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• File Format Conversion to TIFF. Some issues???

  - by Nains

  I'm having a proprietary image format SNG( a proprietary format) which is having a countinous array of Image data along with Image meta information in seperate HDR file. Now I need to convert this SNG format to a Standard TIFF 6.0 Format. So I studied the TIFF format i.e. about its Header, Image File Directories( IFD's) and Stripped Image Data. Now I have few concerns about this conversion. Please assist me. SNG Continous Data vs TIFF Stripped Data: Should I convert SNG Data to TIFF as a continous data in one Strip( data load/edit time problem?) OR make logical StripOffsets of the SNG Image data. SNG Data Header uses only necessary Meta Information, thus while converting the SNG to TIFF, some information can’t be retrieved such as NewSubFileType, Software Tag etc. So this raises a concern that after conversion whether any missing directory information such as NewSubFileType, Software Tag etc is necessary and sufficient condition for TIFF File. Encoding of each pixel component of RGB Sample in SNG data: Here each SNG Image Data Strip per Pixel component is encoded as: Out^[i] := round( LineBuffer^[i * 3] * **0.072169** + LineBuffer^[i * 3 + 1] * **0.715160** + LineBuffer^[i * 3+ 2]* **0.212671**); Only way I deduce from it is that each Pixel is represented with 3 RGB component and some coefficient is multiplied with each component to make the SNG Viewer work RGB color information of SNG Image Data. (Developer who earlier work on this left, now i am following the trace :)) Thus while converting this to TIFF, the decoding the same needs to be done. This raises a concern that the how RBG information in TIFF is produced, or better do we need this information?. Please assist...

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• Editing 8bpp indexed Bitmaps

  - by Pedro Sá

  hi, i'm trying to edit the pixels of a 8bpp. Since this PixelFormat is indexed i'm aware that it uses a Color Table to map the pixel values. Even though I can edit the bitmap by converting it to 24bpp, 8bpp editing is much faster (13ms vs 3ms). But, changing each value when accessing the 8bpp bitmap results in some random rgb colors even though the PixelFormat remains 8bpp. I'm currently developing in c# and the algorithm is as follows: (C#) 1- Load original Bitmap at 8bpp 2- Create Empty temp Bitmap with 8bpp with the same size as the original 3-LockBits of both bitmaps and, using P/Invoke, calling c++ method where I pass the Scan0 of each BitmapData object. (I used a c++ method as it offers better performance when iterating through the Bitmap's pixels) (C++) 4- Create a int[256] palette according to some parameters and edit the temp bitmap bytes by passing the original's pixel values through the palette. (C#) 5- UnlockBits. My question is how can I edit the pixel values without having the strange rgb colors, or even better, edit the 8bpp bitmap's Color Table? Regards, Pedro

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• Using Sendkeys in python to press {F12} results in other keys pressed?

  - by ThantiK

  import time from ctypes import * import win32gui import win32com.client as comclt X = 119 Y = 53 def PILColorToRGB(pil_color): """ convert a PIL-compatible integer into an (r, g, b) tuple """ hexstr = '%06x' % pil_color # reverse byte order r, g, b = hexstr[4:], hexstr[2:4], hexstr[:2] r, g, b = [int(n, 16) for n in (r, g, b)] return (r, g, b) wsh = comclt.Dispatch("WScript.Shell") w = win32gui user = windll.LoadLibrary("c:\\windows\\system32\\user32.dll") h = user.GetDC(0) gdi = windll.LoadLibrary("c:\\windows\\system32\\gdi32.dll") while True: FG = w.GetWindowText(w.GetForegroundWindow()) #FG = Foreground window title. if FG == "World of Warcraft": rgb = (PILColorToRGB(gdi.GetPixel(h,X,Y))) #X, Y time.sleep(0.333) #don't check too often. if (rgb[0] >= 130): #While Pixel (X, Y) is Red... #print "%d %d %d" % (rgb[0], rgb[1], rgb[2]) #Debug wsh.SendKeys("{F12}") #Send a key. time.sleep(0.7) #Add some extra down-time if we send the key. else: time.sleep(5) Basically all this code does is read a pixel on the screen, and send a key (F12) if the pixel is red. But when using this code I regularly get some phantom key-code being pressed. The application I'm using this on is obviously world of warcraft, and I have checked that all keybinds are standard keybinds. However randomly it seems I get either an up arrow, or a w pressed, which moves my character forward whenever this code executes (F12 is bound to a macro, unbound from any movement. If I press f12 with a hardware event, it does not exhibit this behavior. What in the world could be going on here?

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• How to scale a sprite image without losing color key information?

  - by Michael P

  Hello everyone, I'm currently developing a simple application that displays map and draws some markers on it. I'm developing for Windows Mobile, so I decided to use DirectDraw and Imaging interfaces to make the application fast and pretty. The map moves when user moves finger on the touchscreen, so the whole map moving/scrolling animation has to be fast, but it is not. On every map update I have to draw portion of the map, control buttons, and markers - buttons and markers are preloaded on DirectDraw surface as a mipmap. So the only thing I do is BitBlit from the mipmap to a back buffer, and from the back buffer to a primary surface (I can't use page flipping due to the windowed mode of my application). Previously I used premultiplied-alpha surface with 32 bit ARGB pixel format for images mipmap, everything was looking good, but drawing entire "scene" was horribly slow - i could forget about smooth map scrolling. Now I'm using mipmap with native (RGB565) pixel format and fuchsia (0xFF00FF) color key. Drawing is much better my mipmap surface is generated on program loading - images are loaded from files, scaled (with filtering) and drawn on mipmap. The problem is, that image scaling process blends pixel colors, and those pixels which are on the border of a sprite region are blended with surrounding fuchsia pixels resulting semi-fuchsia color that is not treated as color key. When I do blitting with color key option, sprites have small fuchsia-like borders, and it looks really bad. How to solve this problem? I can use alpha blitting, but it is too slow - even in ARGB 1555 format.

