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• AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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• About Solaris 11 and UltraSPARC II/III/IV/IV+

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

  I know that I will get the usual amount of comments like "Oh, Jörg ? you can't be negative about Oracle" for this article. However as usual I want to explain the logic behind my reasoning. Yes ? I know that there is a lot of UltraSPARC III, IV and IV+ gear out there. But there are some very basic questions: Does your application you are currently running on this gear stops running just because you can't run Solaris 11 on it? What is the need to upgrade a system already in production to Solaris 11? I have the impression, that some people think that the systems get useless in the moment Oracle releases Solaris 11. I know that Sun sold UltraSPARC IV+ systems until 2009. The Sun SF490 introduced 2004 for example, that was a Sun SF480 with UltraSPARC IV and later with UltraSPARC IV+. And yes, Sun made some speedbumps. At that time the systems of the UltraSPARC III to IV+ generations were supported on Solaris 8, on Solaris 9 and on Solaris 10. However from my perspective we sold them to customers, which weren't able to migrate to Solaris 10 because they used applications not supported on Solaris 9 or who just didn't wanted to migrate to Solaris 10. Believe it or not ? I personally know two customers that migrated core systems to Solaris 10 in ? well 2008/9. This was especially true when the M3000 was announced in 2008 when it closed the darned single socket gap. It may be different at you site, however that's what I remember about that time when talking with customers. At first: Just because there is no Solaris 11 for UltraSPARC III, IV and IV+, it doesn't mean that Solaris 10 will go away anytime soon. I just want to point you to "Expect Lifetime Support - Hardware and Operating Systems". It states about Premier Support:Maintenance and software upgrades are included for Oracle operating systems and Oracle VM for a minimum of eight years from the general availability date.GA for Solaris 10 was in 2005. Plus 8 years ? 2013 ? at minimum. Then you can still opt for 3 years of "Extended Support" ? 2016 ? at minimum. 2016 your systems purchased in 2009 are 7 years old. Even on systems purchased at the very end of the lifetime of that system generation. That are the rules as written in the linked document. I said minimum The actual dates are even further in the future: Premier Support for Solaris 10 ends in 2015, Extended support ends 2018. Sustaining support ? indefinite. You will find this in the document "Oracle Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Hardware and Operating Systems".So I don't understand when some people write, that Oracle is less protective about hardware investments than Sun. And for hardware it's the same as with Sun: Service 5 years after EOL as part of Premier Support. I would like to write about a different perspective as well: I have to be a little cautious here, because this is going in the roadmap area, so I will mention the public sources here: John Fowler told last year that we have to expect at at least 3x the single thread performance of T3 for T4. We have 8 cores in T4, as stated by Rick Hetherington. Let's assume for a moment that a T4 core will have the performance of a UltraSPARC core (just to simplify math and not to disclosing anything about the performance, all existing SPARC cores are considered equal). So given this pieces of information, you could consolidate 8 V215, 4 or 8 V245, 2 full blown V445,2 full blown 490, 2 full blown M3000 on a single T4 SPARC processor. The Fowler roadmap prezo talked about 4-socket systems with T4. So 32 V215, 16 to 8 V245, 8 fullblown V445, 8 full blown V490, 8 full blown M3000 in a system image. I think you get the idea. That said, most of the systems we are talking about have already amortized and perhaps it's just time to invest in new systems to yield other advantages like reduced space consumptions, like reduced power consumption, like some of the neat features sun4v gives you, and yes ? reduced number of processor licenses for Oracle and less money for Oracle HW/SW support. As much as I dislike it myself that my own UltraSPARC III and UltraSPARC II based systems won't run on Solaris 11 (and I have quite a few of them in my personal lab), I really think that the impact on production environments will be much less than most people think now. By the way: The reason for this move is a quite significant new feature. I will tell you that it was this feature, when it's out. I assume, telling just a word more could lead to much more time to blog.

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• Microsoft Forcing Dev/Partners Hands on Win 8 Through Certification

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I remember 2.5 years ago when Microsoft dropped a bomb on the Microsoft Partner community: all Gold competencies would require .NET 4 based premiere certifications (MCPD). Problem was, this gave a window of about 6 months for partners to update their employees’ certifications. At the place I was working, I put together an aggressive plan and we were able to attain the certs needed. Microsoft is always open that the certification requirements will change as the industry changes. .NET 1.0 certifications are useless here in 2012, and rightfully so they’ve been retired for a long time now. But now we’re seeing a new tactic by Microsoft – shifting gears away from certifications that speak to what industry needs and more to the Windows 8 agenda. Consider that currently the premiere development certification is the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, which comes in three flavours – Web, Windows, and Azure. All require WCF and Data Access exams, as well as one that deals with the associated base technologies (ASP.NET, WinForms/WPF, Azure), and one that ties all three together in a solution-based exam. For Microsoft-based organizations, these skills aren’t just valid but necessary in building Microsoft applications. But the MCPD is being replaced with our old friend Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD). So far, Microsoft has only released two types of MCSD – Web and Windows Store Apps. Windows Store Apps?! In a push to move developers to create WinRT-based applications, desktop development is now considered a second-class citizen in the eyes of Redmond. Also interesting are the language options for the exams: HTML5 and C#. Sorry VB folks, its time to embrace curly braces whether they be JavaScript or C#. Consider too the skills being assessed for the Windows Store Apps: Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using HTML5 Get your MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C# *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcsd-windows-store-apps.aspx Nov 21/2012 If you look at the skills being tested in each exam, you’ll find that skills like WCF and Data Access are downplayed compared to things like integrating Charms, facilitating Search, programming for the microphone and camera – all very Windows 8 focussed items. Where this becomes maddening is that Microsoft is still pushing Windows 7 with enterprise clients. According to a ZDNet article, Microsoft wants to see Windows 7 on 70% of enterprise desktops by mid 2013. Assuming they somehow meet that (its a pretty lofty goal), there’s years of traditional desktop-based development that will still be required at some level. For those thinking they’ll just write and stick with the MCPD certification, note that most exams that go towards that certification will be retired at the end of July 2013! (Read the small print). And while details haven’t been finalized, its a safe bet that MCPD certifications eventually won’t count towards Gold-level competencies in the Microsoft Partner program. What this means for Microsoft Partners and Developers is that certification for desktop development is going to be limited to Windows Store Apps unless Microsoft re-introduces a traditional desktop (WPF) based MCSD cert. Web Application Development – It’s Not All Bad There’s big changes on the web side of certification, but I actually see these changes as being for the good! Check out the new exam requirements for MCSD – Web Applications: Get your MCSD: Web Applications certification *Image Source: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-mcsd-web-applications.aspx Nov 21, 2012 We now *start* with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3! Now I’m sure that these will be slanted towards web development in IE, and I can hear designers everywhere bemoaning the CSS/IE combination. Still, I applaud Microsoft for adopting HTML5 as the go-to web technology and requiring certified developers to prove they have skills in the basics of web dev. The fact that the second exam clearly states “MVC Web Applications” shows that Web Forms is truly legacy and deprecated. That’s not to say there aren’t those out there that are still supporting or (for whatever reason) doing new dev with Web Forms, but this move by Microsoft is telling the community they better get on the MVC bandwagon if they want to stay current. Fantastic! And of course Azure needs to be here as well, and this is where the Microsoft agenda fits in. It’s no secret that there’s been a huge push in getting developers on to Azure. I don’t see this as being a bad thing either, as cloud computing (whether Azure, private, or 3rd party) is a necessary skill for developers to have here in 2012. The cynic in me realizes that the HTML5/JavaScript/CSS push wouldn’t be as prominent though if not for the Windows 8 Store App play, where HTML5 is a first class citizen (and an available language for the MCSD Windows Store App cert). In this case, the desktop developers loss is the web developers gain. Get Ready for Changes In addition to the changes in certifications, the Microsoft Partner competencies are going through changes as well. Web and Software Development are being merged into a single competency, meaning that licenses you would have received from having both as Gold are reduced. Other competencies are either being removed or changed, as are the exam requirements. In the same way that we’re seeing faster release cycles from Microsoft, so too will we see the Microsoft Partner Program and MS Certifications evolve faster than ever before. Many of us got caught in the last wave of changes, but this time we can see the wave coming – and it looks pretty big!

