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  • Complimentary Refills

    - by onefloridacoder
    My son and I were out to dinner and right after we sat down, he combs the menu to locate the soda  selection.  Then he looks up at me and says “Looks like we get free refills here, sweet!”  While we were sitting there I was thinking where that statement came from and I remember one time where he was helping to figure out the tip and saw that were we charged for six sodas, but there were only four of us at the table.  I would say that’s when this started for eateries he’s not familiar with. I was talking a friend of mine this week and this thought came to me, why can’t we manage expectations like my son – find out before the order is placed.  Find out what’s expected first then use the other bits of guidance to move forward.  But how many times have we all paid way to much for something we thought was free on a project – me, plenty.  This quote is going up in my work space, next to one I picked up Corey Haines’ Software Craftsmanship talk at Open Agile Romania - “Work != Practice”.  So if anyone else has gotten burnt, maybe check the menu, it will be in the area where the customer will pick two from the list of “Price, Quality, or Speed”.  Refills will be listed just beneath that.

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  • Farmyard

    - by Richard Jones
    Moooooooo     For a while now we’ve been using Apple’s enterprise device app distribution mechanism.   This allows you to have a user, click on a URL on their iOS device and it pulls down a new version of an enterprise app. of of our servers. Its really nice,  have a look at - http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/FA_Wireless_Enterprise_App_Distribution/Introduction/Introduction.html   I’ve embedded this, into a check on application launch, that a web-service is called to detect a newer version of the software is available.  It then calls the URL to the App and a new version is deployed. You can alert users that a new App update is available by sending them a push notification.  See screenshot at the top. We send our push notifications out to users,  using a simple C# service.    The fun part is this.   You can instruct the push notification to play a sound (embedded in the app already). So our push notification’s play a random farmyard noise, i.e from a selection of - cow.wav dogbrk.wav duck.wav goose.wav horse.wav lamb.wav monkey.wav – left field I know rooster.wav Imagine my amusement being able to periodically send out an update and watch our office (of about 60 people) turn into farm for a few seconds. I’ve messed up a few times, with people being interrupted on customer conference calls,  but people seem good humoured about it. (so far) Simple(ish) pleasures…

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  • IE9 and the Mystery of the Broken Video Tag

    - by David Wesst
    I was very excited when Microsoft released the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. As far as I was concerned, this was another nail in the coffin for IE6 and step in the right direction for us .NET web developers as our base camp was finally starting to support the latest and greatest future-web standards. Unfortunately, my celebration was short lived as I soon hit a snag while loading up an HTML5 site I was building in Visual Studio 2010. The Mystery After updating Internet Explorer, I ran my HTML5 site that had the oh-so-lovely HTML5 video tag showing a video. Even though this worked in IE9 Beta, it appeared that IE9 RC could not load the same file. I figured that it was the video codec. Maybe IE9 RC no longer supported the video codec I used to encode my video. Here's the code I used: <video width="854" height="480" id="myOtherVideo" autoplay="" controls=""> <source src="/DemoSite1/Media/big_buck_bunny.mp4"/> <div> <p>Your browser does not support HTML5 Video.</p> </div> </video> As you can see from the code, I had the "fail-safe" code inside the video tag. The idea there being that if the video tag, or the video files themselves, are not supported by the browser my video should fail gracefully. What was even more strange was the fact that it worked in all the other HTML5 browsers that supported video. The Investigation Whoa! DJ stop the music. How can any of that make sense? Would the IE team really take such huge strides forward only to forget to include a feature that was already in the beta? I don't think so. I did plenty of searching on the web and asking around on the web, but could not seem to find anyone else having the same problem. Eventually I came across this post talking about declaring the MIME type in the .htaccess file. That got me thinking: does my web server support the video MIME type? I was using VS2010, so how do I know what kind of MIME types are supported by default? Still, my page hosted in Cassini (the web development server in VS2010) works on the other browsers. Why wouldn't it work with IE9 RC? To answer that, it was time to open up the upgraded toolbox known as the Developer's Tools in IE9 and use the new Network Tab. The Conclusion If you take a closer look at the results displayed from the Network tab, you can see that IE9 RC has interpreted the video file as text/html rather than video/mp4. To make this work, I decided to use IIS to debug my HTML5 web application by setting the web project's properties. Then, I added the MIME types that I want to support (i.e. video/mp4, video/ogg, video/webm). Et voila! The Mystery of the Broken Video Tag is solved. After Thoughts After solving the mystery, I still had the question about why my site worked in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox 3.6. After asking around, the best answer that I received was from my colleague Tyler Doerksen. He said that IE9 likely depends on the server telling it what kind of file it is downloading rather than trying to read the metadata about the data it is trying to download before doing anything. I have no facts to back this up, but it makes sense to me. In a browser war where milliseconds can make your browser fall back a few places in the race for supremacy, maybe the IE team opted to depend on the server knowing what kind of content it is serving up. Makes sense to me. In any case, that is just an educated guess. If you have any comments, feel free to post on them below. This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