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• Updating UIView subclass contents

  - by Brett

  Hi; I am trying to update a UIView subclass to draw individual pixels (rectangles) after calculating if they are in the mandelbrot set. I am using the following code but am getting a blank screen: //drawingView.h ... -(void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect{ CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext(); CGContextSetRGBFillColor(context, r, g, b, 1); CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(context, r, g, b, 1); CGRect arect = CGRectMake(x,y,1,1); CGContextFillRect(context, arect); } ... //viewController.m ... - (void)viewDidLoad { [drawingView setX:10]; [drawingView setY:10]; [drawingView setR:0.0]; [drawingView setG:0.0]; [drawingView setB:0.0]; [super viewDidLoad]; [drawingView setNeedsDisplay]; } Once I figure out how to display one pixel, I'd like to know how to go about updating the view by adding another pixel (once calculated). Once all the variables change, how do I keep the current view as is but add another pixel? Thanks, Brett

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• Qt/C++, Problems with large QImage

  - by David Günzel

  I'm pretty new to C++/Qt and I'm trying to create an application with Visual Studio C++ and Qt (4.8.3). The application displays images using a QGraphicsView, I need to change the images at pixel level. The basic code is (simplified): QImage* img = new QImage(img_width,img_height,QImage::Format_RGB32); while(do_some_stuff) { img->setPixel(x,y,color); } QGraphicsPixmapItem* pm = new QGraphicsPixmapItem(QPixmap::fromImage(*img)); QGraphicsScene* sc = new QGraphicsScene; sc->setSceneRect(0,0,img->width(),img->height()); sc->addItem(pm); ui.graphicsView->setScene(sc); This works well for images up to around 12000x6000 pixel. The weird thing happens beyond this size. When I set img_width=16000 and img_height=8000, for example, the line img = new QImage(...) returns a null image. The image data should be around 512,000,000 bytes, so it shouldn't be too large, even on a 32 bit system. Also, my machine (Win 7 64bit, 8 GB RAM) should be capable of holding the data. I've also tried this version: uchar* imgbuf = (uchar*) malloc(img_width*img_height*4); QImage* img = new QImage(imgbuf,img_width,img_height,QImage::Format_RGB32); At first, this works. The img pointer is valid and calling img-width() for example returns the correct image width (instead of 0, in case the image pointer is null). But as soon as I call img-setPixel(), the pointer becomes null and img-width() returns 0. So what am I doing wrong? Or is there a better way of modifying large images on pixel level? Regards, David

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• Help in J2ME for creating image and parse it

  - by HAMED

  Can anyone tell me how i can parse a png image into many png images in J2ME??? for examole:I just wnat to have a source image 150*150 pixel and parse it to 10 image with 15*15 pixel. I write an elemantary code that have exeption. This is my code: public class HelloMIDlet extends MIDlet implements CommandListener { private boolean midletPaused = false; private Command exitCommand; private Form form; private StringItem stringItem; Image im , im2; Form form1 = null; public HelloMIDlet() { try { // create source image im = Image.createImage("/image1.JPG"); int height = im.getHeight() ; int width = im.getWidth() ; int x = 0 ; int y = 0 ; while ( y < height ){ while ( x < width ){ // create 15*15 pixel of source image im2 = im.createImage(im, x, y, 15, 15, Sprite.TRANS_NONE) ; x += 15 ; } y += 15 ; x = 0 ; } } catch (IOException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } } please help me to make it right....It's emergency! Thanks a lot guys...

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• Screen information while Windows system is locked (.NET)

  - by Matt

  We have a nightly process that updates applications on a user's pc, and that requires bringing the application down and back up again (not looking to get into changing that process). The problem is that we are building a Windows AppBar on launch which requires a valid screen, and when the system is locked there isn't one in the Screen class. So none of the visual effects are enabled and it shows up real ugly. The only way we currently have around this is to detect a locked screen and just spin and wait until the user unlocks the desktop, then continue launching. Leaving it down isn't an option, as this is a key part of our user's workflow, and they expect it to be up and running if they left it that way the night before. Any ideas?? I can't seem to find the display information anywhere, but it has to be stored off someplace, since the user is still logged in. The contents of the Screen.AllScreens array: ** When Locked: Device Name : DISPLAY Primary : True Bits Per Pixel : 0 Bounds : {X=-1280,Y=0,Width=2560,Height=1024} Working Area : {X=0,Y=0,Width=1280,Height=1024} ** When Unlocked: Device Name : \\.\DISPLAY1 Primary : True Bits Per Pixel : 32 Bounds : {X=0,Y=0,Width=1280,Height=1024} Working Area : {X=0,Y=0,Width=1280,Height=994} Device Name : \\.\DISPLAY2 Primary : False Bits Per Pixel : 32 Bounds : {X=-1280,Y=0,Width=1280,Height=1024} Working Area : {X=-1280,Y=0,Width=1280,Height=964}

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• Python: Serial Transmission

  - by Silent Elektron

  I have an image stack of 500 images (jpeg) of 640x480. I intend to make 500 pixels (1st pixels of all images) as a list and then send that via COM1 to FPGA where I do my further processing. I have a couple of questions here: How do I import all the 500 images at a time into python and how do i store it? How do I send the 500 pixel list via COM1 to FPGA? I tried the following: Converted the jpeg image to intensity values (each pixel is denoted by a number between 0 and 255) in MATLAB, saved the intensity values in a text file, read that file using readlines(). But it became too cumbersome to make the intensity value files for all the 500 images! Used NumPy to put the read files in a matrix and then pick the first pixel of all images. But when I send it, its coming like: [56, 61, 78, ... ,71, 91]. Is there a way to eliminate the [ ] and , while sending the data serially? Thanks in Advance! :)

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• Selenium Webdriver Java - looking for alternatives for Actions and Robot when performing drag-and-drop

  - by Ja-ke Alconcel

  I first tried Actions class and the drag-and-drop does work on different elements, however it was unable to locate the a specific draggable element on it's exact screen/webpage position. Here's the code I've used: Point loc = driver.findElement(By.id("thiselement")).getLocation(); System.out.println(loc); WebElement drag = driver.findElement(By.id("thiselement")); Actions test = new Actions(driver); test.dragAndDropBy(drag, 0, 60).build().perform(); I checked the element with it's pixel location and it prints (837, -52), which was somewhere on top of the webpage and was pixels away from the actual element. Then I tried using the Robot class and works perfectly fine on my script, but can only provide constant successful runs on a single test machine, running it with a different machine with different screen resolution and screen size will render the script to fail due to the dependency of Robot on the pixel location of the element. The sample code of the Robot script I'm using: Robot dragAndDrop = new Robot(); dragAndDrop.mouseMove(945, 166); //actual pixel location of the draggable element dragAndDrop.mousePress(InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK); sleep(3000); dragAndDrop.mouseMove(945, 226); dragAndDrop.mouseRelease(InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK); sleep(3000); Is there any alternative for Actions and Robot to automate drag-and-drop? Or maybe a help on working the script to work on Actions as I really can't use Robot. Thanks in advance.

