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• ExpressJS: What is the difference between app.local and res.local?

  - by aeyang

  I'm trying to learn Express and in my app I have middleware that passes the session object from the Request object to my Response object so that I can access it in my views: app.use((req, res, next) -> res.locals.session = req.session next() ) But app.locals is available to the view as well right? So is it the same if I do app.locals.session = req.session? Is there a convention for the types of things app.locals and res.locals are used for? I was also confused on what the difference is between res.render() and res.redirect()? When should each be used? Thanks for reading. Any help related to Express is appreciated!

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• Fixing the Model Binding issue of ASP.NET MVC 4 and ASP.NET Web API

  - by imran_ku07

          Introduction:                     Yesterday when I was checking ASP.NET forums, I found an important issue/bug in ASP.NET MVC 4 and ASP.NET Web API. The issue is present in System.Web.PrefixContainer class which is used by both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API assembly. The details of this issue is available in this thread. This bug can be a breaking change for you if you upgraded your application to ASP.NET MVC 4 and your application model properties using the convention available in the above thread. So, I have created a package which will fix this issue both in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API. In this article, I will show you how to use this package.           Description:                     Create or open an ASP.NET MVC 4 project and install ImranB.ModelBindingFix NuGet package. Then, add this using statement on your global.asax.cs file, using ImranB.ModelBindingFix;                     Then, just add this line in Application_Start method,   Fixer.FixModelBindingIssue(); // For fixing only in MVC call this //Fixer.FixMvcModelBindingIssue(); // For fixing only in Web API call this //Fixer.FixWebApiModelBindingIssue(); .                     This line will fix the model binding issue. If you are using Html.Action or Html.RenderAction then you should use Html.FixedAction or Html.FixedRenderAction instead to avoid this bug(make sure to reference ImranB.ModelBindingFix.SystemWebMvc namespace). If you are using FormDataCollection.ReadAs extension method then you should use FormDataCollection.FixedReadAs instead to avoid this bug(make sure to reference ImranB.ModelBindingFix.SystemWebHttp namespace). The source code of this package is available at github.          Summary:                     There is a small but important issue/bug in ASP.NET MVC 4. In this article, I showed you how to fix this issue/bug by using a package. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.

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• Hyperlinked, externalized source code documentation

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Why do we still embed natural language descriptions of source code (i.e., the reason why a line of code was written) within the source code, rather than as a separate document? Given the expansive real-estate afforded to modern development environments (high-resolution monitors, dual-monitors, etc.), an IDE could provide semi-lock-step panels wherein source code is visually separated from -- but intrinsically linked to -- its corresponding comments. For example, developers could write source code comments in a hyper-linked markup language (linking to additional software requirements), which would simultaneously prevent documentation from cluttering the source code. What shortcomings would inhibit such a software development mechanism? A mock-up to help clarify the question: When the cursor is at a particular line in the source code (shown with a blue background, above), the documentation that corresponds to the line at the cursor is highlighted (i.e., distinguished from the other details). As noted in the question, the documentation would stay in lock-step with the source code as the cursor jumps through the source code. A hot-key could switch between "documentation mode" and "development mode". Potential advantages include: More source code and more documentation on the screen(s) at once Ability to edit documentation independently of source code (regardless of language?) Write documentation and source code in parallel without merge conflicts Real-time hyperlinked documentation with superior text formatting Quasi-real-time machine translation into different natural languages Every line of code can be clearly linked to a task, business requirement, etc. Documentation could automatically timestamp when each line of code was written (metrics) Dynamic inclusion of architecture diagrams, images to explain relations, etc. Single-source documentation (e.g., tag code snippets for user manual inclusion). Note: The documentation window can be collapsed Workflow for viewing or comparing source files would not be affected How the implementation happens is a detail; the documentation could be: kept at the end of the source file; split into two files by convention (filename.c, filename.c.doc); or fully database-driven By hyperlinked documentation, I mean linking to external sources (such as StackOverflow or Wikipedia) and internal documents (i.e., a wiki on a subdomain that could cross-reference business requirements documentation) and other source files (similar to JavaDocs). Related thread: What's with the aversion to documentation in the industry?

