dev/video1 DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/video4linux/video1 ID_BUS=usb ID_MODEL=08b0 ID_MODEL_ENC=08b0 ID_MODEL_ID=08b0 ID_PATH=pci-0000:00:1d.0-usb-0:2:1.0 ID_PATH_TAG=pci-0000_00_1d_0-usb-0_2_1_0 ID_REVISION=0002 ID_SERIAL=046d_08b0_01402100A5000000 ID_SERIAL_SHORT=01402100A5000000 ID_TYPE=generic ID_USB_DRIVER=Philips webcam ID_USB_INTERFACES=:0aff00:010100:010200: ID_USB_INTERFACE_NUM=00 ID_V4L_CAPABILITIES=:capture: ID_V4L_PRODUCT=Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000 ID_V4L_VERSION=2 ID_VENDOR=046d ID_VENDOR_ENC=046d ID_VENDOR_ID=046d MAJOR=81 MINOR=1 SUBSYSTEM=video4linux TAGS=:udev-acl: UDEV_LOG=6 USEC_INITIALIZED=18213768 run: 'udev-acl --action=add --device=/dev/video1' jjk@eee-old:~$ (and correspondingly for video2) It looks to me like my rules are read, but not respected. What am I doing wrong?

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• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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• Brighton Rocks: UA Europe 2011

  - by ultan o'broin

  User Assistance Europe 2011 was held in Brighton, UK. Having seen Quadrophenia a dozen times, I just had to go along (OK, I wanted to talk about messages in enterprise applications). Sadly, it rained a lot, though that was still eminently more tolerable than being stuck home in Dublin during Bloomsday. So, here are my somewhat selective highlights and observations from the conference, massively skewed towards my own interests, as usual. Enjoyed Leah Guren's (Cow TC) great start ‘keynote’ on the Cultural Dimensions of Software Help Usage. Starting out by revisiting Hofstede's and Hall's work on culture (how many times I have done this for Multilingual magazine?) and then Neilsen’s findings on age as an indicator of performance, Leah showed how it is the expertise of the user that user assistance (UA) needs to be designed for (especially for high-end users), with some considerations made for age, while the gender and culture of users are not major factors. Help also needs to be contextual and concise, embedded close to the action. That users are saying things like “If I want help on Office, I go to Google ” isn't all that profound at this stage, but it is always worth reiterating how search can be optimized to return better results for users. Interestingly, regardless of user education level, the issue of information quality--hinging on the lynchpin of terminology reflecting that of the user--is critical. Major takeaway for me there. Matthew Ellison’s sessions on embedded help and demos were also impressive. Embedded help that is concise and contextual is definitely a powerful UX enabler, and I’m pleased to say that in Oracle Fusion Applications we have embraced the concept fully. Matthew also mentioned in his session about successful software demos that the principle of modality with demos is a must. Look no further than Oracle User Productivity Kit demos See It!, Try It!, Know It, and Do It! modes, for example. I also found some key takeaways in the presentation by Marie-Louise Flacke on notes and warnings. Here, legal considerations seemed to take precedence over providing any real information to users. I was delighted when Marie-Louise called out the Oracle JDeveloper documentation as an exemplar of how to use notes and instructions instead of trying to scare the bejaysus out of people and not providing them with any real information they’d find useful instead. My own session on designing messages for enterprise applications was well attended. Knowing your user profiles (remember user expertise is the king maker for UA so write for each audience involved), how users really work, the required application business and UI rules, what your application technology supports, and how messages integrate with the enterprise help desk and support policies and you will go much further than relying solely on the guideline of "writing messages in plain language". And, remember the value in warnings and confirmation messages too, and how you can use them smartly. I hope y’all got something from my presentation and from my answers to questions afterwards. Ellis Pratt stole the show with his presentation on applying game theory to software UA, using plenty of colorful, relevant examples (check out the Atlassian and DropBox approaches, for example), and striking just the right balance between theory and practice. Completely agree that the approach to take here is not to make UA itself a game, but to invoke UA as part of a bigger game dynamic (time-to-task completion, personal and communal goals, personal achievement and status, and so on). Sure there are gotchas and limitations to gamification, and we need to do more research. However, we'll hear a lot more about this subject in coming years, particularly in the enterprise space. I hope. I also heard good things about the different sessions about DITA usage (including one by Sonja Fuga that clearly opens the door for major innovation in the community content space using WordPress), the progressive disclosure of information (Cerys Willoughby), an overview of controlled language (or "information quality", as I like to position it) solutions and rationale by Dave Gash, and others. I also spent time chatting with Mike Hamilton of MadCap Software, who showed me a cool demo of their Flare product, and the Lingo translation solution. I liked the idea of their licensing model for workers-on-the-go; that’s smart UX-awareness in itself. Also chatted with Julian Murfitt of Mekon about uptake of DITA in the enterprise space. In all, it's worth attending UA Europe. I was