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• What Can We Learn About Software Security by Going to the Gym

  - by Nick Harrison

  There was a recent rash of car break-ins at the gym. Not an epidemic by any stretch, probably 4 or 5, but still... My gym used to allow you to hang your keys from a peg board at the front desk. This way you could come to the gym dressed to work out, lock your valuables in your car, and not have anything to worry about. Ignorance is bliss. The problem was that anyone who wanted to could go pick up your car keys, click the unlock button and find your car. Once there, they could rummage through your stuff and then walk back in and finish their workout as if nothing had happened. The people doing this were a little smatter then the average thief and would swipe some but not all of your cash leaving everything else in place. Most thieves would steal the whole car and be busted more quickly. The victims were unaware that anything had happened for several days. Fortunately, once the victims realized what had happened, the gym was still able to pull security tapes and find out who was misbehaving. All of the bad guys were busted, and everyone can now breathe a sigh of relieve. It is once again safe to go to the gym. Except there was still a fundamental problem. Putting your keys on a peg board by the front door is just asking for bad things to happen. One person got busted exploiting this security flaw. Others can still be exploiting it. In fact, others may well have been exploiting it and simply never got caught. How long would it take you to realize that $10 was missing from your wallet, if everything else was there? How would you even know when it went missing? Would you go to the front desk and even bother to ask them to review security tapes if you were only missing a small amount. Once highlighted, it is easy to see how commonly such vulnerability may have been exploited. So the gym did the very reasonable precaution of removing the peg board. To me the most shocking part of this story is the resulting uproar from gym members losing the convenient key peg. How dare they remove the trusted peg board? How can I work out now, I have to carry my keys from machine to machine? How can I enjoy my workout with this added inconvenience? This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and some people are still complaining. In light of the recent high profile hacking, there are a couple of parallels that can be drawn. Many web sites are riddled with vulnerabilities are crazy and easily exploitable as leaving your car keys by the front door while you work out. No one ever considered thanking the people who were swiping these keys for pointing out the vulnerability. Without a hesitation, they had their gym memberships revoked and are awaiting prosecution. The gym did recognize the vulnerability for what it is, and closed up that attack vector. What can we learn from this? Monitoring and logging will not prevent a crime but they will allow us to identify that a crime took place and may help track down who did it. Once we find a security weakness, we need to eliminate it. We may never identify and eliminate all security weaknesses, but we cannot allow well known vulnerabilities to persist in our system. In our case, we are not likely to meet resistance from end users. We are more likely to meet resistance from stake holders, product owners, keeper of schedules and budgets. We may meet resistance from integration partners, co workers, and third party vendors. Regardless of the source, we will see resistance, but the weakness needs to be dealt with. There is no need to glorify a cracker for bringing to light a security weakness. Regardless of their claimed motives, they are not heroes. There is also no point in wasting time defending weaknesses once they are identified. Deal with the weakness and move on. In may be embarrassing to find security weaknesses in our systems, but it is even more embarrassing to continue ignoring them. Even if it is unpopular, we need to seek out security weaknesses and eliminate them when we find them. http://www.sans.org has put together the Common Weakness Enumeration http://cwe.mitre.org/ which lists out common weaknesses. The site navigation takes a little getting used to, but there is a treasure trove here. Here is the detail page for SQL Injection. It clearly states how this can be exploited, in case anyone doubts that the weakness should be taken seriously, and more importantly how to mitigate the risk.

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• How many developers before continuous integration becomes effective for us?

  - by Carnotaurus

  There is an overhead associated with continuous integration, e.g., set up, re-training, awareness activities, stoppage to fix "bugs" that turn out to be data issues, enforced separation of concerns programming styles, etc. At what point does continuous integration pay for itself? EDIT: These were my findings The set-up was CruiseControl.Net with Nant, reading from VSS or TFS. Here are a few reasons for failure, which have nothing to do with the setup: Cost of investigation: The time spent investigating whether a red light is due a genuine logical inconsistency in the code, data quality, or another source such as an infrastructure problem (e.g., a network issue, a timeout reading from source control, third party server is down, etc., etc.) Political costs over infrastructure: I considered performing an "infrastructure" check for each method in the test run. I had no solution to the timeout except to replace the build server. Red tape got in the way and there was no server replacement. Cost of fixing unit tests: A red light due to a data quality issue could be an indicator of a badly written unit test. So, data dependent unit tests were re-written to reduce the likelihood of a red light due to bad data. In many cases, necessary data was inserted into the test environment to be able to accurately run its unit tests. It makes sense to say that by making the data more robust then the test becomes more robust if it is dependent on this data. Of course, this worked well! Cost of coverage, i.e., writing unit tests for already existing code: There was the problem of unit test coverage. There were thousands of methods that had no unit tests. So, a sizeable amount of man days would be needed to create those. As this would be too difficult to provide a business case, it was decided that unit tests would be used for any new public method going forward. Those that did not have a unit test were termed 'potentially infra red'. An intestesting point here is that static methods were a moot point in how it would be possible to uniquely determine how a specific static method had failed. Cost of bespoke releases: Nant scripts only go so far. They are not that useful for, say, CMS dependent builds for EPiServer, CMS, or any UI oriented database deployment. These are the types of issues that occured on the build server for hourly test runs and overnight QA builds. I entertain that these to be unnecessary as a build master can perform these tasks manually at the time of release, esp., with a one man band and a small build. So, single step builds have not justified use of CI in my experience. What about the more complex, multistep builds? These can be a pain to build, especially without a Nant script. So, even having created one, these were no more successful. The costs of fixing the red light issues outweighed the benefits. Eventually, developers lost interest and questioned the validity of the red light. Having given it a fair try, I believe that CI is expensive and there is a lot of working around the edges instead of just getting the job done. It's more cost effective to employ experienced developers who do not make a mess of large projects than introduce and maintain an alarm system. This is the case even if those developers leave. It doesn't matter if a good developer leaves because processes that he follows would ensure that he writes requirement specs, design specs, sticks to the coding guidelines, and comments his code so that it is readable. All this is reviewed. If this is not happening then his team leader is not doing his job, which should be picked up by his manager and so on. For CI to work, it is not enough to just write unit tests, attempt to maintain full coverage, and ensure a working infrastructure for sizable systems. The bottom line: One might question whether fixing as many bugs before release is even desirable from a business prespective. CI involves a lot of work to capture a handful of bugs that the customer could identify in UAT or the company could get paid for fixing as part of a client service agreement when the warranty period expires anyway.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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• From Pocket to Instapaper

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced-  1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped,  but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in  InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2.  Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that  a full screen popup was  implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on  http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper  or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should  provide  a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment  explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper.  I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought  RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

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• How is the gimbal locked problem solved using accumulative matrix transformations