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• Another Marketing Conference, part two – the afternoon

  - by Roger Hart

  In my previous post, I’ve covered the morning sessions at AMC2012. Here’s the rest of the write-up. I’ve skipped Charles Nixon’s session which was a blend of funky futurism and professional development advice, but you can see his slides here. I’ve also skipped the Google presentation, as it was a little thin on insight. 6 – Brand ambassadors: Getting universal buy in across the organisation, Vanessa Northam Slides are here This was the strongest enforcement of the idea that brand and campaign values need to be delivered throughout the organization if they’re going to work. Vanessa runs internal communications at e-on, and shared her experience of using internal comms to align an organization and thereby get the most out of a campaign. She views the purpose of internal comms as: “…to help leaders, to communicate the purpose and future of an organization, and support change.” This (and culture) primes front line staff, which creates customer experience and spreads brand. You ensure a whole organization knows what’s going on with both internal and external comms. If everybody is aligned and informed, if everybody can clearly articulate your brand and campaign goals, then you can turn everybody into an advocate. Alignment is a powerful tool for delivering a consistent experience and message. The pathological counter example is the one in which a marketing message goes out, which creates inbound customer contacts that front line contact staff haven’t been briefed to handle. The NatWest campaign was again mentioned in this context. The good example was e-on’s cheaper tariff campaign. Building a groundswell of internal excitement, and even running an internal launch meant everyone could contribute to a good customer experience. They found that meter readers were excited – not a group they’d considered as obvious in providing customer experience. But they were a group that has a lot of face-to-face contact with customers, and often were asked questions they may not have been briefed to answer. Being able to communicate a simple new message made it easier for them, and also let them become a sales and marketing asset to the organization. 7 – Goodbye Internet, Hello Outernet: the rise and rise of augmented reality, Matt Mills I wasn’t going to write this up, because it was essentially a sales demo for Aurasma. But the technology does merit some discussion. Basically, it replaces QR codes with visual recognition, and provides a simple-looking back end for attaching content. It’s quite sexy. But here’s my beef with it: QR codes had a clear visual language – when you saw one you knew what it was and what to do with it. They were clunky, but they had the “getting started” problem solved out of the box once you knew what you were looking at. However, they fail because QR code reading isn’t native to the platform. You needed an app, which meant you needed to know to download one. Consequentially, you can’t use QR codes with and ubiquity, or depend on them. This means marketers, content providers, etc, never pushed them, and they remained and awkward oddity, a minority sport. Aurasma half solves problem two, and re-introduces problem one, making it potentially half as useful as a QR code. It’s free, and you can apparently build it into your own apps. Add to that the likelihood of it becoming native to the platform if it takes off, and it may have legs. I guess we’ll see. 8 – We all need to code, Helen Mayor Great title – good point. If there was anybody in the room who didn’t at least know basic HTML, and if Helen’s presentation inspired them to learn, that’s fantastic. However, this was a half hour sales pitch for a basic coding training course. Beyond advocating coding skills it contained no useful content. Marketers may also like to consider some of these resources if they’re looking to learn code: Code Academy – free interactive tutorials Treehouse – learn web design, web dev, or app dev WebPlatform.org – tutorials and documentation for web tech  11 – Understanding our inner creativity, Margaret Boden This session was the most theoretical and probably least actionable of the day. It also held my attention utterly. Margaret spoke fluently, fascinatingly, without slides, on the subject of types of creativity and how they work. It was splendid. Yes, it raised a wry smile whenever she spoke of “the content of advertisements” and gave an example from 1970s TV ads, but even without the attempt to meet the conference’s theme this would have been thoroughly engaging. There are, Margaret suggested, three types of creativity: Combinatorial creativity The most common form, and consisting of synthesising ideas from existing and familiar concepts and tropes. Exploratory creativity Less common, this involves exploring the limits and quirks of a particular constraint or style. Transformational creativity This is uncommon, and arises from finding a way to do something that the existing rules would hold to be impossible. In essence, this involves breaking one of the constraints that exploratory creativity is composed from. Combinatorial creativity, she suggested, is particularly important for attaching favourable ideas to existing things. As such is it probably worth developing for marketing. Exploratory creativity may then come into play in something like developing and optimising an idea or campaign that now has momentum. Transformational creativity exists at the edges of this exploration. She suggested that products may often be transformational, but that marketing seemed unlikely to in her experience. This made me wonder about Listerine. Crucially, transformational creativity is characterised by there being some element of continuity with the strictures of previous thinking. Once it has happened, there may be  move from a revolutionary instance into an explored style. Again, from a marketing perspective, this seems to chime well with the thinking in Youngme Moon’s book: Different Talking about the birth of Modernism is visual art, Margaret pointed out that transformational creativity has historically risked a backlash, demanding what is essentially an education of the market. This is best accomplished by referring back to the continuities with the past in order to make the new familiar. Thoughts The afternoon is harder to sum up than the morning. It felt less concrete, and was troubled by a short run of poor presentations in the middle. Mainly, I found myself wrestling with the internal comms issue. It’s one of those things that seems astonishingly obvious in hindsight, but any campaign – particularly any large one – is doomed if the people involved can’t believe in it. We’ve run things here that haven’t gone so well, of course we have; who hasn’t? I’m not going to air any laundry, but people not being informed (much less aligned) feels like a common factor. It’s tough though. Managing and anticipating information needs across an organization of any size can’t be easy. Even the simple things like ensuring sales and support departments know what’s in a product release, and what messages go with it are easy to botch. The thing I like about framing this as a brand and campaign advocacy problem is that it makes it likely to get addressed. Better is always sexier than less-worse. Any technical communicator who’s ever felt crowded out by a content strategist or marketing copywriter  knows this – increasing revenue gets a seat at the table far more readily than reducing support costs, even if the financial impact is identical. So that’s it from AMC. The big thought-provokers were social buying behaviour and eliciting behaviour change, and the value of internal communications in ensuring successful campaigns and continuity of customer experience. I’ll be chewing over that for a while, and I’d definitely return next year.      