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• "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space" in image and array storage

  - by totalconscience

  I am currently working on an image processing demonstration in java (Applet). I am running into the problem where my arrays are too large and I am getting the "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space" error. The algorithm I run creates an NxD float array where: N is the number of pixel in the image and D is the coordinates of each pixel plus the colorspace components of each pixel (usually 1 for grayscale or 3 for RGB). For each iteration of the algorithm it creates one of these NxD float arrays and stores it for later use in a vector, so that the user of the applet may look at the individual steps. My client wants the program to be able to load a 500x500 RGB image and run as the upper bound. There are about 12 to 20 iterations per run so that means I need to be able to store a 12x500x500x5 float in some fashion. Is there a way to process all of this data and, if possible, how? Example of the issue: I am loading a 512 by 512 Grayscale image and even before the first iteration completes I run out of heap space. The line it points me to is: Y.add(new float[N][D]) where Y is a Vector and N and D are described as above. This is the second instance of the code using that line.

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• how to make a CUDA Histogram kernel?

  - by kitw

  Hi all, I am writing a CUDA kernel for Histogram on a picture, but I had no idea how to return a array from the kernel, and the array will change when other thread read it. Any possible solution for it? __global__ void Hist( TColor *dst, //input image int imageW, int imageH, int*data ){ const int ix = blockDim.x * blockIdx.x + threadIdx.x; const int iy = blockDim.y * blockIdx.y + threadIdx.y; if(ix < imageW && iy < imageH) { int pixel = get_red(dst[imageW * (iy) + (ix)]); //this assign specific RED value of image to pixel data[pixel] ++; // ?? problem statement ... } } @para d_dst: input image TColor is equals to float4. @para data: the array for histogram size [255] extern "C" void cuda_Hist(TColor *d_dst, int imageW, int imageH,int* data) { dim3 threads(BLOCKDIM_X, BLOCKDIM_Y); dim3 grid(iDivUp(imageW, BLOCKDIM_X), iDivUp(imageH, BLOCKDIM_Y)); Hist<<<grid, threads>>>(d_dst, imageW, imageH, data); }

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• Creating transparent PNG with exact RGBA values

  - by rrowland

  I'm color-coding a transparent image to be read programatically. However, the image seems to be getting compressed and my code is reading color values other than the ones I mean to pass it. Concept This is the output I get, exporting as PNG-24. I programatically check each pixel for one of the six colors I use in creating the image: 0x00000F 0x0000F0 0x000F00 0x00F000 0x0F0000 0xF00000 Each color represents a different texture to apply. Top right (0x00000F) will pull texture from the tile to its top right and blend it at a ratio equal to the opacity of the pixel. The end goal is to create a hex tiled grid with differing textures that blend smoothly. What's happening It seems that when converting to PNG, Photoshop will change the RGBA to make it smoother, or just to help compression size. Parts that should be 250 red range anywhere from 150 to 255. Question Whether using PNG or another web-compatible format, I need to be able to save these pixel values, essentially instructions, loss-less and still maintain transparency. Is this possible in any format or will I need to re-think my approach?

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• Voice Recognition Google API

  - by user2966744

  thanks for reading. I'm creating a simple web based drawing app that uses speech recognition. I have created a simple page, the project is on github here: https://github.com/a5hton/speechdraw It has a 16x16 pixel grid. I would like to be able to draw on this grid by using simple words. For example if you say "right", the pixel to the right will be colored black. If you say "down" the pixel below the last one will be colored black. You can say up, down, left or right and the corresponding pixels will be colored. Saying "erase" will switch to erase mode, colouring the pixels back to their original color. Saying "lift" will lift the pen off the page. Saying "draw" will enable the draw mode. Could you please help me work out how to make this happen. Please see the simple page at to get an understanding. Thank you! Cheers, Michael

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• Creating Descriptive Flex Field (DFF) Bean in OAF

  - by Manoj Madhusoodanan

  In this blog I will explain how to add a custom DFF in a custom OAF page.I am using XXCUST_DFF_DEMO table to store the DFF values.Also I am using custom DFF named XXCUST_PERSON_DFF.  Following steps needs to be performed to create this solution. 1) Register the custom table in Oracle Application2) Register the DFF3) Define the segments of DFF4) Create BC4J components for OAF and OA Page which holds the DFF I will explain the steps in detail below. Register the custom table in Oracle Application I am using custom DFF here so I have to register the custom table which I am going to capture the values.Please click here to see the table script. I am using the AD_DD package to register the custom table.Please click here to see the table registration script. Please verify the table has registered successfully. Navigation: Application Developer > Application > Database > Table Table has registered successfully. Register the DFF Next step is to register the DFF. Navigate to Application Developer > Flex Field > Descriptive > Register. Give details as below. Click on Reference Fields and set the Reference Field as ATTRIBUTE_CATEGORY. Click on the Columns button to verify that the columns ATTRIBUTE_CATEGORY,ATTRIBUTE1 .... ATTRIBUTE30 are enabled. DFF has registered successfully. Define the segments of DFF Here I am going to define the segments of the DFF.Navigate to Application Developer > Flex Field > Descriptive > Segments.Query for "XXCUST - Person DFF". Uncheck "Freeze Flexfield Definition". In my DFF the reference field I want to display a value set which has values "Permanent" and "Contractor". So define a value set  XXCUST_EMPLOYMENT_TYPE. Navigation: Application Developer > Flex Field > Descriptive > Validation > Sets After that assign the values to above created value sets. Navigation: Application Developer > Flex Field > Descriptive > Validation > Values Assign XXCUST_EMPLOYMENT_TYPE to Context Field Valueset. Setup the Context Field Values based on below table. Context Code Segments Global Data Elements Phone Number Email Fax Contractor Manager Extension Number CSP Name Permanent Extension Number Access Card Number Phone Number,Email and Fax displays always.When user choose Context Value as "Contractor" Manager Extension Number and CSP Name will show.In case of "Permanent" Extension Number and Access Card Number will show.  Assign value set also as follows. For Global Data Elements following are the segments. For "Contractor" following are the segments. For "Permanent" following are the segments. Check the "Freeze Flexfield Definition" check box and save.Standard concurrent program "Flexfield View Generator" will generate XXCUST_DFF_DEMO_DFV view which we mentioned in the DFF registration step.  Now the DFF has created successfully and ready to use. Create BC4J components for OAF and OA Page which holds the DFF Create the BC4J components ( EO,VO and AM) appropriately.Create the page based on the created VO.For DFF create an item of type "flex" with following property.  Note: You cannot create a flex item directly under a messageComponentLayout region, but you can create a messageLayout region under the messageComponentLayout region and add the flex item under the messageLayout region. In the Segment List property give the segment names which you want to display.The syntax of this is Global Data Elements|SEGMENT 1|...|SEGMENT N||[Context Code1]|SEGMENT 1|...|SEGMENT N||[Context Code2]|SEGMENT 1|...|SEGMENT N||... Eg: Global Data Elements|Phone Number|Email|Fax||Contractor|Manager Extension Number|CSP Name||Permanent|Extension Number|Access Card Number When you change the Context Value corresponding segments will display automatically by PPR in the page. You can attach partial action to the DFF bean programmatically so that you can identify the action related to DFF. pageContext.getParameter(EVENT_PARAM) will return "FLEX_CONTEXT_CHANGEDPersonDFF" when you change the DFF Context. Page is ready and you can test. When you choose "Contract" following output you can see. When you choose "Permanent" following output you can see.  Give proper values and press Apply.You can see values populated in the table.