  - by Luke San Antonio

  I am reading the online "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming" book by Jason L. McKesson As of now, I am up to the gimbal lock problem and how to solve it using quaternions. However right here, at the Quaternions page. Part of the problem is that we are trying to store an orientation as a series of 3 accumulated axial rotations. Orientations are orientations, not rotations. And orientations are certainly not a series of rotations. So we need to treat the orientation of the ship as an orientation, as a specific quantity. I guess this is the first spot I start to get confused, the reason is because I don't see the dramatic difference between orientations and rotations. I also don't understand why an orientation cannot be represented by a series of rotations... Also: The first thought towards this end would be to keep the orientation as a matrix. When the time comes to modify the orientation, we simply apply a transformation to this matrix, storing the result as the new current orientation. This means that every yaw, pitch, and roll applied to the current orientation will be relative to that current orientation. Which is precisely what we need. If the user applies a positive yaw, you want that yaw to rotate them relative to where they are current pointing, not relative to some fixed coordinate system. The concept, I understand, however I don't understand how if accumulating matrix transformations is a solution to this problem, how the code given in the previous page isn't just that. Here's the code: void display() { glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glClearDepth(1.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); glutil::MatrixStack currMatrix; currMatrix.Translate(glm::vec3(0.0f, 0.0f, -200.0f)); currMatrix.RotateX(g_angles.fAngleX); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_X_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.4f, 0.4f, 1.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateY(g_angles.fAngleY); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Y_AXIS, glm::vec4(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f)); currMatrix.RotateZ(g_angles.fAngleZ); DrawGimbal(currMatrix, GIMBAL_Z_AXIS, glm::vec4(1.0f, 0.3f, 0.3f, 1.0f)); glUseProgram(theProgram); currMatrix.Scale(3.0, 3.0, 3.0); currMatrix.RotateX(-90); //Set the base color for this object. glUniform4f(baseColorUnif, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0); glUniformMatrix4fv(modelToCameraMatrixUnif, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(currMatrix.Top())); g_pObject->Render("tint"); glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); } To my understanding, isn't what he is doing (modifying a matrix on a stack) considered accumulating matrices, since the author combined all the individual rotation transformations into one matrix which is being stored on the top of the stack. My understanding of a matrix is that they are used to take a point which is relative to an origin (let's say... the model), and make it relative to another origin (the camera). I'm pretty sure this is a safe definition, however I feel like there is something missing which is blocking me from understanding this gimbal lock problem. One thing that doesn't make sense to me is: If a matrix determines the difference relative between two "spaces," how come a rotation around the Y axis for, let's say, roll, doesn't put the point in "roll space" which can then be transformed once again in relation to this roll... In other words shouldn't any further transformations to this point be in relation to this new "roll space" and therefore not have the rotation be relative to the previous "model space" which is causing the gimbal lock. That's why gimbal lock occurs right? It's because we are rotating the object around set X, Y, and Z axes rather than rotating the object around it's own, relative axes. Or am I wrong? Since apparently this code I linked in isn't an accumulation of matrix transformations can you please give an example of a solution using this method. So in summary: What is the difference between a rotation and an orientation? Why is the code linked in not an example of accumulation of matrix transformations? What is the real, specific purpose of a matrix, if I had it wrong? How could a solution to the gimbal lock problem be implemented using accumulation of matrix transformations? Also, as a bonus: Why are the transformations after the rotation still relative to "model space?" Another bonus: Am I wrong in the assumption that after a transformation, further transformations will occur relative to the current? Also, if it wasn't implied, I am using OpenGL, GLSL, C++, and GLM, so examples and explanations in terms of these are greatly appreciated, if not necessary. The more the detail the better! Thanks in advance...

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• To refund or not to refund this client?

  - by Mahalia Samuels

  I'd really appreciate your advice on an ongoing project. I presented my client with a proposal and design samples which he approved, and he paid in full instead of the 50% upfront deposit as I'd given him a generous discount. He was then slow in furnishing me with some of the content, but once we did, he expected the website to be finished immediately which was not possible. Because he needed it done urgently, we agreed to try to get it done about 10 working days after the content was provided, but the developer who was helping me let me down. The next week, I completed the website myself and uploaded it to the server on a Friday afternoon. He then calls and texts me on following Sunday while I'm at church to say it's not online (there was probably a problem with his browser). The next morning, I received an email from him demanding a full refund within two days because he couldn't see the website (even though it was live, and I tested it on multiple browsers, a different computer and my phone), and he called me shouting at me because he couldn't access it. Finally when he was able to access it, he was unhappy with a certain detail regarding the slideshow which I began fixing and which was done the next day. He then referred me to another website and said he wanted it to look similar but not identical to it in terms of the layout. He also now wanted to add more features which were not in the original design. I got a designer to work on a new design which I sent to him for review, which if approved would be completed by 15 October, and he approved it last Thursday. He then called me yesterday to say that he wanted to change the design - he only approved it out of impatience. He now wants the website to be more similar to the other website he referred me to and he wants it done before the 15th! Then, he says to me that other people have done websites for him in three days - website's he's complained to me about for lacking dimension because they were just premium themes, whereas we'd designed and coded from scratch. I'm thinking of finishing the website but refunding him in full (or at least the refundable 50%) less domain registration and other non-refundable amounts, just to avoid further escalation of this matter and having him call me next week and say he wants to change it again. These are the applicable terms and conditions as laid out in the agreement: Total amount due for this project is Amount A. Client shall pay Consultant a deposit of Amount B (50% of total amount due for project) in advance before any work commences on the Project. The balance is due within 7 working days of completion of project. Deposit is non-refundable. Should client opt to host elsewhere, applicable transferral fee of Amount C will apply. Estimated project completion time frame is 14 to 30 days from the date Client furnishes Consultant with Brief and all other required media and data, provided that Client has made payment to secure the project. Consultant will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials, or last minute changes and excessive changes may cause subsequent delays. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished work. Major changes in client input or direction or brief will be charged at normal rates. Any work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the attached Proposal will be considered an additional service. Client agrees to pay Consultant for any additional expenses or additional services not included in the attached quotation and proposal if requested by the Client. Web design credit in the name of the Consultant, and link to Consultant’s website shall be placed on the footer of the final Website. Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 7 days written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata at full rates for work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. Advice please?

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• Using Definition of Done to Drive Agile Maturity

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been an Agile Coach at a lot of different clients over the years, and I want to share an approach I use to help them adopt and mature over time. It’s important to realize that “Agile” is not a black/white yes/no thing. Teams can be varying degrees of agile. I think of this as their agile maturity level. When I coach teams I want them to start out being a little agile, and get more agile as they mature. The approach I teach them is to use the definition of done as a technique to continuously improve their agile maturity over time. We’re probably all familiar with the concept of “Done Done” that represents what *actually* being done a feature means. Not just when a developer says he’s done right after he writes that last line of code that makes the feature kind-of work. Done Done means the coding is done, it’s been tested, installers and deployment packages have been created, user manuals have been updated, architecture docs have been updated, etc. To enable teams to internalize the concept of “Done Done”, they usually get together and come up with their Definition of Done (DoD) that defines all the activities that need to be completed before a feature is considered Done Done. The Done Done technique typically is applied only to features (aka User Stories). What I do is extend this to apply to several concepts such as User Stories, Sprints, Releases (and sometimes Check-Ins). During project kick-off I’ll usually sit down with the team and go through an exercise of creating DoD’s for each of these concepts (Stories/Sprints/Releases). We’ll usually start by just brainstorming a bunch of activities that could end up in these various DoD’s. Here’s some examples: Code Reviews StyleCop FxCop User Manuals Updated Architecture Docs Updated Tested by QA Tested by UAT Installers Created Support Knowledge Base Updated Deployment Instructions (for Ops) written Automated Unit Tests Run Automated Integration Tests Run Then we start by arranging these activities into the place they occur today (e.g. Do you do UAT testing only once per release? every sprint? every feature?). If the team was previously Waterfall most of these activities probably end up in the Release DoD. An extremely mature agile team would probably have most of these activities in the DoD for the User Stories (because an extremely mature agile team will probably do continuous deployment and release every story). So what we need to do as a team, is work to move these activities from their current home (Release DoD) down into the Sprint DoD and eventually into the User Story DoD (and maybe into the lower-level Check-In DoD if we decide to use that). We don’t have to move them all down to User Story immediately, but as a team we figure out what we think we’re capable of moving down to the Sprint cycle, and Story cycle immediately, and that becomes our starting DoD’s. Over time the team makes an effort to continue moving activities down from Release->Sprint->Story as they become more agile and more mature. I try to encourage them to envision a world in which they deploy to production as each User Story is completed. They would need to be updating User Manuals, creating installers, doing UAT testing (typical Release cycle activities) on every single User Story. They may never actually reach that point, but they should envision that, and strive to keep driving the activities down closer to the User Story cycle s they mature. This is a great technique to give a team an easy-to-follow roadmap to mature their agile practices over time. Sure there’s other aspects to maturity outside of this, but it’s a great technique, that’s easy to visualize, to drive agility into the team. Just keep moving those activities (aka “gates”) down the board from Release->Sprint->Story. I’ll try to give an example of what a recent client of mine had for their DoD’s (this is from memory, so probably not 100% accurate): Release Create/Update deployment Instructions For Ops Instructional Videos Updated Run manual regression test suite UAT Testing In this case that meant deploying to an environment shared across the enterprise that mirrored production and asking other business groups to test their own apps to ensure we didn’t break anything outside our system Sprint Deploy to UAT Environment But not necessarily actually request UAT testing occur User Guides updated Sprint Features Video Created In this case we decided to create a video each sprint showing off the progress (video version of Sprint Demo) User Story Manual Test scripts developed and run Tested by BA Deployed in shared QA environment Using automated deployment process Peer Code Review Code Check-In Compiled (warning-free) Passes StyleCop Passes FxCop Create installer packages Run Automated Tests Run Automated Integration Tests PS – One of my clients had a great question when we went through this activity. They said that if a Sprint is by definition done when the end-date rolls around (time-boxed), isn’t a DoD on a sprint meaningless – it’s done on the end-date regardless of whether those other activities are complete or not? My answer is that while that statement is true – the sprint is done regardless when the end date rolls around – if the DoD activities haven’t been completed I would consider the Sprint a failure (similar to not completing what was committed/planned – failure may be too strong a word but you get the idea). In the Retrospective that will become an agenda item to discuss and understand why we weren’t able to complete the activities we agreed would need to be completed each Sprint.