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• Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part 1

  - by shiju

  In this post, I will demonstrate web application development using ASP. NET MVC 3, Razor and EF code First. This post will also cover Dependency Injection using Unity 2.0 and generic Repository and Unit of Work for EF Code First. The following frameworks will be used for this step by step tutorial. ASP.NET MVC 3 EF Code First CTP 5 Unity 2.0 Define Domain Model Let’s create domain model for our simple web application Category class public class Category {     public int CategoryId { get; set; }     [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]     [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]     public string Name { get; set;}     public string Description { get; set; }     public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } }   Expense class public class Expense {             public int ExpenseId { get; set; }            public string  Transaction { get; set; }     public DateTime Date { get; set; }     public double Amount { get; set; }     public int CategoryId { get; set; }     public virtual Category Category { get; set; } } We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. In this post, we will be focusing on CRUD operations for the entity Category and will be working on the Expense entity with a View Model object in the later post. And the source code for this application will be refactored over time. The above entities are very simple POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) classes and the entity Category is decorated with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. Now we want to use these entities for defining model objects for the Entity Framework 4. Using the Code First approach of Entity Framework, we can first define the entities by simply writing POCO classes without any coupling with any API or database library. This approach lets you focus on domain model which will enable Domain-Driven Development for applications. EF code first support is currently enabled with a separate API that is runs on top of the Entity Framework 4. EF Code First is reached CTP 5 when I am writing this article. Creating Context Class for Entity Framework We have created our domain model and let’s create a class in order to working with Entity Framework Code First. For this, you have to download EF Code First CTP 5 and add reference to the assembly EntitFramework.dll. You can also use NuGet to download add reference to EEF Code First.    public class MyFinanceContext : DbContext {     public MyFinanceContext() : base("MyFinance") { }     public DbSet<Category> Categories { get; set; }     public DbSet<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }         }   The above class MyFinanceContext is derived from DbContext that can connect your model classes to a database. The MyFinanceContext class is mapping our Category and Expense class into database tables Categories and Expenses using DbSet<TEntity> where TEntity is any POCO class. When we are running the application at first time, it will automatically create the database. EF code-first look for a connection string in web.config or app.config that has the same name as the dbcontext class. If it is not find any connection string with the convention, it will automatically create database in local SQL Express database by default and the name of the database will be same name as the dbcontext class. You can also define the name of database in constructor of the the dbcontext class. Unlike NHibernate, we don’t have to use any XML based mapping files or Fluent interface for mapping between our model and database. The model classes of Code First are working on the basis of conventions and we can also use a fluent API to refine our model. The convention for primary key is ‘Id’ or ‘<class name>Id’.  If primary key properties are detected with type ‘int’, ‘long’ or ‘short’, they will automatically registered as identity columns in the database by default. Primary key detection is not case sensitive. We can define our model classes with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and it automatically enforces validation rules when a model object is updated or saved. Generic Repository for EF Code First We have created model classes and dbcontext class. Now we have to create generic repository pattern for data persistence with EF code first. If you don’t know about the repository pattern, checkout Martin Fowler’s article on Repository Let’s create a generic repository to working with DbContext and DbSet generics. public interface IRepository<T> where T : class     {         void Add(T entity);         void Delete(T entity);         T GetById(long Id);         IEnumerable<T> All();     }   RepositoryBasse – Generic Repository class public abstract class RepositoryBase<T> where T : class { private MyFinanceContext database; private readonly IDbSet<T> dbset; protected RepositoryBase(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory) {     DatabaseFactory = databaseFactory;     dbset = Database.Set<T>(); }   protected IDatabaseFactory DatabaseFactory {     get; private set; }   protected MyFinanceContext Database {     get { return database ?? (database = DatabaseFactory.Get()); } } public virtual void Add(T entity) {     dbset.Add(entity);            }        public virtual void Delete(T entity) {     dbset.Remove(entity); }   public virtual T GetById(long id) {     return dbset.Find(id); }   public virtual IEnumerable<T> All() {     return dbset.ToList(); } }   DatabaseFactory class public class DatabaseFactory : Disposable, IDatabaseFactory {     private MyFinanceContext database;     public