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• Testing Mobile Websites with Adobe Shadow

  - by dwahlin

  It’s no surprise that mobile development is all the rage these days. With all of the new mobile devices being released nearly every day the ability for developers to deliver mobile solutions is more important than ever. Nearly every developer or company I’ve talked to recently about mobile development in training classes, at conferences, and on consulting projects says that they need to find a solution to get existing websites into the mobile space. Although there are several different frameworks out there that can be used such as jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, jQTouch, and others, how do you test how your site renders on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and the variety of mobile form factors out there? Although there are different virtual solutions that can be used including Electric Plum for iOS, emulators, browser plugins for resizing the laptop/desktop browser, and more, at some point you need to test on as many physical devices as possible. This can be extremely challenging and quite time consuming though especially when you consider that you have to manually enter URLs into devices and click links on each one to drill-down into sites. Adobe Labs just released a product called Adobe Shadow (thanks to Kurt Sprinzl for letting me know about it) that significantly simplifies testing sites on physical devices, debugging problems you find, and even making live modifications to HTML and CSS content while viewing a site on the device to see how rendering changes. You can view a page in your laptop/desktop browser and have it automatically pushed to all of your devices without actually touching the device (a huge time saver). See a problem with a device? Locate it using the free Chrome extension, pull up inspection tools (based on the Chrome Developer tools) and make live changes through Chrome that appear on the respective device so that it’s easy to identify how problems can be resolved. I’ve been using Adobe Shadow and am very impressed with the amount of time saved and the different features that it offers. In the rest of the post I’ll walk through how to get it installed, get it started, and use it to view and debug pages.   Getting Adobe Shadow Installed The following steps can be used to get Adobe Shadow installed: 1. Download and install Adobe Shadow on your laptop/desktop 2. Install the Adobe Shadow extension for Chrome 3. Install the Adobe Shadow app on all of your devices (you can find it in various app stores) 4. Connect your devices to Wifi. Make sure they’re on the same network that your laptop/desktop machine is on   Getting Adobe Shadow Started Once Adobe Shadow is installed, you’ll need to get it running on your laptop/desktop and on all your mobile devices. The following steps walk through that process: 1. Start the Adobe Shadow application on your laptop/desktop 2. Start the Adobe Shadow app on each of your mobile devices 3. Locate the laptop/desktop name in the list that’s shown on each mobile device: 4. Select the laptop/desktop name and a passcode will be shown: 5. Open the Adobe Shadow Chrome extension on the laptop/desktop and enter the passcode for the given device: Using Adobe Shadow to View and Modify Pages Once Adobe Shadow is up and running on your laptop/desktop and on all of your mobile devices you can navigate to a page in Chrome on the laptop/desktop and it will automatically be pushed out to all connected mobile devices. If you have 5 mobile devices setup they’ll all navigate to the page displayed in Chrome (pretty awesome!). This makes it super easy to see how a given page looks on your iPad, Android device, etc. without having to touch the device itself. If you find a problem with a page on a device you can select the device in the Chrome Adobe Shadow extension on your laptop/desktop and select the remote inspector icon (it’s the < > icon): This will pull up the Adobe Shadow remote debugging window which contains the standard Chrome Developer tool tabs such as Elements, Resources, Network, etc. Click on the Elements tab to see the HTML rendered for the target device and then drill into the respective HTML content, CSS styles, etc. As HTML elements are selected in the Adobe Shadow debugging tool they’ll be highlighted on the device itself just like they would if you were debugging a page directly in Chrome with the developer tools. Here’s an example from my Android device that shows how the page looks on the device as I select different HTML elements on the laptop/desktop: Conclusion I’m really impressed with what I’ve to this point from Adobe Shadow. Controlling pages that display on devices directly from my laptop/desktop is a big time saver and the ability to remotely see changes made through the Chrome Developer Tools (on my laptop/desktop) really pushes the tool over the top. If you’re developing mobile applications it’s definitely something to check out. It’s currently free to download and use. For additional details check out the video below:  

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• A little primer on using TFS with a small team