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• From the Classroom to the Boardroom

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Pens and Paper...these are the only things being a student and being a graduate / professional have in common. Walking in to the offices of Oracle South Africa as a graduate the first thing you notice is how polished and sleek all the people who work here look. 80% of the ladies wear sky-scraper heels and walk with the greatest grace. This was the first of many rude awakenings to remind me that I am no longer a student but a graduate. My first struggle was having to wake up at wee hours of the morning to prepare for work. As a student going to class was almost an optional thing, if you missed a morning class you could always attend an evening class to make up for it or simply attend with another group. But in the workplace, you HAVE to show up every single morning at the same time, with no option of coming in when it suits you and there is definitely no coming in with the evening class/shift. As a student, the earliest hour I ever woke up was 7:00am, anything earlier than that was considered inhumane torture. My reason for waking up every morning as a student was “you have a degree to go get” but as a graduate having to go to work I have to say to myself “here’s to a new day of learning and growing”. My second struggle has come in having to change my beloved wardrobe. Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about fashion and shopping. For me Shopping is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, that should not be messed with. Therefore it was with great sadness that I swopped my rippled skinny jeans for pin-striped formal pants, my long chandelier earrings for simple studs, my flat shoes for heels, my sheer blouses for crisp white shirts, even my beloved wild hair had to make way for a simple ponytail. Our looks as ladies also came under great scrutiny, we had to acquaint ourselves with some serious grooming tools: the mascara, blush, lip-gloss, blush, a touch of lipstick and a manicure set. Language was a struggle of its own as well. Being a student you learn to relate to your peers in a informal way. In the workplace you have to address everyone with the same respect, including your peers. Words like “Hey buddy” had to make way for “good morning friend”. The month long winter school holiday was one of the things I looked forward to as a student. This was a time where we got to be at home and avoid the coldest month of the year, July. It was the most amazing thing ever, just sleeping and snuggling up to all sorts of warm things but sadly it is now a thing of the past. It is currently winter in South Africa and going to work has become the most unfashionable thing with all the jackets, boots, scarves and gloves. But summer is coming and I will miss those holidays too. As a student the school holidays were like a gift for us to catch a break and not think for a while which was why it was imaginable how someone would go on for the entire year without a break, with only the promise of a mere 21 days annual leave!! Right now I am sure we are all looking forward to taking that annual leave when the time is right. The worst rude awakening I must say, has to be presenting in front of clients and managers. As a student you have the same class mates for almost four years therefore presenting in front of them becomes the norm over the years and your lecturer will always go gently on you. What they don’t tell you at University is that in the real world, time is money and clients pay money to see you present therefore there is no room for error. Clients are not there to give you a score and boost your ego, they expect nothing less than 100% and they will let you know without a second thought. For a graduate this can feel like you are being fed to the sharks, you either get eaten or you swim for your life. At the end of the day, it is all an experience that is meant to groom us into better professional and make us a part of the Red Team. All the sacrifices are worth it and they lead us to being better and more polished professionals. So if you are interested in joining the ECEMEA Sales and Presales Internship Programme, please have a look at http://campus.oracle.com for more information and for our latest vacancies and internships. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Concurrency Utilities for Java EE Early Draft (JSR 236)

  - by arungupta

  Concurrency Utilities for Java EE is being worked as JSR 236 and has released an Early Draft. It provides concurrency capabilities to Java EE application components without compromising container integrity. Simple (common) and advanced concurrency patterns are easily supported without sacrificing usability. Using Java SE concurrency utilities such as java.util.concurrent API, java.lang.Thread and java.util.Timer in a Java EE application component such as EJB or Servlet are problematic since the container and server have no knowledge of these resources. JSR 236 enables concurrency largely by extending the Concurrency Utilities API developed under JSR-166. This also allows a consistency between Java SE and Java EE concurrency programming model. There are four main programming interfaces available: ManagedExecutorService ManagedScheduledExecutorService ContextService ManagedThreadFactory ManagedExecutorService is a managed version of java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService. The implementations of this interface are provided by the container and accessible using JNDI reference: <resource-env-ref>  <resource-env-ref-name>    concurrent/BatchExecutor  </resource-env-ref-name>  <resource-env-ref-type>    javax.enterprise.concurrent.ManagedExecutorService  </resource-env-ref-type><resource-env-ref> and available as: @Resource(name="concurrent/BatchExecutor")ManagedExecutorService executor; Its recommended to bind the JNDI references in the java:comp/env/concurrent subcontext. The asynchronous tasks that need to be executed need to implement java.lang.Runnable or java.util.concurrent.Callable interface as: public class MyTask implements Runnable { public void run() { // business logic goes here }} OR public class MyTask2 implements Callable<Date> {  public Date call() { // business logic goes here   }} The task is then submitted to the executor using one of the submit method that return a Future instance. The Future represents the result of the task and can also be used to check if the task is complete or wait for its completion. Future<String> future = executor.submit(new MyTask(), String.class);. . .String result = future.get(); Another example to submit tasks is: class MyTask implements Callback<Long> { . . . }class MyTask2 implements Callback<Date> { . . . }ArrayList<Callable> tasks = new ArrayList<();tasks.add(new MyTask());tasks.add(new MyTask2());List<Future<Object>> result = executor.invokeAll(tasks); The ManagedExecutorService may be configured for different properties such as: Hung Task Threshold: Time in milliseconds that a task can execute before it is considered hung Pool Info Core Size: Number of threads to keep alive Maximum Size: Maximum number of threads allowed in the pool Keep Alive: Time to allow threads to remain idle when # of threads > Core Size Work Queue Capacity: # of tasks that can be stored in inbound buffer Thread Use: Application intend to run short vs long-running tasks, accordingly pooled or daemon threads are picked ManagedScheduledExecutorService adds delay and periodic task running capabilities to ManagedExecutorService. The implementations of this interface are provided by the container and accessible using JNDI reference: <resource-env-ref>  <resource-env-ref-name>    concurrent/BatchExecutor  </resource-env-ref-name>  <resource-env-ref-type>    javax.enterprise.concurrent.ManagedExecutorService  </resource-env-ref-type><resource-env-ref> and available as: @Resource(name="concurrent/timedExecutor")ManagedExecutorService executor; And then the tasks are submitted using submit, invokeXXX or scheduleXXX methods. ScheduledFuture<?> future = executor.schedule(new MyTask(), 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS); This will create and execute a one-shot action that becomes enabled after 5 seconds of delay. More control is possible using one of the newly added methods: MyTaskListener implements ManagedTaskListener {  public void taskStarting(...) { . . . }  public void taskSubmitted(...) { . . . }  public void taskDone(...) { . . . }  public void taskAborted(...) { . . . } }ScheduledFuture<?> future = executor.schedule(new MyTask(), 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS, new MyTaskListener()); Here, ManagedTaskListener is used to monitor the state of a task's future. ManagedThreadFactory provides a method for creating threads for execution in a managed environment. A simple usage is: @Resource(name="concurrent/myThreadFactory")ManagedThreadFactory factory;. . .Thread thread = factory.newThread(new Runnable() { . . . }); concurrent/myThreadFactory is a JNDI resource. There is lot of interesting content in the Early Draft, download it, and read yourself. The implementation will be made available soon and also be integrated in GlassFish 4 as well. Some references for further exploring ... Javadoc Early Draft Specification concurrency-ee-spec.java.net [email protected]