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  • SilverlightShow for 06-12 Dec 2010

    - by Dave Campbell
    In an effort to get some synergy in the Silverlight community, the SilverlightShow folks and I have decided to share some information. As always, I'm running a bit behind, so I get to post first with the material they provided to me :) Check out the five most popular news at SilverlightShow for last week (06 - 12 Dec 2010). The news that hit the top is the announcement for the upcoming SilverlightShow webinar with Gill Cleeren [which I posted about a couple weeks ago] (check other webinars Gill delivered for SilverlightShow) and the free Telerik license given away to attendees. Michael Crump's digest of Silverlight 5 news announced at Firestarter was the next most attention-grabbing news. Here is SilverlightShow's weekly top 5: Join our next webinar and win a license for Telerik RadControls for Silverlight Silverlight 5 - What's New (Including Screenshots & Code Snippets) Glossy TextBlock Custom Control For Windows Phone WP7 development vs iOS, Android and mobile Web Silverlight Simple Drag And Drop / Or Browse View Model / MVVM File Upload Control Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow... they've got a lot of good things happening over there. Stay in the 'Light

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  • Free eBooks from Microsoft&ndash;We like free!

    - by Jim Duffy
    In a recent blog post I mentioned the availability of the Programming Windows Phone 7 ebook by Charles Petzold. Well I have good news, there are a number of additional FREE ebooks available from Microsoft to help you continue honing your tech skills. Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (Second Edition) First Look Microsoft Office 2010 Windows 7 troubleshooting tips Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance I, for one, appreciate Microsoft making these resources available for free. I think it demonstrates their interest making sure we as developers and I.T. professionals have the resources we need to effectively solve the business problems we encounter. Have a day.

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  • Cool projects at Codeplex

    - by Tiago Salgado
    There’s a significant number of useful projects at Codeplex who were meeting with some of our needs. As such, here are two that already have been useful to me: Droid Explorer As the name implies, allows us to explore an Android device and has features such as: Copy local files to device Reboot device Reboot device in to recovery mode Open files for viewing / execution locally with the default file type executable Package Manager (Install & Uninstall) Take a Screen Shot (landscape or portrait) etc Virtual Router – Wifi Hot Spot (Windows 7 / 2008 R2) Allows you to create an Access Point, sharing your local Internet connection, with other wireless devices. Its no doubt an application to be always installed, by the simple way to create a resource like this one.

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  • XNA RenderTarget2D Sample

    - by Michael B. McLaughlin
    I remember being scared of render targets when I first started with XNA. They seemed like weird magic and I didn’t understand them at all. There’s nothing to be frightened of, though, and they are pretty easy to learn how to use. The first thing you need to know is that when you’re drawing in XNA, you aren’t actually drawing to the screen. Instead you’re drawing to this thing called the “back buffer”. Internally, XNA maintains two sections of graphics memory. Each one is exactly the same size as the other and has all the same properties (such as surface format, whether there’s a depth buffer and/or a stencil buffer, and so on). XNA flips between these two sections of memory every update-draw cycle. So while you are drawing to one, it’s busy drawing the other one on the screen. Then the current update-draw cycle ends, it flips, and the section you were just drawing to gets drawn to the screen while the one that was being drawn to the screen before is now the one you’ll be drawing on. This is what’s meant by “double buffering”. If you drew directly to the screen, the player would see all of those draws taking place as they happened and that would look odd and not very good at all. Those two sections of graphics memory are render targets. All a render target is, is a section of graphics memory to which things can be drawn. In addition to the two that XNA maintains automatically, you can also create and set your own using RenderTarget2D and GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget. Using render targets lets you do all sorts of neat post-processing effects (like bloom) to make your game look cooler. It also just lets you do things like motion blur and lets you create mirrors in 3D games. There are quite a lot of things that render targets let you do. To go along with this post, I wrote up a simple sample for how to create and use a RenderTarget2D. It’s available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License and is available for download on my website here: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/developers/utils/RenderTarget2DSample.zip . Other than the ‘using’ statements, every line is commented in detail so that it should (hopefully) be easy to follow along with and understand. If you have any questions, leave a comment here or drop me a line on Twitter. One last note. While creating the sample I came across an interesting quirk. If you start by creating a Windows Game, and then make a copy for Windows Phone 7, the drop-down that lets you choose between drawing to a WP7 device and the WP7 emulator stays grayed-out. To resolve this, you need to right click on the Windows Phone 7 version in the Solution Explorer, and choose “Set as StartUp Project”. The bar will then become active, letting you change the target you which to deploy to. If you want another version to be the one that starts up when you press F5 to start debugging, just go and right-click on that version and choose “Set as StartUp Project” for it once you’ve set the WP7 target (device or emulator) that you want.