  - by johndoucette

  The scenario; A small team of 3 developers mostly in maintenance mode with traditional ASP.net, classic ASP, .Net integration services and utilities with the company’s third party packages, and a bunch of java-based Coldfusion web applications all under Visual Source Safe (VSS). They are about to embark on a huge SharePoint 2010 new construction project and wanted to use subversion instead VSS. TFS was a foreign word and smelled of “high cost” and of an “over complicated process”. Since they had no preconditions about the old TFS versions (‘05 & ‘08), it was fun explaining how simple it was to install a TFS server and get the ball rolling, with or without all the heavy stuff one sometimes associates with such a huge and powerful application management lifecycle product. So, how does a small team begin using TFS? 1. Start by using source control and migrate current VSS source trees into TFS. You can take the latest version or migrate the entire version history. It’s up to you on whether you want a clean start or need quick access to all the version notes and history of the bits. 2. Since most shops are mainly in maintenance mode with existing applications, begin using bug workitems for everything. When you receive an issue/bug from your current tracking system, manually enter the workitem in TFS right through Visual Studio. You can automate the integration to the current tracking system later or replace it entirely. Believe me, this thing is powerful and can handle even the largest of help desks. 3. With new construction, begin work with requirements and task workitems and follow the traditional sprint-based development lifecycle. Obviously, some minor training will be needed, but don’t fear, this is very intuitive and MSDN has a ton of lesson based labs and videos. 4. For the java developers, use the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 plugin (recently known as Teamprise). There is a seamless interface in Eclipse, but also a good command-line utility for other environments such as Dreamweaver. 5. Wait to fully integrate the whole workitem/project management/testing process until your team is familiar with the integrated workitems for bugs and code. After a while, you will see the team wanting more transparency into the work they are all doing and naturally, everyone will want workitems to help them organize the chaos! 6. Management will be limited in the value of the reports until you have a fully blown implementation of project planning, construction, build, deployment and testing. However, there are some basic “bug rate” reports and current backlog listings that can provide good information. Some notable explanations of TFS; Work Item Tracking and Project Management - A workitem represents the unit of work within the system which enables tracking of all activities produced by a user, whether it is a developer, business user, project manager or tester. The properties of a workitem such as linked changesets (checked-in code), who updated the data and when, the states and reasons for change, are all transitioned to a data warehouse within TFS for reporting purposes. A workitem can be defines as a "bug", "requirement", test case", or a "change request". They drive the work effort by the individual assigned to it and also provide a key role in defining what needs to be done. Workitems are the things the team needs to do to accomplish a goal. Test Case Management - Starting with a workitem known as a "test case", a tester (or developer) can now author and manage test cases within a formal test plan subsystem. Although TFS supports the test case workitem type, there is a new product known as the VS Test Professional 2010 which allows a tester to facilitate manual tests including fast forwarding steps in the process to arrive at the assertion point quickly. This repeatable process provides quick regression tests and can be conducted by the business user to ensure completeness during UAT. In addition, developers no longer can provide a response to a bug with the line "cannot reproduce". With every test run, attachments including the recorded session, captured environment configurations and settings, screen shots, intellitrace (debugging history), and in some cases if the lab manager is being used, a snapshot of the tested environment is available. Version Control - A modern system allowing shared check-in/check-out, excellent merge conflict resolution, Shelvesets (personal check-ins), branching/merging visualization, public workspaces, gated check-ins, security hierarchy capabilities, and changeset/workitem tracking. Knowing what was done with the code by any developer has become much easier to picture and resolve issues. Team Build - Automate the compilation process whether you need it to be whenever a developer checks-in code, periodically such as nightly builds for testers in the morning, or manual builds to be deployed into production. Each build can run through pre-determined tests, perform code analysis to see if the developer conforms to the team standards, and reject the build if either fails. Project Portal & Reporting - Provide management with a dashboard with insight into the project(s). "Where are we" in each step of the way including past iterations and the current burndown rate. Enabling this feature is easy as it seamlessly interfaces with existing SharePoint implementations.

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• Session Report - Modern Software Development Anti-Patterns

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  In this standing-room-only session, building upon his 2011 JavaOne Rock Star “Diabolical Developer” session, Martijn Verburg, this time along with Ben Evans, identified and explored common “anti-patterns” – ways of doing things that keep developers from doing their best work. They emphasized the importance of social interaction and team communication, along with identifying certain psychological pitfalls that lead developers astray. Their emphasis was less on technical coding errors and more how to function well and to keep one’s focus on what really matters. They are the authors of the highly regarded The Well-Grounded Java Developer and are both movers and shakers in the London JUG community and on the Java Community Process. The large room was packed as they gave a fast-moving, witty presentation with lots of laughs and personal anecdotes. Below are a few of the anti-patterns they discussed.Anti-Pattern One: Conference-Driven DeliveryThe theme here is the belief that “Real pros hack code and write their slides minutes before their talks.” Their response to this anti-pattern is an expression popular in the military – PPPPPP, which stands for, “Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”“Communication is very important – probably more important than the code you write,” claimed Verburg. “The more you speak in front of large groups of people the easier it gets, but it’s always important to do dry runs, to present to smaller groups. And important to be members of user groups where you can give presentations. It’s a great place to practice speaking skills; to gain new skills; get new contacts, to network.”They encouraged attendees to record themselves and listen to themselves giving a presentation. They advised them to start with a spouse or friends if need be. Learning to communicate to a group, they argued, is essential to being a successful developer. The emphasis here is that software development is a team activity and good, clear, accessible communication is essential to the functioning of software teams. Anti-Pattern Two: Mortgage-Driven Development The main theme here was that, in a period of worldwide recession and economic stagnation, people are concerned about keeping their jobs. So there is a tendency for developers to treat knowledge as power and not share what they know about their systems with their colleagues, so when it comes time to fix a problem in production, they will be the only one who knows how to fix it – and will have made themselves an indispensable cog in a machine so you cannot be fired. So developers avoid documentation at all costs, or if documentation is required, put it on a USB chip and lock it in a lock box. As in the first anti-pattern, the idea here is that communicating well with your colleagues is essential and documentation is a key part of this. Social interactions are essential. Both Verburg and Evans insisted that increasingly, year by year, successful software development is more about communication than the technical aspects of the craft. Developers who understand this are the ones who will have the most success. Anti-Pattern Three: Distracted by Shiny – Always Use the Latest Technology to Stay AheadThe temptation here is to pick out some obscure framework, try a bit of Scala, HTML5, and Clojure, and always use the latest technology and upgrade to the latest point release of everything. Don’t worry if something works poorly because you are ahead of the curve. Verburg and Evans insisted that there need to be sound reasons for everything a developer does. Developers should not bring in something simply because for some reason they just feel like it or because it’s new. They recommended a site run by a developer named Matt Raible with excellent comparison spread sheets regarding Web frameworks and other apps. They praised it as a useful tool to help developers in their decision-making processes. They pointed out that good developers sometimes make bad choices out of boredom, to add shiny things to their CV, out of frustration with existing processes, or just from a lack of understanding. They pointed out that some code may stay in a business system for 15 or 20 years, but not all code is created equal and some may change after 3 or 6 months. Developers need to know where the code they are contributing fits in. What is its likely lifespan? Anti-Pattern Four: Design-Driven Design The anti-pattern: If you want to impress your colleagues and bosses, use design patents left, right, and center – MVC, Session Facades, SOA, etc. Or the UML modeling suite from IBM, back in the day… Generate super fast code. And the more jargon you can talk when in the vicinity of the manager the better.Verburg shared a true story about a time when he was interviewing a guy for a job and asked him what his previous work was. The interviewee said that he essentially took patterns and uses an approved book of Enterprise Architecture Patterns and applied them. Verburg was dumbstruck that someone could have a job in which they took patterns from a book and applied them. He pointed out that the idea that design is a separate activity is simply wrong. He repeated a saying that he uses, “You should pay your junior developers for the lines of code they write and the things they add; you should pay your senior developers for what they take away.”He explained that by encouraging people to take things away, the code base gets simpler and reflects the actual business use cases developers are trying to solve, as opposed to the framework that is being imposed. He told another true story about a project to decommission a very long system. 98% of the code was decommissioned and people got a nice bonus. But the 2% remained on the mainframe so the 98% reduction in code resulted in zero reduction in costs, because the entire mainframe was needed to run the 2% that was left. There is an incentive to get rid of source code and subsystems when they are no longer needed. The session continued with several more anti-patterns that were equally insightful.