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 2: Platforms and Features

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 2 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. In the previous post I discussed what reasons a company might have for creating a smartphone application.  In this installment I will cover some of history and state of the different platforms as well as features that can be leveraged for building enterprise smartphone applications. Platforms Before you start choosing a platform to develop your solutions on it is good to understand how we got here and what features you can leverage. History To my memory we owe all of this to a product called the Apple Newton that came out in 1987. It was the first PDA and back then I was much more of an Apple fan.  I was very impressed with this device even though it never really went anywhere.  The Palm Pilot by US Robotics was the next major advancement in PDA. It had a simple short hand window that allowed for quick stylus entry.. Later, Windows CE came out and started the broadening of the PDA market. After that it was the Palm and CE operating systems that started showing up on cell phones and for some time these were the two dominant operating systems that were distributed with devices from multiple hardware vendors. Current The iPhone was the first smartphone to take away the stylus and give us a multi-touch interface.  It was a revolution in usability and really changed the attractiveness of smartphones for the general public.  This brought us to the beginning of the current state of the market with the concept of an online store that makes it easy for customers to get new features and functionality on demand. With Android, Google made this more than a one horse race.  Not only did they come to compete, their low cost actually made them the leading OS.  Of course what made Android so attractive also is its major fault.  It is so open that it has been a target for malware which leaves consumers exposed.  Fortunately for Google though, most consumers aren’t aware of the threat that they are under. Although Microsoft had put out one of the first smart phone operating systems with CE it had to play catch up and finally came out with the Windows Phone.  They have gone for a market approach between those of iOS and Android.  They support multiple hardware vendors like Google, but they kept a certification process for applications that is similar to Apple.  They also created a user interface that was different enough to give it a clear separation from the other two platforms. The result of all this is hundreds of millions of smartphones being sold monthly across all three platforms giving us a wide range of choices and challenges when it comes to developing solutions. Features So what are the features that make these devices flexible enough be considered for use in the enterprise? The biggest advantage of today's devices is network connectivity.  The ability to access information from multiple sources at a moment’s notice is critical for businesses.  Add to that the ability to communicate over a variety of text, voice and video modes and we have a powerful starting point. Every smartphone has a cameras and they are not just useful for posting to Instagram. We are seeing more applications such as Bing vision that allow us to scan just about any printed code or text to find information.  These capabilities have been made available to developers in the form of standard libraries for reading barcodes of just about an flavor and optical character recognition (OCR) interpretation. Bluetooth give us the ability to communicate with multiple devices. Whether these are headsets, keyboard or printers the wireless communication capabilities are just starting to evolve.  The more these wireless communication protocols grow, the more opportunities we will see to transfer data between users and a variety of devices. Local storage of information that can be called up even when the device cannot reach the network is the other big capability.  This give users the ability to work offline as well and transmit information when connections are restored. These are the tools that we have to work with to build applications that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage for companies that implement them. Coming Up In the third installment I will cover key concerns that you face when building enterprise smartphone apps. del.icio.us Tags: smartphones,enterprise smartphone Apps,architecture,iOS,Android,Windows Phone

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• Is it feasible and useful to auto-generate some code of unit tests?

  - by skiwi

  Earlier today I have come up with an idea, based upon a particular real use case, which I would want to have checked for feasability and usefulness. This question will feature a fair chunk of Java code, but can be applied to all languages running inside a VM, and maybe even outside. While there is real code, it uses nothing language-specific, so please read it mostly as pseudo code. The idea Make unit testing less cumbersome by adding in some ways to autogenerate code based on human interaction with the codebase. I understand this goes against the principle of TDD, but I don't think anyone ever proved that doing TDD is better over first creating code and then immediatly therafter the tests. This may even be adapted to be fit into TDD, but that is not my current goal. To show how it is intended to be used, I'll copy one of my classes here, for which I need to make unit tests. public class PutMonsterOnFieldAction implements PlayerAction { private final int handCardIndex; private final int fieldMonsterIndex; public PutMonsterOnFieldAction(final int handCardIndex, final int fieldMonsterIndex) { this.handCardIndex = Arguments.requirePositiveOrZero(handCardIndex, "handCardIndex"); this.fieldMonsterIndex = Arguments.requirePositiveOrZero(fieldMonsterIndex, "fieldCardIndex"); } @Override public boolean isActionAllowed(final Player player) { Objects.requireNonNull(player, "player"); Hand hand = player.getHand(); Field field = player.getField(); if (handCardIndex >= hand.getCapacity()) { return false; } if (fieldMonsterIndex >= field.getMonsterCapacity()) { return false; } if (field.hasMonster(fieldMonsterIndex)) { return false; } if (!(hand.get(handCardIndex) instanceof MonsterCard)) { return false; } return true; } @Override public void performAction(final Player player) { Objects.requireNonNull(player); if (!isActionAllowed(player)) { throw new PlayerActionNotAllowedException(); } Hand hand = player.getHand(); Field field = player.getField(); field.setMonster(fieldMonsterIndex, (MonsterCard)hand.play(handCardIndex)); } } We can observe the need for the following tests: Constructor test with valid input Constructor test with invalid inputs isActionAllowed test with valid input isActionAllowed test with invalid inputs performAction test with valid input performAction test with invalid inputs My idea mainly focuses on the isActionAllowed test with invalid inputs. Writing these tests is not fun, you need to ensure a number of conditions and you check whether it really returns false, this can be extended to performAction, where an exception needs to be thrown in that case. The goal of my idea is to generate those tests, by indicating (through GUI of IDE hopefully) that you want to generate tests based on a specific branch. The implementation by example User clicks on "Generate code for branch if (handCardIndex >= hand.getCapacity())". Now the tool needs to find a case where that holds. (I haven't added the relevant code as that may clutter the post ultimately) To invalidate the branch, the tool needs to find a handCardIndex and hand.getCapacity() such that the condition >= holds. It needs to construct a Player with a Hand that has a capacity of at least 1. It notices that the capacity private int of Hand needs to be at least 1. It searches for ways to set it to 1. Fortunately it finds a constructor that takes the capacity as an argument. It uses 1 for this. Some more work needs to be done to succesfully construct a Player instance, involving the creation of objects that have constraints that can be seen by inspecting the source code. It has found the hand with the least capacity possible and is able to construct it. Now to invalidate the test it will need to set handCardIndex = 1. It constructs the test and asserts it to be false (the returned value of the branch) What does the tool need to work? In order to function properly, it will need the ability to scan through all source code (including JDK code) to figure out all constraints. Optionally this could be done through the javadoc, but that is not always used to indicate all constraints. It could also do some trial and error, but it pretty much stops if you cannot attach source code to compiled classes. Then it needs some basic knowledge of what the primitive types are, including arrays. And it needs to be able to construct some form of "modification trees". The tool knows that it needs to change a certain variable to a different value in order to get the correct testcase. Hence it will need to list all possible ways to change it, without using reflection obviously. What this tool will not replace is the need to create tailored unit tests that tests all kinds of conditions when a certain method actually works. It is purely to be used to test methods when they invalidate constraints. My questions: Is creating such a tool feasible? Would it ever work, or are there some obvious problems? Would such a tool be useful? Is it even useful to automatically generate these testcases at all? Could it be extended to do even more useful things? Does, by chance, such a project already exist and would I be reinventing the wheel? If not proven useful, but still possible to make such thing, I will still consider it for fun. If it's considered useful, then I might make an open source project for it depending on the time. For people searching more background information about the used Player and Hand classes in my example, please refer to this repository. At the time of writing the PutMonsterOnFieldAction has not been uploaded to the repo yet, but this will be done once I'm done with the unit tests.