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  • More Free Apps Bound for the Marketplace

    - by Scott Kuhl
    Microsoft has announced they are raising the limit of free applications a developer can submit from 5 to 100.  But what does that really mean? First, lets look at the reason for the limitation.  The iTunes Store and the Android Market both have a lot more applications available than the Windows Phone Marketplace.  But that says nothing about the quality of those applications.  I attended a couple of pre-launch events and Microsoft representatives were clearly told to send a message. We don’t want a bunch of junky applications that do nothing but spam the marketplace.  That was the reason for the 5 free application limit. Okay, so now what has the result been?  Well, there are still fart apps, but there is no sign of a developer flooding the marking with 1500 wallpaper applications or 1000 of the same application all pointed at different RSS feeds.   On the other hand there are developers who want to release real free apps but are constrained by the 5 app limit. So why did Microsoft change it’s mind?  Is it to get the count of applications up, or is to make developers happy?  Windows Phone Marketplace is growing fast but it’s a long way behind the other guys.   I don’t think Microsoft wants to have 100,000 apps show up in the next 3 months if they are loaded with copy cat apps.  Those numbers will get picked apart quickly and the press will start complaining about  the same problems the Android Market has.  I do think the bump was at developer request.  Microsoft is usually good about listening to developer feedback, but has been pretty slow about it at times.  And from a financial perspective, there will me more apps that Microsoft has to review that they will see no profit on.  At least not until they bake in a advertising model connected to Bing. Ultimately, what does this mean for the future? Well, there are developers out there looking to release more than 5 simple free apps, so I think we will see more hobby apps.  And there are developers out there trying to make money from advertising instead of sales, so I think we will see more of those also.  But the category that I think will grow the fastest is free versions of paid applications that are the same as the trial version of the application.  While technically that makes no sense, its purely a marketing move.  Free apps get downloaded a lot more than paid apps, even with a trial mode.  It always surprises me how little consumers are willing to spend on mobile apps.  How many reviews of applications have you seen that says something like “a bit pricey at $1.99”.  Really?  Have you looked at how much you spend on your phone and plan?  I always thought the trial mode baked into Windows Marketplace was a good idea.  So I’m not sure how the more open free market will play out. In the long run though, I won’t be surprised to see a Bing ad mobile ad model show up so Microsoft can capitalize on the more open and free Windows Marketplace. Bonus: The Oatmeal on How I Feel About Buying Apps

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  • What I saw at TechEd North America 2014

    - by Brian Schroer
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brians/archive/2014/05/19/teched-north-america-2014.aspxI was thrilled to be able to attend TechEd North America 2014 in Houston last week. I got to go to Orlando in 2008, and since then I’ve had to settle for watching the sessions online (which ain’t bad – They’re all available on Channel 9 for streaming or downloading. Here are links to the Developer Track sessions and to the sessions from all tracks.) The sessions I attended (with my favorites bolded) were: Shiny new stuff The Microsoft Application Platform for Developers: Create Applications That Span Devices and Services INTRODUCING: The Future of .NET on the Server DEEP DIVE: The Future of .NET on the Server ASP.NET: Building Web Application Using ASP.NET and Visual Studio The Next Generation of .NET for Building Applications The Future of Visual Basic and C# Stuff you can use now Building Rich Apps with AngularJS on ASP.NET Get the Most Out of Your Code Maps SignalR: Building Real-Time Applications with ASP.NET SignalR Performance Optimize Your ASP.NET Web App Modern Web and Visual Studio Visual Studio Power User: Tips and Tricks Debugging Tips and Tricks in Visual Studio 2013 In a world where the whole company uses TFS… Using Functional, Exploratory and Acceptance Testing to Release with Confidence A Practical View of Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 From Vanity to Value, Metrics That Matter: Improving Lean and Agile, Kanban, and Scrum Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That As usual, there were some time slots with nothing of interest and others with 5 things I wanted to see at the same time. Here are the sessions I’m still planning to watch… Getting Started with TypeScript Building a Large Scale JavaScript Application in TypeScript Modern Application Lifecycle Management Why a Hacker Can Own Your Web Servers in a Day! Async Best Practices for C# and Visual Basic Building Multi-Device Apps with the New Visual Studio Tooling for Apache Cordova Applying S.O.L.I.D. Principles in .NET/C# Native Mobile Application Development for iOS, Android, and Windows in C# and Visual Studio Using Xamarin Latest Innovations in Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications Zero to Hero: Untested to Tested with Microsoft Fakes Using Visual Studio Cool and Elegant ASP.NET Web Forms with HTML 5 for the Modern Web The Present and Future of .NET in a World of Devices and Services

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  • Announcing the Winnipeg Visual Studio.NET 2010 Launch Event!