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• MonoTouch App Crashes When Returning From MFMailComposeViewController

  - by Richard Khan

  My MonoTouch Version Info: Release ID: 20401003 Git revision: 2f1746af36f421d262dcd2b0542ce86b12158f02 Build date: 2010-12-23 23:13:38+0000 The MFMailComposeViewController is displayed and works correctly as a dialog using the following code: if (MFMailComposeViewController.CanSendMail) { MFMailComposeViewController mail; mail = new MFMailComposeViewController (); mail.SetSubject ("Subject Test"); mail.SetMessageBody ("Body Test", false); mail.Finished += HandleMailFinished; this.navigationController.PresentModalViewController (mail, true); } else { new UIAlertView ("Mail Failed", "Mail Failed", null, "OK", null).Show (); } However, once the user selects Cancel | Delete Draft or Cancel | Save Draft or Send, the App throws a run-time error like the following: Stacktrace: at (wrapper managed-to-native) MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.UIApplicationMain (int,string[],intptr,intptr) <0x00004 at (wrapper managed-to-native) MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.UIApplicationMain (int,string[],intptr,intptr) <0x00004 at MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.Main (string[],string,string) [0x00038] in /Users/plasma/Source/iphone/monotouch/UIKit/UIApplication.cs:26 at MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.Main (string[]) [0x00000] in /Users/plasma/Source/iphone/monotouch/UIKit/UIApplication.cs:31 at MailDialog.Application.Main (string[]) [0x00000] in /Users/rrkhan/Projects/Sandbox/MailDialog/Main.cs:15 at (wrapper runtime-invoke) .runtime_invoke_void_object (object,intptr,intptr,intptr) Native stacktrace: 0 MailDialog 0x000be66f mono_handle_native_sigsegv + 343 1 MailDialog 0x0000e43e mono_sigsegv_signal_handler + 313 2 libSystem.B.dylib 0x903e946b _sigtramp + 43 3 ??? 0xffffffff 0x0 + 4294967295 4 MessageUI 0x01a9f6b7 -[MFMailComposeController _close] + 284 5 UIKit 0x01f682f1 -[UIActionSheet(Private) _buttonClicked:] + 258 6 UIKit 0x01be1a6e -[UIApplication sendAction:to:from:forEvent:] + 119 7 UIKit 0x01c701b5 -[UIControl sendAction:to:forEvent:] + 67 8 UIKit 0x01c72647 -[UIControl(Internal) _sendActionsForEvents:withEvent:] + 527 9 UIKit 0x01c711f4 -[UIControl touchesEnded:withEvent:] + 458 10 UIKit 0x01c060d1 -[UIWindow _sendTouchesForEvent:] + 567 11 UIKit 0x01be737a -[UIApplication sendEvent:] + 447 12 UIKit 0x01bec732 _UIApplicationHandleEvent + 7576 13 GraphicsServices 0x03eb7a36 PurpleEventCallback + 1550 14 CoreFoundation 0x00df9064 CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_SOURCE1_PERFORM_FUNCTION + 52 15 CoreFoundation 0x00d596f7 __CFRunLoopDoSource1 + 215 16 CoreFoundation 0x00d56983 __CFRunLoopRun + 979 17 CoreFoundation 0x00d56240 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 208 18 CoreFoundation 0x00d56161 CFRunLoopRunInMode + 97 19 GraphicsServices 0x03eb6268 GSEventRunModal + 217 20 GraphicsServices 0x03eb632d GSEventRun + 115 21 UIKit 0x01bf042e UIApplicationMain + 1160 22 ??? 0x0a1e4bd9 0x0 + 169757657 23 ??? 0x0a1e4b12 0x0 + 169757458 24 ??? 0x0a1e4515 0x0 + 169755925 25 ??? 0x0a1e4451 0x0 + 169755729 26 ??? 0x0a1e44ac 0x0 + 169755820 27 MailDialog 0x0000e202 mono_jit_runtime_invoke + 1360 28 MailDialog 0x001c92af mono_runtime_invoke + 137 29 MailDialog 0x001caf6b mono_runtime_exec_main + 714 30 MailDialog 0x001ca891 mono_runtime_run_main + 812 31 MailDialog 0x00094fe8 mono_jit_exec + 200 32 MailDialog 0x0027cf05 main + 3494 33 MailDialog 0x00002ca1 _start + 208 34 MailDialog 0x00002bd0 start + 40 Debug info from gdb: warning: Could not find object file "/var/folders/Ny/NyElTwhDGD8kZMqIEeLGXE+++TI/-Tmp-//cc6F1tBs.o" - no debug information available for "template.m". warning: .o file "/Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(zlib-helper.x86.42.o)" more recent than executable timestamp in "/Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog" warning: Could not open OSO file /Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(zlib-helper.x86.42.o) to scan for pubtypes for objfile /Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog warning: .o file "/Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(monotouch-glue.x86.42.o)" more recent than executable timestamp in "/Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog" warning: Could not open OSO file /Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(monotouch-glue.x86.42.o) to scan for pubtypes for objfile /Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog warning: .o file "/Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(gc.x86.42.o)" more recent than executable timestamp in "/Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog" warning: Could not open OSO file /Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(gc.x86.42.o) to scan for pubtypes for objfile /Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog Error connecting stdout and stderr (127.0.0.1:10001) warning: .o file "/Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(monotouch-glue.x86.42.o)" more recent than executable timestamp in "/Users/rrkhan/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.2/Applications/52AF1D24-AADA-48ED-B373-ED08E89E4985/MailDialog.app/MailDialog" warning: Couldn't open object file '/Developer/MonoTouch/SDKs/MonoTouch.iphonesimulator4.2.sdk/usr/lib/libmonotouch.a(monotouch-glue.x86.42.o)' Attaching to process 9992. Reading