MyFinanceContext Get()     {         return database ?? (database = new MyFinanceContext());     }     protected override void DisposeCore()     {         if (database != null)             database.Dispose();     } } Unit of Work If you are new to Unit of Work pattern, checkout Fowler’s article on Unit of Work . According to Martin Fowler, the Unit of Work pattern "maintains a list of objects affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and the resolution of concurrency problems." Let’s create a class for handling Unit of Work   public interface IUnitOfWork {     void Commit(); }   UniOfWork class public class UnitOfWork : IUnitOfWork {     private readonly IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory;     private MyFinanceContext dataContext;       public UnitOfWork(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)     {         this.databaseFactory = databaseFactory;     }       protected MyFinanceContext DataContext     {         get { return dataContext ?? (dataContext = databaseFactory.Get()); }     }       public void Commit()     {         DataContext.Commit();     } }   The Commit method of the UnitOfWork will call the commit method of MyFinanceContext class and it will execute the SaveChanges method of DbContext class.   Repository class for Category In this post, we will be focusing on the persistence against Category entity and will working on other entities in later post. Let’s create a repository for handling CRUD operations for Category using derive from a generic Repository RepositoryBase<T>.   public class CategoryRepository: RepositoryBase<Category>, ICategoryRepository     {     public CategoryRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)         : base(databaseFactory)         {         }                } public interface ICategoryRepository : IRepository<Category> { } If we need additional methods than generic repository for the Category, we can define in the CategoryRepository. Dependency Injection using Unity 2.0 If you are new to Inversion of Control/ Dependency Injection or Unity, please have a look on my articles at http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/tags/IoC/default.aspx. I want to create a custom lifetime manager for Unity to store container in the current HttpContext.   public class HttpContextLifetimeManager<T> : LifetimeManager, IDisposable {     public override object GetValue()     {         return HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName];     }     public override void RemoveValue()     {         HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName);     }     public override void SetValue(object newValue)     {         HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName] = newValue;     }     public void Dispose()     {         RemoveValue();     } }   Let’s create controller factory for Unity in the ASP.NET MVC 3 application. public class UnityControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory { IUnityContainer container; public UnityControllerFactory(IUnityContainer container) {     this.container = container; } protected override IController GetControllerInstance(RequestContext reqContext, Type controllerType) {     IController controller;     if (controllerType == null)         throw new HttpException(                 404, String.Format(                     "The controller for path '{0}' could not be found" +     "or it does not implement IController.",                 reqContext.HttpContext.Request.Path));       if (!typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(controllerType))         throw new ArgumentException(                 string.Format(                     "Type requested is not a controller: {0}",                     controllerType.Name),                     "controllerType");     try     {         controller= container.Resolve(controllerType) as IController;     }     catch (Exception ex)     {         throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format(                                 "Error resolving controller {0}",                                 controllerType.Name), ex);     }     return controller; }   }   Configure contract and concrete types in Unity Let’s configure our contract and concrete types in Unity for resolving our dependencies.   private void ConfigureUnity() {     //Create UnityContainer               IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer()                 .RegisterType<IDatabaseFactory, DatabaseFactory>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IDatabaseFactory>())     .RegisterType<IUnitOfWork, UnitOfWork>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IUnitOfWork>())     .RegisterType<ICategoryRepository, CategoryRepository>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<ICategoryRepository>());                 //Set container for Controller Factory                ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(             new UnityControllerFactory(container)); }   In the above ConfigureUnity method, we are registering our types onto Unity container with custom lifetime manager HttpContextLifetimeManager. Let’s call ConfigureUnity method in the Global.asax.cs for set controller factory for Unity and configuring the types with Unity.   