surprised, however, not to see conference topics about mobile UA, community conversation and content, and search in its own right. These are unstoppable forces now, and the latter is pretty central to providing assistance now to all but the most irredentist of hard-copy fetishists or advanced technical or functional users working away on the back end of applications and systems. Only saw one iPad too (says the guy who carries three laptops). Tweeting during the conference was pretty much nonexistent during the event, so no community energy there. Perhaps all this can be addressed next year. I would love to see the next UA Europe event come to Dublin (despite Bloomsday, it's not a bad place place, really) now that hotels are so cheap and all. So, what is my overall impression of the state of user assistance in Europe? Clearly, there are still many people in the industry who feel there is something broken with the traditional forms of user assistance (particularly printed doc) and something needs to be done about it. I would suggest they move on and try and embrace change, instead. Many others see new possibilities, offered by UX and technology, as well as the reality of online user behavior in an increasingly connected world and that is encouraging. Such thought leaders need to be listened to. As Ellis Pratt says in his great book, Trends in Technical Communication - Rethinking Help: “To stay relevant means taking a new perspective on the role (of technical writer), and delivering “products” over and above the traditional manual and online Help file... there are a number of new trends in this field - some complementary, some conflicting. Whatever trends emerge as the norm, it’s likely the status quo will change.” It already has, IMO. I hear similar debates in the professional translation world about the onset of translation crowd sourcing (the Facebook model) and machine translation (trust me, that battle is over). Neither of these initiatives has put anyone out of a job and probably won't, though the nature of the work might change. If anything, such innovations have increased the overall need for professional translators as user expectations rise, new audiences emerge, and organizations need to collate and curate user-generated content, combining it with their own. Perhaps user assistance professionals can learn from other professions and grow accordingly.

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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• Database continuous integration step by step

  - by David Atkinson

  This post will describe how to set up basic database continuous integration using TeamCity to initiate the build process, SQL Source Control to put your database under source control, and the SQL Compare command line to keep a test database up to date. In my example I will be using Subversion as my source control repository. If you wish to follow my steps verbatim, please make sure you have TortoiseSVN, SQL Compare and SQL Source Control installed. Downloading and Installing TeamCity TeamCity (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/index.html) is free for up to three agents, so it a great no-risk tool you can use to experiment with. 1. Download the latest version from the JetBrains website. For some reason the TeamCity executable didn't download properly for me, stalling frustratingly at 99%, so I tried again with the zip file download option (see screenshot below), which worked flawlessly. 2. Run the installer using the defaults. This results in a set-up with the server component and agent installed on the same machine, which is ideal for getting started with ease. 3. Check that the build agent is pointing to the server correctly. This has caught me out a few times before. This setting is in C:\TeamCity\buildAgent\conf\buildAgent.properties and for my installation is serverUrl=http\://localhost\:80 . If you need to change this value, if for example you've had to install the Server console to a different port number, the TeamCity Build Agent Service will need to be restarted for the change to take effect. 4. Open the TeamCity admin console on http://localhost , and specify your own designated username and password at first startup. Putting your database in source control using SQL Source Control 5. Assuming you've got SQL Source Control installed, select a development database in the SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer and select Link Database to Source Control. 6. For the Link step you can either create your own empty folder in source control, or you can select Just Evaluating, which just creates a local subversion repository for you behind the scenes. 7. Once linked, note that your database turns green in the Object Explorer. Visit the Commit tab to do an initial commit of your database objects by typing in an appropriate comment and clicking Commit. 8. There is a hidden feature in SQL Source Control that opens up TortoiseSVN (provided it is installed) pointing to the linked repository. Keep Shift depressed and right click on the text to the right of 'Linked to', in the example below, it's the red Evaluation Repository text. Select Open TortoiseSVN Repo Browser. This screen should give you an idea of how SQL Source Control manages the object files behind the scenes. Back in the TeamCity admin console, we'll now create a new project to monitor the above repository location and to trigger a 'build' each time the repository changes. 9. In TeamCity Adminstration, select Create Project and give it a name, such as "My first database CI", and click Create. 