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    That’s right Winnipeg, we’re having our own Visual Studio.NET 2010 launch event on May 11th brought to you by your local Winnipeg .NET User Group, Anvil Digital, Imaginet, Microsoft, and Protegra! We’re excited to bring a day of sessions highlighting developer productivity, application lifecycle management, and web development using these new technologies! We’re also thrilled to have this event at the IMAX Theatre at Portage Place! The day looks like this: The event is FREE and we’re providing a continental breakfast for attendees. To register for the event, visit our registration site here. If you have any questions, please contact me through comments on this post or via email through my blog. D’Arcy

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  • Oracle Sequences

    - by jkrebsbach
    Reminder to myself - SQL Server has nice index columns directly tied to their tables. Oracle has sequences that are islands to themselves. select seq_name.currval from dual; select seq_name.nextval from dual; currval - return current number at top of sequence nextval - increment sequence by 1, return new number   therefore - to create functionality in oracle similar to an index column - OPTION A) - Create insert trigger: CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER dept_bir BEFORE INSERT ON departments FOR EACH ROW WHEN (new.id IS NULL) BEGIN SELECT dept_seq.NEXTVAL INTO :new.id FROM dual; END; This will handle creating a unique identity, but will not necessarily inform process flow of identity without additional logic. OPTION B) - Select indentity into temp variable, insert whole item into tab **** When attemptint to query currval, the below error was being thrown - SELECT seq_name.currval from dual; ERROR : TABLE OR VIEW DOES NOT EXIST *** Although Oracle sys tables may have access to the sequences, that isn't to say the Oracle user may have access to those sequences - verify permissions when the system can't see object that are being reported in the object explorer.

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  • Register now for the UK Windows Azure Self-paced Interactive Learning Course starting May 10th

    - by Eric Nelson
    [Suggested twitter tag #selfpacedazure] We (myself and David Gristwood) have been working in the UK to create a fantastic opportunity to get yourself up to speed on the Windows Azure Platform over a 6 week period starting May 10th – without ever needing to leave the comfort of your home/office.  The course is derived from the internal training Microsoft gives on Azure which is both fun and challenging in equal parts – and we felt was just too good to keep to ourselves! We will be releasing more details nearer the date but hopefully the following is enough to convince you to register and … recommend it to a colleague or three :-) What we have produced is the “Microsoft Azure Self-paced Learning Course”. This is a free, interactive, self-paced, technical training course covering the Windows Azure platform – Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Azure AppFabric. The course takes place over a six week period finishing on June 18th. During the course you will work from your own home or workplace, and get involved via interactive Live Meetings session, watch on-line videos, work through hands-on labs and research and complete weekly coursework assignments. The mentors and other attendees on the course will help you in your research and learning, and there are weekly Live Meetings where you can raise questions and interact with them. This is a technical course, aimed at programmers, system designers, and architects who want a solid understanding of the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, hence a prerequisite for this course is at least six months programming in the .NET framework and Visual Studio. Check out the full details of the event or go straight to registration.   The course outline is: Week 1 - Windows Azure Platform Week 2 - Windows Azure Storage Week 3 - Windows Azure Deep Dive and Codename "Dallas" Week 4 - SQL Azure Week 5 - Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Access Control Week 6 - Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus If you have any questions about the course and its suitability, please email [email protected].

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  • A story of Murphy&ndash;my technical issues at TechDays Switzerland #chtd