symbols for shared libraries . done Reading symbols for shared libraries ....................................................................................................................... done 0x9038e459 in read$UNIX2003 () 8 0x903a8a12 in __workq_kernreturn () 7 "WebThread" 0x903830fa in mach_msg_trap () 6 0x903b10a6 in __semwait_signal () 5 0x90383136 in semaphore_wait_trap () 4 0x903830fa in mach_msg_trap () 3 0x903a8a12 in __workq_kernreturn () 2 "com.apple.libdispatch-manager" 0x903a9982 in kevent () * 1 "com.apple.main-thread" 0x9038e459 in read$UNIX2003 () Thread 8 (process 9992): 0 0x903a8a12 in __workq_kernreturn () 1 0x903a8fa8 in _pthread_wqthread () 2 0x903a8bc6 in start_wqthread () Thread 7 (process 9992): 0 0x903830fa in mach_msg_trap () 1 0x90383867 in mach_msg () 2 0x00df94a6 in __CFRunLoopServiceMachPort () 3 0x00d56874 in __CFRunLoopRun () 4 0x00d56240 in CFRunLoopRunSpecific () 5 0x00d56161 in CFRunLoopRunInMode () 6 0x04f7c423 in RunWebThread () 7 0x903b085d in _pthread_start () 8 0x903b06e2 in thread_start () Thread 6 (process 9992): 0 0x903b10a6 in __semwait_signal () 1 0x903dcee5 in nanosleep$UNIX2003 () 2 0x903dce23 in usleep$UNIX2003 () 3 0x0027714c in monotouch_pump_gc () 4 0x903b085d in _pthread_start () 5 0x903b06e2 in thread_start () Thread 5 (process 9992): 0 0x90383136 in semaphore_wait_trap () 1 0x0015ae1d in finalizer_thread (unused=0x0) at ../../../../mono/metadata/gc.c:1026 2 0x002034a3 in start_wrapper (data=0x7b16ba0) at ../../../../mono/metadata/threads.c:661 3 0x002448e2 in thread_start_routine (args=0x8037e34) at ../../../../mono/io-layer/wthreads.c:286 4 0x00274357 in GC_start_routine (arg=0x6ff7f60) at ../../../libgc/pthread_support.c:1390 5 0x903b085d in _pthread_start () 6 0x903b06e2 in thread_start () Thread 4 (process 9992): 0 0x903830fa in mach_msg_trap () 1 0x90383867 in mach_msg () 2 0x0011cc46 in mach_exception_thread (arg=0x0) at ../../../../mono/mini/mini-darwin.c:138 3 0x903b085d in _pthread_start () 4 0x903b06e2 in thread_start () Thread 3 (process 9992): 0 0x903a8a12 in __workq_kernreturn () 1 0x903a8fa8 in _pthread_wqthread () 2 0x903a8bc6 in start_wqthread () Thread 2 (process 9992): 0 0x903a9982 in kevent () 1 0x903aa09c in _dispatch_mgr_invoke () 2 0x903a9559 in _dispatch_queue_invoke () 3 0x903a92fe in _dispatch_worker_thread2 () 4 0x903a8d81 in _pthread_wqthread () 5 0x903a8bc6 in start_wqthread () Thread 1 (process 9992): 0 0x9038e459 in read$UNIX2003 () 1 0x000be81f in mono_handle_native_sigsegv (signal=11, ctx=0xbfffd238) at ../../../../mono/mini/mini-exceptions.c:1826 2 0x0000e43e in mono_sigsegv_signal_handler (_dummy=10, info=0xbfffd1f8, context=0xbfffd238) at ../../../../mono/mini/mini.c:4846 3 4 0x028d6a63 in objc_msgSend () 5 0x01ad469f in func.24012 () 6 0x01a9f6b7 in -[MFMailComposeController _close] () 7 0x01f682f1 in -[UIActionSheet(Private) _buttonClicked:] () 8 0x01be1a6e in -[UIApplication sendAction:to:from:forEvent:] () 9 0x01c701b5 in -[UIControl sendAction:to:forEvent:] () 10 0x01c72647 in -[UIControl(Internal) _sendActionsForEvents:withEvent:] () 11 0x01c711f4 in -[UIControl touchesEnded:withEvent:] () 12 0x01c060d1 in -[UIWindow _sendTouchesForEvent:] () 13 0x01be737a in -[UIApplication sendEvent:] () 14 0x01bec732 in _UIApplicationHandleEvent () 15 0x03eb7a36 in PurpleEventCallback () 16 0x00df9064 in CFRUNLOOP_IS_CALLING_OUT_TO_A_SOURCE1_PERFORM_FUNCTION () 17 0x00d596f7 in __CFRunLoopDoSource1 () 18 0x00d56983 in __CFRunLoopRun () 19 0x00d56240 in CFRunLoopRunSpecific () 20 0x00d56161 in CFRunLoopRunInMode () 21 0x03eb6268 in GSEventRunModal () 22 0x03eb632d in GSEventRun () 23 0x01bf042e in UIApplicationMain () 24 0x0a1e4bd9 in ?? () 25 0x0a1e4b12 in ?? () 26 0x0a1e4515 in ?? () 27 0x0a1e4451 in ?? () 28 0x0a1e44ac in ?? () 29 0x0000e202 in mono_jit_runtime_invoke (method=0xa806e6c, obj=0x0, params=0xbfffedbc, exc=0x0) at ../../../../mono/mini/mini.c:4733 30 0x001c92af in mono_runtime_invoke (method=0xa806e6c, obj=0x0, params=0xbfffedbc, exc=0x0) at ../../../../mono/metadata/object.c:2615 31 0x001caf6b in mono_runtime_exec_main (method=0xa806e6c, args=0xa6a34e0, exc=0x0) at ../../../../mono/metadata/object.c:3581 32 0x001ca891 in mono_runtime_run_main (method=0xa806e6c, argc=0, argv=0xbfffeef4, exc=0x0) at ../../../../mono/metadata/object.c:3355 33 0x00094fe8 in mono_jit_exec (domain=0x6f8fe58, assembly=0xa200730, argc=1, argv=0xbfffeef0) at ../../../../mono/mini/driver.c:1094 34 0x0027cf05 in main () ================================================================= Got a SIGSEGV while executing native code. This usually indicates a fatal error in the mono runtime or one of the native libraries used by your application. Unhandled Exception: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at (wrapper managed-to-native) MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication:UIApplicationMain (int,string[],intptr,intptr) at MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.Main (System.String[] args, System.String principalClassName, System.String delegateClassName) [0x00038] in /Users/plasma/Source/iphone/monotouch/UIKit/UIApplication.cs:26 at MonoTouch.UIKit.UIApplication.Main (System.String[] args) [0x00000] in /Users/plasma/Source/iphone/monotouch/UIKit/UIApplication.cs:31 at MailDialog.Application.Main (System.String[] args) [0x00000] in /Users/rrkhan/Projects/Sandbox/MailDialog/Main.cs:15 I have a very simple sample project illustrating the problem. I can sent you if required.