10. Click on Create Build Configuration, and name it something like "Integration build". 11. Click VCS settings and then Create And Attach new VCS root. This is where you will tell TeamCity about the repository it should monitor. 12. In my case since I'm using the Just Evaluating option in SQL Source Control, I should select Subversion. 13. In the URL field paste your repository location. In my case this is file:///C:/Users/David.Atkinson/AppData/Local/Red Gate/SQL Source Control 3/EvaluationRepositories/WidgetDevelopment/WidgetDevelopment 14. Click on Test Connection to ensure that you can communicate with your source control system. Click Save. 15. Click Add Build Step, and Runner Type: Command Line. Should you be familiar with the other runner types, such as NAnt, MSBuild or Powershell, you can opt for these, but for the same of keeping it simple I will pick the simplest option. 16. If you have installed SQL Compare in the default location, set the Command Executable field to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Compare 10\sqlcompare.exe 17. Flip back to SSMS briefly and add a new database to your server. This will be the database used for continuous integration testing. 18. Set the command parameters according to your server and the name of the database you have created. In my case I created database RedGateCI on server .\sql2008r2 /scripts1:. /server2:.\sql2008r2 /db2:RedGateCI /sync /verbose Note that if you pick a server instance that isn't on your local machine, you'll need the TCP/IP protocol enabled in SQL Server Configuration Manager otherwise the SQL Compare command line will not be able to connect. 19. Save and select Build Triggering / Add New Trigger / VCS Trigger. This is where you tell TeamCity when it should initiate a build. Click Save. 20. Now return to SQL Server Management Studio and make a schema change (eg add a new object) to your linked development database. A blue indicator will appear in the Object Explorer. Commit this change, typing in an appropriate check-in comment. All being good, within 60 seconds (a TeamCity default that can be changed) a build will be triggered. 21. Click on Projects in TeamCity to get back to the overview screen: The build log will show you the console output, which is useful for troubleshooting any issues: That's it! You now have continuous integration on your database. In future posts I'll cover how you can generate and test the database creation script, the database upgrade script, and run database unit tests as part of your continuous integration script. If you have any trouble getting this up and running please let me know, either by commenting on this post, or email me directly using the email address below. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• Professional Scrum Developer (.NET) Training in London

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  On the 26th - 30th July in Microsoft’s offices in London Adam Cogan from SSW will be presenting the first Professional Scrum Developer course in the UK. I will be teaching this course along side Adam and it is a fantastic experience. You are split into teams and go head-to-head to deliver units of potentially shippable work in four two hour sprints. The Professional Scrum Developer course is the only course endorsed by both Microsoft and Ken Schwaber and they have worked together very effectively in brining this course to fruition. This course is the brain child of Richard Hundhausen, a Microsoft Regional Director, and both Adam and I attending the Trainer Prep in Sydney when he was there earlier this year. He is a fantastic trainer and no matter where you do this course you can be safe in the knowledge that he has trained and vetted all of the teachers. A tools version of Ken if you will Find a course and register Download this syllabus Download the Scrum Guide What is the Professional Scrum Developer course all about? Professional Scrum Developer course is a unique and intensive five-day experience for software developers. The course guides teams on how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software using the Scrum framework, Visual Studio 2010, and modern software engineering practices. Attendees will work in self-organizing, self-managing teams using a common instance of Team Foundation Server 2010. Who should attend this course? This course is suitable for any member of a software development team – architect, programmer, database developer, tester, etc. Entire teams are encouraged to attend and experience the course together, but individuals are welcome too. Attendees will self-organize to form cross-functional Scrum teams. These teams require an aggregate of skills specific to the selected case study. Please see the last page of this document for specific details. Product Owners, ScrumMasters, and other stakeholders are welcome too, but keep in mind that everyone who attends will be expected to commit to work and pull their weight on a Scrum team. What should you know by the end of the course? Scrum will be experienced through a combination of lecture, demonstration, discussion, and hands-on exercises. Attendees will learn how to do Scrum correctly while being coached and critiqued by the instructor, in the following topic areas: Form effective teams Explore and understand legacy “Brownfield” architecture Define quality attributes, acceptance criteria, and “done” Create automated builds How to handle software hotfixes Verify that bugs are identified and eliminated Plan releases and sprints Estimate product backlog items Create and manage a sprint backlog Hold an effective sprint review Improve your process by using retrospectives