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• What are some concise and comprehensive introductory guide to unit testing for a self-taught programmer [closed]

  - by Superbest

  I don't have much formal training in programming and I have learned most things by looking up solutions on the internet to practical problems I have. There are some areas which I think would be valuable to learn, but which ended up both being difficult to learn and easy to avoid learning for a self-taught programmer. Unit testing is one of them. Specifically, I am interested in tests in and for C#/.NET applications using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools in Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2012, but I really want a good introduction to the principles so language and IDE shouldn't matter much. At this time I'm interested in relatively trivial tests for small or medium sized programs (development time of weeks or months and mostly just myself developing). I don't necessarily intend to do test-driven development (I am aware that some say unit testing alone is supposed to be for developing features in TDD, and not an assurance that there are no bugs in the software, but unit testing is often the only kind of testing for which I have resources). I have found this tutorial which I feel gave me a decent idea of what unit tests and TDD looks like, but in trying to apply these ideas to my own projects, I often get confused by questions I can't answer and don't know how to answer, such as: What parts of my application and what sorts of things aren't necessarily worth testing? How fine grained should my tests be? Should they test every method and property separately, or work with a larger scope? What is a good naming convention for test methods? (since apparently the name of the method is the only way I will be able to tell from a glance at the test results table what works in my program and what doesn't) Is it bad to have many asserts in one test method? Since apparently VS2012 reports only that "an Assert.IsTrue failed within method MyTestMethod", and if MyTestMethod has 10 Assert.IsTrue statements, it will be irritating to figure out why a test is failing. If a lot of the functionality deals with writing and reading data to/from the disk in a not-exactly trivial fashion, how do I test that? If I provide a bunch of files as input by placing them in the program's directory, do I have to copy those files to the test project's bin/Debug folder now? If my program works with a large body of data and execution takes minutes or more, should my tests have it do the whole use all of the real data, a subset of it, or simulated data? If latter, how do I decide on the subset or how to simulate? Closely related to the previous point, if a class is such that its main operation happens in a state that is arrived to by the program after some involved operations (say, a class makes calculations on data derived from a few thousands of lines of code analyzing some raw data) how do I test just that class without inevitably ending up testing that class and all the other code that brings it to that state along with it? In general, what kind of approach should I use for test initialization? (hopefully that is the correct term, I mean preparing classes for testing by filling them in with appropriate data) How do I deal with private members? Do I just suck it up and assume that "not public = shouldn't be tested"? I have seen people suggest using private accessors and reflection, but these feel like clumsy and unsuited for regular use. Are these even good ideas? Is there anything like design patterns concerning testing specifically? I guess the main themes in what I'd like to learn more about are, (1) what are the overarching principles that should be followed (or at least considered) in every testing effort and (2) what are popular rules of thumb for writing tests. For example, at one point I recall hearing from someone that if a method is longer than 200 lines, it should be refactored - not a universally correct rule, but it has been quite helpful since I'd otherwise happily put hundreds of lines in single methods and then wonder why my code is so hard to read. Similarly I've found ReSharpers suggestions on member naming style and other things to be quite helpful in keeping my codebases sane. I see many resources both online and in print that talk about testing in the context of large applications (years of work, 10s of people or more). However, because I've never worked on such large projects, this context is very unfamiliar to me and makes the material difficult to follow and relate to my real world problems. Speaking of software development in general, advice given with the assumptions of large projects isn't always straightforward to apply to my own, smaller endeavors. Summary So my question is: What are some resources to learn about unit testing, for a hobbyist, self-taught programmer without much formal training? Ideally, I'm looking for a short and simple "bible of unit testing" which I can commit to memory, and then apply systematically by repeatedly asking myself "is this test following the bible of testing closely enough?" and then amending discrepancies if it doesn't.

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• Copies of GameScene created when called additional times

  - by Orin MacGregor

  I have a game with a level select managed by a SceneManager, which basically just uses ReplaceScene. The first time I load a level everything works fine. On subsequent calls, for example: completing the level and continuing to the next, things blow up. The level loads fine, but when I try to pan the map or try to move the player the game crashes. Debugging through I found that there are multiple occurrences of self and related children like player and mapLayer. As a test, I put this code in my ccTouchesBegan: NSLog(@"test %i", [self retainCount]); The first time a level is loaded, it gives: test 2 The second time I load a level it gives: test 2 test 1 as in it spits out both values by looping through twice, not just appending an output to the last. It continues with this pattern for each subsequent load. So the third time will give 2 1 1. Particular code that causes the game to crash involve calling _tileMap.tileSize because there is a second GameScene with a tileMap that was supposedly destroyed, so it has tileSize and mapSize of 0. I noticed dealloc doesn't really ever get called, so I tried to manage some things with -(void) onExit -(void) onExit { [self unscheduleAllSelectors]; [_player stopAllActions]; //stop any animations just in case. normally handled in ccTouchesEnded [self removeAllChildrenWithCleanup:YES]; } I never replace the GameScene while I'm in a GameScene; if the level is completed it goes to a GameOver scene, or I use a back button that goes to the LevelSelect scene. This is [the relevant parts of] my init, in case something like the adding of children matters: -(id) init { _mapLayer = [CCLayer node]; //load data for level GameData *gameData = [GameDataParser loadData]; int selectedChapter = gameData.selectedChapter; int selectedLevel = gameData.selectedLevel; Levels *chapterLevels = [LevelParser loadLevelsForChapter:selectedChapter]; //loop until we get selected level, then do stuff for (Level *level in chapterLevels.levels) { if (level.number == selectedLevel) { //load the level map _tileMap = [CCTMXTiledMap tiledMapWithTMXFile:level.file]; } } _background = [_tileMap layerNamed:@"Background"]; _foreground = [_tileMap layerNamed:@"Foreground"]; _meta = [_tileMap layerNamed:@"Meta"]; _meta.visible = NO; //initialize Spawn Point object and place player there CCTMXObjectGroup *objects = [_tileMap objectGroupNamed:@"Objects"]; NSAssert(objects != nil, @"'Objects' object group not found"); NSMutableDictionary *spawnPoint = [objects objectNamed:@"SpawnPoint"]; NSAssert(spawnPoint != nil, @"SpawnPoint object not found"); int x = [[spawnPoint valueForKey:@"x"] intValue] / retinaScaling; int y = [[spawnPoint valueForKey:@"y"] intValue] / retinaScaling; //setup animations [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] addSpriteFramesWithFile:@"MouseRightAnim_24x21.plist"]; CCSpriteBatchNode *spriteSheet = [CCSpriteBatchNode batchNodeWithFile:@"MouseRightAnim_24x21.png"]; [_mapLayer addChild:spriteSheet z:1]; NSMutableArray *rightAnimFrames = [NSMutableArray array]; for(int i = 1; i <= 3; ++i) { [rightAnimFrames addObject: [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"MouseRight%d_24x21.png", i]]]; } CCAnimation *rightAnim = [CCAnimation animationWithSpriteFrames:rightAnimFrames delay:0.1f]; self.player = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"MouseRight2_24x21.png"]; _player.position = ccp(x, y); self.rightAction = [CCRepeatForever actionWithAction:[CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:rightAnim]]; rightAnim.restoreOriginalFrame = NO; [spriteSheet addChild:_player]; //get map size in pixels mapHeight = _tileMap.contentSize.height; mapWidth = _tileMap.contentSize.width; //setup defaults //this value works well for the calculation later, trial and error really distance = 150; lastGoodDistance = 150; mapScale = 1; [self setViewpointCenter:_player.position]; [_mapLayer addChild:_tileMap]; [self addChild:_mapLayer z:-1]; self.isTouchEnabled = YES; } return self; } And here's the SceneManager code for replacing scenes: +(void) goGameScene { CCLayer *gameLayer = [GameScene node]; [SceneManager go:gameLayer:[GameHUD node]]; } //this is what every call looks like besides the GameScene one above +(void) goLevelSelect { [SceneManager go:[LevelSelect node]:nil]; } +(void) go:(CCLayer *)layer: (CCLayer *)hudLayer { CCDirector *director = [CCDirector sharedDirector]; CCScene *newScene = [SceneManager wrap:layer:hudLayer]; if ([director runningScene]) { [director replaceScene:newScene]; } else { [director runWithScene:newScene]; } } +(CCScene *) wrap:(CCLayer *)layer: (CCLayer *)hudLayer { CCScene *newScene = [CCScene node]; [newScene addChild: layer]; if (hudLayer != nil) { [newScene addChild: hudLayer z:1]; } return newScene; } Any ideas why I'm getting these fatal artifacts? I'm hoping this isn't considered too localized since it basically combines 3 tutorials that anyone could end up following. (Ray Wenderlich Animations, Tim Roadley Scene Manager, Pan and Zoom with Tiled Maps.