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Make my git user and apache user have read/write/delete access

  - by Mr A

  I am having permission problems on my server. I use user developer to pull my git repository on the server. Then apache uses its own apache user to do write and execute code. I always have the problems when the app wants to write something in the directory (i.e: log files, and cache ...) if I execute a cron job and it uses my developer rights and wants to add something to the folders that is written by apache. My question is how to have my developer have the same write/delete access as my apache and avoid permission conflicts with each other? I am not fluent on linux command so, it would help if you could provide links or simply examples of doing so. thanks.

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• Convert png sequence to x264 with ffmpeg

  - by Thucydides411

  I am trying to convert a series of pngs into an mp4 video. I am using ffmpeg, and want to encode the video with the x264 codec. Using the command ffmpeg -y -r 30 -b 1800k -i _tmp%04d.png -vcodec libx264 out.mp4 I get the following warning message Incompatible pixel format 'bgra' for codec 'libx264', auto-selecting format 'yuv420p' My understanding is that there is an alpha channel in the pngs, which the x264 encoder cannot handle. Is there a way to get around this problem? Is there, for example, a way to get the encoder to ignore the alpha channel (my pngs don't actually have any transparent elements)? I'm aware that I could batch convert the pngs beforehand to strip the alpha channel, but the sequence of images is produced by another program, and having to preprocess the images each time I make a video would be less than optimal. Edit: After stripping the alpha channel from each frame using the command convert in.png -background white -flatten +matte out.png ffmpeg gives the warning message Incompatible pixel format 'pal8' for codec 'libx264', auto-selecting format 'yuv420p' so still no dice.

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• ffmpeg open webcam using YUYV but i want MJPEG

  - by Pavel

  I need ffmpeg to open webcam (logitech c910) in MJPEG mode, because the webcam can give ~24 using MJPEG "protocol" and only ~10 fps using the YUYV. Can i choose between them using ffmpeg command line? xx@(none) ~ $ v4l2-ctl --list-formats ioctl: VIDIOC_ENUM_FMT Index : 0 Type : Video Capture Pixel Format: 'YUYV' Name : YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV) Index : 1 Type : Video Capture Pixel Format: 'MJPG' (compressed) Name : MJPEG My current command line: ffmpeg -y -f alsa -i hw:3,0 -f video4linux2 -r 20 -s 1280x720 -i /dev/video0 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 /tmp/web.avi ffmpeg produces corrupted h264 stream when i record from webcam, but normal h264 strem when i record from x11grab. Another codecs (mjpeg, mpeg4) works well with webcam... But this is another story.

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• the right way to do deployment with capistrano

  - by com

  I look for good practices for deploying with capistrano. I would like to start out with a short description how I used to do deployment. capistrano is installed locally on a developer's computer. I deploy thought gateway with capistrano option :gateway. Firstly, I thought that with :gateway option I need to have ssh connection only to gateway host, but it turns out that I need ssh connection (public key) to all hosts where I want to deploy to. I would like to find a convenient and secure way to deploy application. For example, in case when new developer starts working, is much more convinient to put his *public_key* only on gateway server and not on all applications servers. On the other hand I don't want him to have any connection to servers in particular ssh to gateway, just because he is developer, he needs to do only deployments. If you are aware of good practices for deploying with capistrano, please, let us know.

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• Media Information for Constant and Variable bit rate of Video files

  - by cpx

  What is this Maximum bit rate for a .mp4 format file whose bit rate mode is Constant? Media information displayed for MP4 (Using MediaInfo Tool) ID : 1 Format : AVC Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec Format profile : [email protected] Format settings, CABAC : No Format settings, ReFrames : 1 frame Codec ID : avc1 Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 1 500 Kbps Maximum bit rate : 3 961 Kbps Display aspect ratio : 4:3 Frame rate mode : Constant Frame rate : 29.970 fps Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.163 In this case where the bit rate mode is set to Variable, is the Bit rate field where the value is displayed as 309 is its average bit rate? Media information displayed for M4V (Using MediaInfo Tool) ID : 1 Format : AVC Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec Format profile : [email protected] Format settings, CABAC : No Format settings, ReFrames : 1 frame Codec ID : avc1 Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding Bit rate mode : Variable Bit rate : 309 Kbps Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate mode : Variable Frame rate : 23.976 fps Minimum frame rate : 23.810 fps Maximum frame rate : 24.390 fps Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.229 Writing library : x264 core 120

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