Use emergent architecture to avoid technical debt Use Test Driven Development as a design tool Setup and leverage continuous integration Use Test Impact Analysis to decrease testing times Manage SQL Server development in an Agile way Use .NET and T-SQL refactoring effectively Build, deploy, and test SQL Server databases Create and manage test plans and cases Create, run, record, and play back manual tests Setup a branching strategy and branch code Write more maintainable code Identify and eliminate people and process dysfunctions Inspect and improve your team’s software development process What does the week look like? This course is a mix of lecture, demonstration, group discussion, simulation, and hands-on software development. The bulk of the course will be spent working as a team on a case study application delivering increments of new functionality in mini-sprints. Here is the week at a glance: Monday morning and most of the day Friday will be spent with the computers powered off, so you can focus on sharpening your game of Scrum and avoiding the common pitfalls when implementing it. The Sprints Timeboxing is a critical concept in Scrum as well as in this course. We expect each team and student to understand and obey all of the timeboxes. The timebox duration will always be clearly displayed during each activity. Expect the instructor to enforce it. Each of the ½ day sprints will roughly follow this schedule: Component Description Minutes Instruction Presentation and demonstration of new and relevant tools & practices 60 Sprint planning meeting Product owner presents backlog; each team commits to delivering functionality 10 Sprint planning meeting Each team determines how to build the functionality 10 The Sprint The team self-organizes and self-manages to complete their tasks 120 Sprint Review meeting Each team will present their increment of functionality to the other teams = 30 Sprint Retrospective A group retrospective meeting will be held to inspect and adapt 10 Each team is expected to self-organize and manage their own work during the sprint. Pairing is highly encouraged. The instructor/product owner will be available if there are questions or impediments, but will be hands-off by default. You should be prepared to communicate and work with your team members in order to achieve your sprint goal. If you have development-related questions or get stuck, your partner or team should be your first level of support. Module 1: INTRODUCTION This module provides a chance for the attendees to get to know the instructors as well as each other. The Professional Scrum Developer program, as well as the day by day agenda, will be explained. Finally, the Scrum team will be selected and assembled so that the forming, storming, norming, and performing can begin. Trainer and student introductions Professional Scrum Developer program Agenda Logistics Team formation Retrospective Module 2: SCRUMDAMENTALS This module provides a level-setting understanding of the Scrum framework including the roles, timeboxes, and artifacts. The team will then experience Scrum firsthand by simulating a multi-day sprint of product development, including planning, review, and retrospective meetings. Scrum overview Scrum roles Scrum timeboxes (ceremonies) Scrum artifacts Simulation Retrospective It’s required that you read Ken Schwaber’s Scrum Guide in preparation for this module and course. MODULE 3: IMPLEMENTING SCRUM IN VISUAL STUDIO 2010 This module demonstrates how to implement Scrum in Visual Studio 2010 using a Scrum process template*. The team will learn the mapping between the Scrum concepts and how they are implemented in the tool. After connecting to the shared Team Foundation Server, the team members will then return to the simulation – this time using Visual Studio to manage their product development. Mapping Scrum to Visual Studio 2010 User Story work items Task work items Bug work items Demonstration Simulation Retrospective Module 4: THE CASE STUDY In this module the team is introduced to their problem domain for the week. A kickoff meeting by the Product Owner (the instructor) will set the stage for the why and what that will take during the upcoming sprints. The team will then define the quality attributes of the project and their definition of “done.” The legacy application code will be downloaded, built, and explored, so that any bugs can be discovered and reported. Introduction to the case study Download the source code, build, and explore the application Define the quality attributes for the project Define “done” How to file effective bugs in Visual Studio 2010 Retrospective Module 5: HOTFIX This module drops the team directly into a Brownfield (legacy) experience by forcing them to analyze the existing application’s architecture and code in order to locate and fix the Product Owner’s high-priority bug(s). The team will learn best practices around finding, testing, fixing, validating, and closing a bug. How to use Architecture Explorer to visualize and explore Create a unit test to validate the existence of a bug Find and fix the bug Validate and close the bug Retrospective Module 6: PLANNING This short module introduces the team to release and sprint planning within Visual Studio 2010. The team will define and capture their goals as well as other important planning information. Release vs. Sprint planning Release planning and the Product Backlog Product Backlog prioritization Acceptance criteria and tests Sprint planning and the Sprint Backlog Creating and linking Sprint tasks Retrospective At this point the team will have the knowledge of Scrum, Visual Studio 