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• Silverlight Confirm Dialog to Pause Thread

  - by AlishahNovin

  I'm trying to do a confirmation dialog using Silverlight's ChildWindow object. Ideally, I'd like it to work like MessageBox.Show(), where the entire application halts until an input is received from the user. For example: for(int i=0;i<5;i++) { if (i==3 && MessageBox.Show("Exit early?", "Iterator", MessageBoxButton.OKCancel) == MessageBoxResult.OK) { break; } } Would stop the iteration at 3 if the user hits OK... However, if I were to do something along the lines: ChildWindow confirm = new ChildWindow(); confirm.Title = "Iterator"; confirm.HasCloseButton = false; Grid container = new Grid(); Button closeBtn = new Button(); closeBtn.Content = "Exit early"; closeBtn.Click += delegate { confirm.DialogResult = true; confirm.Close(); }; container.Children.Add(closeBtn); Button continueBtn = new Button(); continueBtn.Content = "Continue!"; continueBtn.Click += delegate { confirm.DialogResult = false; confirm.Close(); }; container.Children.Add(continueBtn); confirm.Content = container; for(int i=0;i<5;i++) { if (i==3) { confirm.Show(); if (confirm.DialogResult.HasResult && (bool)confirm.DialogResult) { break; } } } This clearly would not work, as the thread isn't halted... confirm.DialogResult.HasResult would be false, and the loop would continue past 3. I'm just wondering, how I could go about this properly. Silverlight is single-threaded, so I can't just put the thread to sleep and then wake it up when I'm ready, so I'm just wondering if there's anything else that people could recommend? I've considered reversing the logic - ie, passing the actions I want to occur to the Yes/No events, but in my specific case this wouldn't quite work. Thanks in advance!

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• PostgreSQL to Data-Warehouse: Best approach for near-real-time ETL / extraction of data

  - by belvoir

  Background: I have a PostgreSQL (v8.3) database that is heavily optimized for OLTP. I need to extract data from it on a semi real-time basis (some-one is bound to ask what semi real-time means and the answer is as frequently as I reasonably can but I will be pragmatic, as a benchmark lets say we are hoping for every 15min) and feed it into a data-warehouse. How much data? At peak times we are talking approx 80-100k rows per min hitting the OLTP side, off-peak this will drop significantly to 15-20k. The most frequently updated rows are ~64 bytes each but there are various tables etc so the data is quite diverse and can range up to 4000 bytes per row. The OLTP is active 24x5.5. Best Solution? From what I can piece together the most practical solution is as follows: Create a TRIGGER to write all DML activity to a rotating CSV log file Perform whatever transformations are required Use the native DW data pump tool to efficiently pump the transformed CSV into the DW Why this approach? TRIGGERS allow selective tables to be targeted rather than being system wide + output is configurable (i.e. into a CSV) and are relatively easy to write and deploy. SLONY uses similar approach and overhead is acceptable CSV easy and fast to transform Easy to pump CSV into the DW Alternatives considered .... Using native logging (http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/runtime-config-logging.html). Problem with this is it looked very verbose relative to what I needed and was a little trickier to parse and transform. However it could be faster as I presume there is less overhead compared to a TRIGGER. Certainly it would make the admin easier as it is system wide but again, I don't need some of the tables (some are used for persistent storage of JMS messages which I do not want to log) Querying the data directly via an ETL tool such as Talend and pumping it into the DW ... problem is the OLTP schema would need tweaked to support this and that has many negative side-effects Using a tweaked/hacked SLONY - SLONY does a good job of logging and migrating changes to a slave so the conceptual framework is there but the proposed solution just seems easier and cleaner Using the WAL Has anyone done this before? Want to share your thoughts?

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• How can I do something ~after~ an event has fired in C#?

  - by Siracuse

  I'm using the following project to handle global keyboard and mouse hooking in my C# application. This project is basically a wrapper around the Win API call SetWindowsHookEx using either the WH_MOUSE_LL or WH_KEYBOARD_LL constants. It also manages certain state and generally makes this kind of hooking pretty pain free. I'm using this for a mouse gesture recognition software I'm working on. Basically, I have it setup so it detects when a global hotkey is pressed down (say CTRL), then the user moves the mouse in the shape of a pre-defined gesture and then releases global hotkey. The event for the KeyDown is processed and tells my program to start recording the mouse locations until it receives the KeyUp event. This is working fine and it allows an easy way for users to enter a mouse-gesture mode. Once the KeyUp event fires and it detects the appropriate gesture, it is suppose to send certain keystrokes to the active window that the user has defined for that particular gesture they just drew. I'm using the SendKeys.Send/SendWait methods to send output to the current window. My problem is this: When the user releases their global hotkey (say CTRL), it fires the KeyUp event. My program takes its recorded mouse points and detects the relevant gesture and attempts to send the correct input via SendKeys. However, because all of this is in the KeyUp event, that global hotkey hasn't finished being processed. So, for example if I defined a gesture to send the key "A" when it is detected, and my global hotkey is CTRL, when it is detected SendKeys will send "A" but while CTRL is still "down". So, instead of just sending A, I'm getting CTRL-A. So, in this example, instead of physically sending the single character "A" it is selecting-all via the CTRL-A shortcut. Even though the user has released the CTRL (global hotkey), it is still being considered down by the system. Once my KeyUp event fires, how can I have my program wait some period of time or for some event so I can be sure that the global hotkey is truly no longer being registered by the system, and only then sending the correct input via SendKeys?

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• Detecting which UIButton was pressed in a UITableView

  - by rein

  Hi, I have a UITableView with 5 UITableViewCells. Each cell contains a UIButton which is set up as follows: - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { NSString *identifier = @"identifier"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:identifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[UITableView alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:identifier]; [cell autorelelase]; UIButton *button = [[UIButton alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(10, 5, 40, 20)]; [button addTarget:self action:@selector(buttonPressedAction:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside]; [button setTag:1]; [cell.contentView addSubview:button]; [button release]; } UIButton *button = (UIButton *)[cell viewWithTag:1]; [button setTitle:@"Edit" forState:UIControlStateNormal]; return cell; } My question is this: in the buttonPressedAction: method, how do I know which button has been pressed. I've considered using tags but I'm not sure this is the best route. I'd like to be able to somehow tag the indexPath onto the control. - (void)buttonPressedAction:(id)sender { UIButton *button = (UIButton *)sender; // how do I know which button sent this message? // processing button press for this row requires an indexPath. } What's the standard way of doing this? Edit: I've kinda solved it by doing the following. I would still like to have an opinion whether this is the standard way of doing it or is there a better way? - (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath { NSString *identifier = @"identifier"; UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:identifier]; if (cell == nil) { cell = [[UITableView alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:identifier]; [cell autorelelase]; UIButton *button = [[UIButton alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(10, 5, 40, 20)]; [button addTarget:self action:@selector(buttonPressedAction:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside]; [cell.contentView addSubview:button]; [button release]; } UIButton *button = (UIButton *)[cell.contentView.subViews objectAtIndex:0]; [button setTag:indexPath.row]; [button setTitle:@"Edit" forState:UIControlStateNormal]; return cell; } - (void)buttonPressedAction:(id)sender { UIButton *button = (UIButton *)sender; int row = button.tag; } What's important to note is that I can't set the tag in the creation of the cell since the cell might be dequeued instead. It feels very dirty. There must be a better way.

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• Best Practice for Images with Codeigniter : Generating Thumbs or Resizing on the Fly

  - by Steve K

  Hi all, I know there’s been a good deal written on thumbnail generation and the like with CI, but I wanted to explain what I’ve made and see what kind of best-practice advice I could find. Here’s my story… Currently, I have a site which allows users to upload collections of photos to projects they’ve created after first creating an account. Upon account creation, the site generates folders for the users in the following fashion for each of five pre-defined projects: /students/username/project_num/images/thumbs/ (This is to say that within a pre-created students folder, the username, project_num, images and thumbs folders are created recursively five times.) When a user uploads images to a project, I have a gallery controller which uploads the full images into the images folder for the project_num, and then creates a smaller thumbnail which maintains its ratio. So far so good. On the index page of the site, where these thumbnails and full images are displayed, I had a bit of a brain lapse, thinking I could simply output the full image while resizing it via css for a ‘medium-size’ image which would lead to the full-size image when clicked. (To be clear, the path is: Click on thumbnail— Load scaled full-size (medium-size) image via ajax into a display area above thumbs— Click on medium-sized image— Load full size image via lightbox, or something of that nature.) I have everything working to this point, except, as one might imagine, resizing the full-sized images with css doesn’t maintain aspect ratio for the thumbs, which means I need to find the best way to resize these. In thinking about it, I figured I had two options: I could resize the image on the fly when the user clicks a thumbnail to load the medium-sized image via ajax. (I have a method ‘get_image($url)’ in my gallery controller which simply loads a view with an image tag and the image source passed to it, etc.) I thought perhaps I could send it first to my gallery model, resize it there on the fly, and send it on to the view. The problem I’m having is that resizing it on the fly and echoing it out gives me the raw image data (I apologize, I don’t know that’s the right term). I’ve tried using data_uris to format the raw data into something echoable, but with no success. Is this method possible? The second option I considered was to generate a second medium-sized thumbnail when the user uploads the image with maintain_ratio set to true. This method is slightly less ideal, given that when providing a way for the user to delete their projects, I’ll need to scan for an additional set of images to delete. Not a huge deal, definitely, but something I figured could be avoided by generating the medium-sized image on the fly. I hope I’ve been clear in my explanations, if long-winded! I’m very curious to see what suggestions folks have about the best way to handle this. Much thanks for reading, and any suggestions are much-appreciated! Steve K.