    - by Laurent Bugnion
    I had two sessions at the recent Swiss TechDays. While the first one (Advanced Development for Windows Phone 8) went extremely well (I think), I had a very annoying technical issue in the beginning of my second session. First let me add that I talked to Microsoft about that and I hope they will change a few things in the room assignment for next year. My two sessions were one right after the other, with only 15 minutes break to change room. I don’t mind having two sessions so close from each other, but I would really like them to be in the same room in order to avoid having to move my laptops (plural, that will become important later) and redoing the tech check. That being said, I am guilty of not checking where my talks would be before the day before the conference, and when I did notice, it was too late to change it. After my first session, I quickly moved to the other room and setup my main laptop, a Dell Precision. We tested the video output (VGA) and didn’t notice anything special. The projectors are using a fairly high resolution (kudos to the Basel conference center for not having old school 1024x768 projectors anymore, that makes Blend really hard to demo ;) but since everything went great during the first talk, I was not worried. In fact I even had some time to chat with some early attendees about my Microsoft Surface and the Samsung Slate 7, which I had carried with me in addition to the Precision. I just thought it would be nice to show the hardware that Windows 8 can run on, without thinking any further. When the session started, I immediately noticed that the main screen was not showing anything. I thought I had just forgotten to switch to “duplicate” for the video output, and did that with a quick Win-P. However it didn’t “hold”. After 2 seconds, it reverted back to a black display for my attendees. Then I started to really worry. We tried everything, switching from VGA to HDMI, changing the resolution, setting the projector as primary display, but nothing did the trick. The projector was just refusing to show my screen. Now, to show you how despaired I started to be, I even considered using the “extend” setting (which worked just fine), and to use one of the feedback monitors on the floor but really it was super cumbersome. Eventually, my last resort arrived: I started my Samsung Slate 7, which by chance has Visual Studio 12 and Blend 5 installed, plugged the HDMI projector in the dock (yes, I had the dock with me, which I usually don’t!), connected it to internet (had to enter a long password for that), loaded the source code from my main machine using a USB stick and…. finally started to give my presentation. All in all I think we lost about 10 minutes. Amongst the most horrible minutes of my whole life, truly (yes I am blessed, I didn’t have that many horrible minutes in my life ;) I really want to apologize to my attendees. We joked a bit during the attempts to resolve the issue, the reactions I had after the session were all very nice and sympathetic. Only a handful of people left my session while I was having the issues, and I really don’t blame them (who knew how long the problem would last!!). But still, I probably talked at more than 60 sessions over the years, and this was by far my most painful moment. What did I learn? So what did I learn from this? Well from now on I will always have my slate ready with the latest source code, internet connection and every tool I might need during the presentation. This way, if I detect even a hint that the Precision might not work, I will just switch to the Slate. The experience of presenting on the slate is actually not bad at all, it is just a bit slow for my taste, but it does work. By the way, I will be posting the code and slides for my sessions very soon, I just need to “clean it and zip it”. Stay tuned, and thanks again for your patience in that horrible circumstance. Cheers Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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  • Beginners Guide to Client Application Services

    - by mbcrump
    What is it? Client application services make it easy for you to create Windows-based applications that use the ASP.NET AJAX login, roles, and profile application services included in the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions. These services enable multiple Web and Windows-based applications to share user information and user-management functionality from a single server.   What can you do with it? Authenticate a user. You can use the authentication service to verify a user's identity. Determine the role or roles of an authenticated user. You can use the roles service to change the user interface of your application depending on the user's role. For example, you can provide additional features for users who are in an administrator role. Store and access per-user application settings located on the server. You can use the Web settings service (also known as the profile service) to share settings across multiple applications and locations. Client application services take advantage of the Web services extensibility model through client service providers that you can specify in your application configuration files. These service providers include offline functionality that uses a local cache for authentication, roles, and settings data when a network connection is unavailable. Give me an example of where I would use this! Sharing login and user role information between a Windows Form application and a ASP.NET application. How do I configure it? Click Here

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  • links worth clicking&hellip;

    - by Chris Williams
    Scanning my Twitter feed almost always proves to be fruitful when looking for cool/interesting links to share. Here are a few of the highlights: I read this blog post from Justin Angel today, pretty interesting stuff: Windows Phone 7 – Unlocked ROMs  Looks like there’s a lot of good stuff floating just under the surface in the latest build of the WP7 Emulator. (Courtesy of @JustinAngel) Next up is this video titled Game Design Tutorials: From Seconds to Hours of Gameplay. If you’re into Indie Game Development, or just like watching videos… this one is pretty short at 5 minutes, but contains some good information about increasing the duration of fun gameplay in your game. (Courtesy of @Kei_tchan) If you are a Firefly (or Castle, or Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog) fan, check out this Facebook campaign to get Nathan Fillion to host SNL: http://tinyurl.com/2dh5m67  It worked for Betty White, so why not, right? (Courtesy of @DGalloway42)

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  • Game-a-Week One Completed

    - by Matt Christian
    Last night I finished my Game-a-Week One and felt and extreme sense of accomplishment with what I finished in a single week. I removed all traces of the JigLibX code since it wasn't working properly due to my implementation and got my collision working thanks to some BoundingSpheres and Riemer's tutorials.  However, since the characters are Corndogs a rectangle bounding box would have made more sense although the bullets are only able to move forward currently. While developing it in a week was a challenge, developing it in a week while maintaining proper coding standards and clean, reusable code was damn near impossible.  It's possible my next step will be to either refactor it or move onto Game-a-Week Two. I will post a link to the game ZIP in the future.