2010, and the case study application to begin developing increments of potentially shippable functionality that meet their definition of done. Module 7: EMERGENT ARCHITECTURE This module introduces the architectural practices and tools a team can use to develop a valid design on which to develop new functionality. The teams will learn how Scrum supports good architecture and design practices. After the discussion, the teams will be presented with the product owner’s prioritized backlog so that they may select and commit to the functionality they can deliver in this sprint. Architecture and Scrum Emergent architecture Principles, patterns, and practices Visual Studio 2010 modeling tools UML and layer diagrams SPRINT 1 Retrospective Module 8: TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT This module introduces Test Driven Development as a design tool and how to implement it using Visual Studio 2010. To maximize productivity and quality, a Scrum team should setup Continuous Integration to regularly build every team member’s code changes and run regression tests. Refactoring will also be defined and demonstrated in combination with Visual Studio’s Test Impact Analysis to efficiently re-run just those tests which were impacted by refactoring. Continuous integration Team Foundation Build Test Driven Development (TDD) Refactoring Test Impact Analysis SPRINT 2 Retrospective Module 9: AGILE DATABASE DEVELOPMENT This module lets the SQL Server database developers in on a little secret – they can be agile too. By using the database projects in Visual Studio 2010, the database developers can join the rest of the team. The students will see how to apply Agile database techniques within Visual Studio to support the SQL Server 2005/2008/2008R2 development lifecycle. Agile database development Visual Studio database projects Importing schema and scripts Building and deploying Generating data Unit testing SPRINT 3 Retrospective Module 10: SHIP IT Teams need to know that just because they like the functionality doesn’t mean the Product Owner will. This module revisits acceptance criteria as it pertains to acceptance testing. By refining acceptance criteria into manual test steps, team members can execute the tests, recording the results and reporting bugs in a number of ways. Manual tests will be defined and executed using the Microsoft Test Manager tool. As the Sprint completes and an increment of functionality is delivered, the team will also learn why and when they should create a branch of the codeline. Acceptance criteria Testing in Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Test Manager Writing and running manual tests Branching SPRINT 4 Retrospective Module 11: OVERCOMING DYSFUNCTION This module introduces the many types of people, process, and tool dysfunctions that teams face in the real world. Many dysfunctions and scenarios will be identified, along with ideas and discussion for how a team might mitigate them. This module will enable you and your team to move toward independence and improve your game of Scrum when you depart class. Scrum-butts and flaccid Scrum Best practices working as a team Team challenges ScrumMaster challenges Product Owner challenges Stakeholder challenges Course Retrospective What will be expected of you and you team? This is a unique course in that it’s technically-focused, team-based, and employs timeboxes. It demands that the members of the teams self-organize and self-manage their own work to collaboratively develop increments of software. All attendees must commit to: Pay attention to all lectures and demonstrations Participate in team and group discussions Work collaboratively with other team members Obey the timebox for each activity Commit to work and do your best to deliver All teams should have these skills: Understanding of Scrum Familiarity with Visual Studio 201 C#, .NET 4.0 & ASP.NET 4.0 experience*  SQL Server 2008 development experience Software testing experience * Check with the instructor ahead of time for the exact technologies Self-organising teams Another unique attribute of this course is that it’s a technical training class being delivered to teams of developers, not pairs, and not individuals. Ideally, your actual software development team will attend the training to ensure that all necessary skills are covered. However, if you wish to attend an open enrolment course alone or with just a couple of colleagues, realize that you may be placed on a team with other attendees. The instructor will do his or her best to ensure that each team is cross-functional to tackle the case study, but there are no guarantees. You may be required to try a new role, learn a new skill, or pair with somebody unfamiliar to you. This is just good Scrum! Who should NOT take this course? Because of the nature of this course, as explained above, certain types of people should probably not attend this course: Students requiring command and control style instruction – there are no prescriptive/step-by-step (think traditional Microsoft Learning) labs in this course Students who are unwilling to work within a timebox Students who are unwilling to work collaboratively on a team Students who don’t have any skill in any of the software development disciplines Students who are unable to commit fully to their team – not only will this diminish the student’s learning experience, but it will also impact their team’s learning experience Find a course and register Download this syllabus Download the Scrum Guide Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW,Pro Scrum Dev

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