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• Why is code quality not popular?

  - by Peter Kofler

  I like my code being in order, i.e. properly formatted, readable, designed, tested, checked for bugs, etc. In fact I am fanatic about it. (Maybe even more than fanatic...) But in my experience actions helping code quality are hardly implemented. (By code quality I mean the quality of the code you produce day to day. The whole topic of software quality with development processes and such is much broader and not the scope of this question.) Code quality does not seem popular. Some examples from my experience include Probably every Java developer knows JUnit, almost all languages implement xUnit frameworks, but in all companies I know, only very few proper unit tests existed (if at all). I know that it's not always possible to write unit tests due to technical limitations or pressing deadlines, but in the cases I saw, unit testing would have been an option. If a developer wanted to write some tests for his/her new code, he/she could do so. My conclusion is that developers do not want to write tests. Static code analysis is often played around in small projects, but not really used to enforce coding conventions or find possible errors in enterprise projects. Usually even compiler warnings like potential null pointer access are ignored. Conference speakers and magazines would talk a lot about EJB3.1, OSGI, Cloud and other new technologies, but hardly about new testing technologies or tools, new static code analysis approaches (e.g. SAT solving), development processes helping to maintain higher quality, how some nasty beast of legacy code was brought under test, ... (I did not attend many conferences and it propably looks different for conferences on agile topics, as unit testing and CI and such has a higer value there.) So why is code quality so unpopular/considered boring? EDIT: Thank your for your answers. Most of them concern unit testing (and has been discussed in a related question). But there are lots of other things that can be used to keep code quality high (see related question). Even if you are not able to use unit tests, you could use a daily build, add some static code analysis to your IDE or development process, try pair programming or enforce reviews of critical code.

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• Which functions in the C standard library commonly encourage bad practice?

  - by Ninefingers

  Hello all, This is inspired by this question and the comments on one particular answer in that I learnt that strncpy is not a very safe string handling function in C and that it pads zeros, until it reaches n, something I was unaware of. Specifically, to quote R.. strncpy does not null-terminate, and does null-pad the whole remainder of the destination buffer, which is a huge waste of time. You can work around the former by adding your own null padding, but not the latter. It was never intended for use as a "safe string handling" function, but for working with fixed-size fields in Unix directory tables and database files. snprintf(dest, n, "%s", src) is the only correct "safe strcpy" in standard C, but it's likely to be a lot slower. By the way, truncation in itself can be a major bug and in some cases might lead to privilege elevation or DoS, so throwing "safe" string functions that truncate their output at a problem is not a way to make it "safe" or "secure". Instead, you should ensure that the destination buffer is the right size and simply use strcpy (or better yet, memcpy if you already know the source string length). And from Jonathan Leffler Note that strncat() is even more confusing in its interface than strncpy() - what exactly is that length argument, again? It isn't what you'd expect based on what you supply strncpy() etc - so it is more error prone even than strncpy(). For copying strings around, I'm increasingly of the opinion that there is a strong argument that you only need memmove() because you always know all the sizes ahead of time and make sure there's enough space ahead of time. Use memmove() in preference to any of strcpy(), strcat(), strncpy(), strncat(), memcpy(). So, I'm clearly a little rusty on the C standard library. Therefore, I'd like to pose the question: What C standard library functions are used inappropriately/in ways that may cause/lead to security problems/code defects/inefficiencies? In the interests of objectivity, I have a number of criteria for an answer: Please, if you can, cite design reasons behind the function in question i.e. its intended purpose. Please highlight the misuse to which the code is currently put. Please state why that misuse may lead towards a problem. I know that should be obvious but it prevents soft answers. Please avoid: Debates over naming conventions of functions (except where this unequivocably causes confusion). "I prefer x over y" - preference is ok, we all have them but I'm interested in actual unexpected side effects and how to guard against them. As this is likely to be considered subjective and has no definite answer I'm flagging for community wiki straight away. I am also working as per C99.

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• realtime logging

  - by Ion Todirel

  I have an application which has a loop, part of a "Scheduler", which runs at all time and is the heart of the application. Pretty much like a game loop, just that my application is a WPF application and it's not a game. Naturally the application does logging at many points, but the Scheduler does some sensitive monitoring, and sometimes it's impossible just from the logs to tell what may have gotten wrong (and by wrong I don't mean exceptions) or the current status. Because Scheduler's inner loop runs at short intervals, you can't do file I/O-based logging (or using the Event Viewer) in there. First, you need to watch it in real-time, and secondly the log file would grow in size very fast. So I was thinking of ways to show this data to the user in the realtime, some things I considered: Display the data in realtime in the UI Use AllocConsole/WriteConsole to display this information in a console Use a different console application which would display this information, communicate between the Scheduler and the console app using pipes or other IPC techniques Use Windows' Performance Monitor and somehow feed it with this information ETW Displaying in the UI would have its issues. First it doesn't integrate with the UI I had in mind for my application, and I don't want to complicate the UI just for this. This diagnostics would only happen rarely. Secondly, there is going to be some non-trivial data protection, as the Scheduler has it's own thread. A separate console window would work probably, but I'm still worried if it's not too much threshold. Allocating my own console, as this is a windows app, would probably be better than a different console application (3), as I don't need to worry about IPC communication, and non-blocking communication. However a user could close the console I allocated, and it would be problematic in that case. With a separate process you don't have to worry about it. Assuming there is an API for Performance Monitor, it wouldn't be integrated too well with my app or apparent to the users. Using ETW also doesn't solve anything, just a random idea, I still need to display this information somehow. What others think, would there be other ways I missed?

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• How to run a powershell script within a DOS batch file

  - by Don Vince

  How do I have a powershell script embedded within the same file as a DOS batch script? I know this kind of thing is possible in other scenarios: Embedding SQL in a DOS batch script using sqlcmd and a clever arrangements of goto's and comments at the beginning of the file In a *nix environment having a the name of the program you wish to run the script with on the first line of the script commented out e.g. #!/usr/local/bin/python There may not be a way to do this - in which case I will have to call the separate powershell script from the launching DOS script. One possible solution I've considered is to echo out the powershell script, and then run it. A good reason to not do this is that part of the reason to attempt this is to be using the advantages of the powershell environment without the pain of, for example, DOS escape characters I have some unusual constraints and would like to find an elegant solution. I suspect this question may be baiting responses of the variety: "why don't you try and solve this different problem instead." Suffice to say these are my constraints, sorry about that. Any ideas? Is there a suitable combination of clever comments and escape characters that will enable me to achieve this? Some thoughts on how to achieve this: A carat ^ at the end of a line in DOS is a continuation - like an underscore in VB An ampersand & in DOS typically is used to separate commands echo Hello & echo World results in 2 echos on separate lines %0 will give you the script that's currently running So something like this (if I could make it work) would be good: # & call powershell -psconsolefile %0 # & goto :EOF /* From here on in we're running nice juicy powershell code */ Write-Output "Hello World" Except... It doesn't work... because the extension of the file isn't as per powershell's liking: Windows PowerShell console file "insideout.bat" extension is not psc1. Windows PowerShell console file extension must be psc1. DOS isn't really altogether happy with the situation either - although it does stumble on '#' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

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