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  • Customizing JBar for Notifications

    - by Ryan Ohs
    Lately I've been using JBar, a very neat jQuery plugin for displaying notifications in my web applications. Unfortunately the original version of JBar only supports binding to the click event of a DOM item. In order to get around this limitation I have modified the source code and posted an updated version on my GitHub account here. The modified version allows you to display a JBar notification by calling a method. I typically use it to display succes or failure messages when doing Ajax calls. I have also included some additional CSS and JS so that you can diplay different styles of notifications. showNotification(message) shows a green "success" message. showWarning(message) shows an orange "warning" message. showMessage(message, className) allows you to specify a custom class to apply to the notification for additional styling purposes. A web page with samples is included.   Get the code here.

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  • ApiChange Corporate Edition

    - by Alois Kraus
    In my inital announcement I could only cover a small subset what ApiChange can do for you. Lets look at how ApiChange can help you to fix bugs due to wrong usage of an Api within a fraction of time than it would take normally. It happens that software is tested and some bugs show up. One bug could be …. : We get way too man log messages during our test run. Now you have the task to find the most frequent messages and eliminate the Log calls from the source code. But what about the myriads other log calls? How can we check that the distribution of log calls is nearly equal across all developers? And if not how can we contact the developer to check his code? ApiChange can help you too connect these loose ends. It combines several information silos into one cohesive view. The picture below shows how it is able to fill the gaps. The public version does currently “only” parse the binaries and pdbs to give you for a –whousesmethod query the following colums: If it happens that you have Rational ClearCase (a source control system) in your development shop and an Active Directory in place then ApiChange will try to determine from the source file which was determined from the pdb the last check in user which should be present in your Active Directory. From there it is only a small hop to an LDAP query to your AD domain or the GC (Global Catalog) to get from the user name his Full name Email Phone number Department …. ApiChange will append this additional data all of your query results which contain source files if you add the –fileinfo option. As I said this is currently not enabled by default since the AD domain needs to be configured which are currently only some hard coded values in the SiteConstants.cs source file of ApiChange.Api.dll. Once you got this data you can generate metrics based on source file, developer, assembly, … and add additional data by drag and drop directly into the pivot tables inside Excel. This allows you to e.g. to generate a report which lists the source files with most log calls in descending order along with the developer name and email in the pivot table. Armed with this knowledge you can take meaningful measures e.g. to ask the developer if the huge number of log calls in this source file can be optimized. I am aware that this is a very specific scenario but it is a huge time saver when you are able to fill the missing gaps of information. ApiChange does this in an extensible way. namespace ApiChange.ExternalData {     public interface IFileInformationProvider     {         UserInfo GetInformationFromFile(string fileName);     } } It defines an interface where you can implement your custom information provider to close the gap between source control system and the real person I have to send an email to ask if his code needs a closer inspection.

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  • Memory Glutton

    - by AreYouSerious
    I have to admit that I can't get enough storage. I have hard drives just sitting around in case I need to move somthing, or I'm going to a friends and either they want something I have or I want something they might have. What I'm going to talk about today is cost effective memory for devices. I don't know how this particualr device will work in a camera, as That's not what I use in my camera, in fact I don't have a camera that doesn't either use SD, or the old compact flash card, that's not so compact anymore. There's this thing that uses two micro sd cards to double the capacity of your memory, and it costs about 4 bucks, without the Micro SD card. I have had one for about a year and was going to throw it away because I couldn't get it to work with my computer, or with my Sony Reader. However I found out by one last ditch effort that this thing works beautifully with my Sony PSP. there is no software to speak of associated with this thing, you simply put in two SD cards of the same size... (if you put in two different sizes it will still work, you'll only double the smallest cards size though) and format through the psp. Viola you know have a 29 GB memory card for your PSP. why is this important ? well for starters you can carry more music and more videos. Second if you have gone the way of the hacker.... you can store more games on your card... There are just a few things you have to note.... I speak from experience... you have to use the usb connection to the PSP to do any file moving, as I said previously said card doesn't play well with my computers or card readers... I not saying it won't work at all, just hasn't work with anything I own. Second. If for some reason you try to Hack/crack your PSP don't attempt to delete a game from the psp, use the usb file browser to remove games. if you delete from the PSP you are likely to have to move all your files off, reformat and start again... just a couple things I have noticed... if I had done something like that.   anyway, Here's a link.... http://www.photofast-adapter.com/  and if you want to buy one, get it off ebay, I've seen them as low as $1.99