protected void Application_Start() {     AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();     RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);     ConfigureUnity(); }   Developing web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 We have created our domain model for our web application and also have created repositories and configured dependencies with Unity container. Now we have to create controller classes and views for doing CRUD operations against the Category entity. Let’s create controller class for Category Category Controller   public class CategoryController : Controller {     private readonly ICategoryRepository categoryRepository;     private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork;           public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoryRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork)     {         this.categoryRepository = categoryRepository;         this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork;     }       public ActionResult Index()     {         var categories = categoryRepository.All();         return View(categories);     }     [HttpGet]     public ActionResult Edit(int id)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         return View(category);     }       [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Edit(int id, FormCollection collection)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         if (TryUpdateModel(category))         {             unitOfWork.Commit();             return RedirectToAction("Index");         }         else return View(category);                 }       [HttpGet]     public ActionResult Create()     {         var category = new Category();         return View(category);     }           [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Create(Category category)     {         if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             return View("Create", category);         }                     categoryRepository.Add(category);         unitOfWork.Commit();         return RedirectToAction("Index");     }       [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Delete(int  id)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         categoryRepository.Delete(category);         unitOfWork.Commit();         var categories = categoryRepository.All();         return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);       }        }   Creating Views in Razor Now we are going to create views in Razor for our ASP.NET MVC 3 application.  Let’s create a partial view CategoryList.cshtml for listing category information and providing link for Edit and Delete operations. CategoryList.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @using MyFinance.Domain; @model IEnumerable<Category>      <table>         <tr>         <th>Actions</th>         <th>Name</th>          <th>Description</th>         </tr>     @foreach (var item in Model) {             <tr>             <td>                 @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.CategoryId })                 @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.CategoryId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divCategoryList" })                           </td>             <td>                 @item.Name             </td>             <td>                 @item.Description             </td>         </tr>          }       </table>     <p>         @Html.ActionLink("Create New", "Create")     </p> The delete link is providing Ajax functionality using the Ajax.ActionLink. This will call an Ajax request for Delete action method in the CategoryCotroller class. In the Delete action method, it will return Partial View CategoryList after deleting the record. We are using CategoryList view for the Ajax functionality and also for Index view using for displaying list of category information. Let’s create Index view using partial view CategoryList  Index.chtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Category> @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; }    <h2>Category List</h2>    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>    <div id="divCategoryList">               @Html.Partial("CategoryList", Model) </div>   We can call the partial views using Html.Partial helper method. Now we are going to create View pages for insert and update functionality for the Category. Both view pages are sharing common user interface for entering the category information. So I want to create an EditorTemplate for the Category information. We have to create the EditorTemplate with the same name of entity object so that we can refer it on view pages using @Html.EditorFor(model => model) . So let’s create template with name Category. Let’s create view page for insert Category information   @model MyFinance.Domain.Category   @{     ViewBag.Title = "Save"; }   <h2>Create</h2>   <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>   @using (Html.BeginForm()) {     @Html.ValidationSummary(true)     <fieldset>         <legend>Category</legend>                @Html.EditorFor(model => model)               <p>             <input type="submit" value="Create" />         </p>     </fieldset> }   <div>     @Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") </div> ViewStart file In Razor views, we can add a file named _viewstart.cshtml in the views directory  and this will be shared among the all views with in the Views directory. The below code in the _viewstart.cshtml, sets the Layout page for every Views in the Views folder.      @{     Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; }   Source Code You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com/ . The source will be refactored on over time.   Summary In this post, we have created a simple web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. We have discussed on technologies and practices such as ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor, EF Code First, Unity 2, generic Repository and Unit of Work. In my later posts, I will modify the application and will be discussed on more things. Stay tuned to my blog  for more posts on step by step application building.