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  • WIF-less claim extraction from ACS: SWT

    - by Elton Stoneman
    WIF with SAML is solid and flexible, but unless you need the power, it can be overkill for simple claim assertion, and in the REST world WIF doesn’t have support for the latest token formats.  Simple Web Token (SWT) may not be around forever, but while it's here it's a nice easy format which you can manipulate in .NET without having to go down the WIF route. Assuming you have set up a Relying Party in ACS, specifying SWT as the token format: When ACS redirects to your login page, it will POST the SWT in the first form variable. It comes through in the BinarySecurityToken element of a RequestSecurityTokenResponse XML payload , the SWT type is specified with a TokenType of http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2009/11/swt-token-profile-1.0 : <t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse xmlns:t="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust">   <t:Lifetime>     <wsu:Created xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T07:31:18.655Z</wsu:Created>     <wsu:Expires xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd">2012-08-31T09:11:18.655Z</wsu:Expires>   </t:Lifetime>   <wsp:AppliesTo xmlns:wsp="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/09/policy">     <EndpointReference xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing">       <Address>http://localhost/x.y.z</Address>     </EndpointReference>   </wsp:AppliesTo>   <t:RequestedSecurityToken>     <wsse:BinarySecurityToken wsu:Id="uuid:fc8d3332-d501-4bb0-84ba-d31aa95a1a6c" ValueType="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2009/11/swt-token-profile-1.0" EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> [ base64string ] </wsse:BinarySecurityToken>   </t:RequestedSecurityToken>   <t:TokenType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2009/11/swt-token-profile-1.0</t:TokenType>   <t:RequestType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust/Issue</t:RequestType>   <t:KeyType>http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/NoProofKey</t:KeyType> </t:RequestSecurityTokenResponse> Reading the SWT is as simple as base-64 decoding, then URL-decoding the element value:     var wrappedToken = XDocument.Parse(HttpContext.Current.Request.Form[1]);     var binaryToken = wrappedToken.Root.Descendants("{http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd}BinarySecurityToken").First();     var tokenBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(binaryToken.Value);     var token = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(tokenBytes);     var tokenType = wrappedToken.Root.Descendants("{http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust}TokenType").First().Value; The decoded token contains the claims as key/value pairs, along with the issuer, audience (ACS realm), expiry date and an HMAC hash, which are in query string format. Separate them on the ampersand, and you can write out the claim values in your logged-in page:     var decoded = HttpUtility.UrlDecode(token);     foreach (var part in decoded.Split('&'))     {         Response.Write("<pre>" + part + "</pre><br/>");     } - which will produce something like this: http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationinstant=2012-08-31T06:57:01.855Z http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/authenticationmethod=http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/authenticationmethod/windows http://schemas.microsoft.com/ws/2008/06/identity/claims/windowsaccountname=XYZ http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/[email protected] http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/[email protected] http://schemas.microsoft.com/accesscontrolservice/2010/07/claims/identityprovider=http://fs.svc.xyz.com/adfs/services/trust Audience=http://localhost/x.y.z ExpiresOn=1346402225 Issuer=https://x-y-z.accesscontrol.windows.net/ HMACSHA256=oDCeEDDAWEC8x+yBnTaCLnzp4L6jI0Z/xNK95PdZTts= The HMAC hash lets you validate the token to ensure it hasn’t been tampered with. You'll need the token signing key from ACS, then you can re-sign the token and compare hashes. There's a full implementation of an SWT parser and validator here: How To Request SWT Token From ACS And How To Validate It At The REST WCF Service Hosted In Windows Azure, and a cut-down claim inspector on my github code gallery: ACS Claim Inspector. Interestingly, ACS lets you have a value for your logged-in page which has no relation to the realm for authentication, so you can put this code into a generic claim inspector page, and set that to be your logged-in page for any relying party where you want to check what's being sent through. Particularly handy with ADFS, when you're modifying the claims provided, and want to quickly see the results.

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  • Is Your Corporate Network Secure and Confidential?

    - by Chandra Vennapoosa
    Businesses are increasingly conducted over IT networks and it is imperative for them to maintain network confidentiality more than ever before. A failure to ensure the security of business IT network can lead to dire consequences. In order to secure these network, a number of changes are made to the infrastructure of the underlying network, and a network administrator is designated to create policies which will protect the network from unauthorized access. Read here:  Is Your Corporate Network Secure and Confidential?

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  • Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools &ndash; January 2011 Update

    - by TechTwaddle
    Note: I am currently in the process of relocating my blog from http://www.geekswithblogs.net/techtwaddle to my new address at http://www.techtwaddle.net I suggest you point your feed readers to the new address as I slowly transition to my new shared-hosted, ad-free wordpress blog :) If you haven’t heard already, the Jan 2011 update of the windows phone 7 developer tools is out, er, in Feb. You can download the installation files from here, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=49b9d0c5-6597-4313-912a-f0cca9c7d277 The performance increase with the new emulator is clearly noticeable and the first time deploy is real quick! The emulator image should also be a precursor to the windows phone 7 OS update that we’ve been waiting for ever. The emulator image includes copy-paste functionality which is enabled by default on all textboxes, password boxes and edit controls within web browser control, so existing apps get this feature for free. Go ahead and give the new tools a try. If you want to experiment more you might be interested in a unlocked emulator image, follow the link for more information. http://windowsphonehacker.com/latest_windows_phone_7_emulator_unlocked-02-05-11.php

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  • Using ASP.NET Membership Provider with an ACL

    - by geekrutherford
    Up until recently one of my applications has used the membership provider within ASP.NET exclusively. However, it has been proposed that while the currently defined roles are beneficial, security needs to be more granular to restrict both access to certain pages and functionality present within a given page.   Unfortunately, the role based security ASP.NET gives you out of the box falls down in this area. This is not due to a lack of foresight by Microsoft, but rather it was simply not designed for implementing both role based security and any inherent ACL you may define within these roles. Mind you some would say an ACL is independent of the role to which a user belongs and is assigned to the user directly.   The application mentioned here has it's own User object (which encapsulates the membership provider user object as a property) and SQL Server table to store extended information not present in the aspnet_users table. While I could have modified the aspnet membership schema to suit the applications needs, it seemed smarter to simply create a separate table with a foreign key back to the aspnet_users table.   Since I have a separate object to store extended user information, I simply created an ACL object and expose it as a property of my user object.   This is all well and good, but it does not help in regards to the SiteMapProvider and restricting access at the page level based on the users ACL.   The straightforward answer would be to develop some code within the databound event for the menu that checks the page title and has hardcoded logic that dictates a user must have certain permissions turned on. The problem with this approach is that it's HARDCODED!!! If you need to change access to a page you'd need to do a build and go through your normal deployment process....ugh!!!   An alternative method, albeit not perfect, is to utilize the resourceKey property on the SiteMapNodes in the SiteMap file with the name of the required permission to view the page. Within the databound event for your menu you iterate the SiteMapNodes in the menus SiteMapProvider looking for a match at the page level based on title. When a match is detected, you have a switch/case on the SiteMapNodes resourceKey (the name of the ACL permission required). The case for the resourceKey ensures the users ACL permission is turned on and viola!!!   This is noteably not perfect in that it is using the resourceKey in a manner other than intended.  Since the application is not localized, using it in the manner described it not an issue.   Below is a sample SiteMap file with the resourceKey used as the ACL permission identifier:     Below is the ItemDataBound event. This application uses the Telerik Menu control:

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  • Learning Electronics & the Arduino Microcontroller

    - by Chris Williams
    Lately, I've had a growing interest in Electronics & Microcontrollers. I'm a loyal reader of Make Magazine and thoroughly enjoy seeing all the various projects in each issue, even though I rarely try to make any of them. I've been reading and watching videos about the Arduino, which is an open source Microcontroller and software project that the people at Make (and a lot of other folks) are pretty hot about. Even the prebuilt hardware is remarkably inexpensive , although there are kits available to build one from the base components. (Full disclosure: I bought my first soldering iron... EVER... just last week, so I fully acknowledge the likelihood of making some mistakes. That's why I'm not trying to do the "build it yourself" kit just yet. It's also another reason to be happy the hardware is so cheap.) There are a number of different Arduino boards available, but the two that have really piqued my interest are the Arduino UNO and the NETduino. The UNO is a very popular board, with a number of features and is under $35 which means I won't hurl myself off a bridge when I inevitably destroy it. The NETduino is very similar to the Arduino UNO and has the added advantage of being programmable with... you guessed it... C#. I'm actually ordering both boards and some miscellaneous other doodads to go with them.  There are a few good websites for this sort of thing, including www.makershed.com and www.adafruit.com. The price difference is negligible, so in my case, I'm ordering from Maker Shed (the Make Magazine people) because I want to support them. :) I've also picked up a few O'Reilly books on the subject which I am looking forward to reading & reviewing: Make: Electronics, Arduino: A Quick Start Guide and Getting Started With Arduino (all three of which arrived on my doorstep today.) This ties in with my "learn more about robotics" goals as well, since I'll need a good understanding of Electronics if I want to move past Lego Mindstorms eventually.

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