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• Listing common SQL Code Smells.

  - by Phil Factor

  Once you’ve done a number of SQL Code-reviews, you’ll know those signs in the code that all might not be well. These ’Code Smells’ are coding styles that don’t directly cause a bug, but are indicators that all is not well with the code. . Kent Beck and Massimo Arnoldi seem to have coined the phrase in the "OnceAndOnlyOnce" page of www.C2.com, where Kent also said that code "wants to be simple". Bad Smells in Code was an essay by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler, published as Chapter 3 of the book ‘Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code’ (ISBN 978-0201485677) Although there are generic code-smells, SQL has its own particular coding habits that will alert the programmer to the need to re-factor what has been written. See Exploring Smelly Code   and Code Deodorants for Code Smells by Nick Harrison for a grounding in Code Smells in C# I’ve always been tempted by the idea of automating a preliminary code-review for SQL. It would be so useful to trawl through code and pick up the various problems, much like the classic ‘Lint’ did for C, and how the Code Metrics plug-in for .NET Reflector by Jonathan 'Peli' de Halleux is used for finding Code Smells in .NET code. The problem is that few of the standard procedural code smells are relevant to SQL, and we need an agreed list of code smells. Merrilll Aldrich made a grand start last year in his blog Top 10 T-SQL Code Smells.However, I'd like to make a start by discovering if there is a general opinion amongst Database developers what the most important SQL Smells are. One can be a bit defensive about code smells. I will cheerfully write very long stored procedures, even though they are frowned on. I’ll use dynamic SQL occasionally. You can only use them as an aid for your own judgment and it is fine to ‘sign them off’ as being appropriate in particular circumstances. Also, whole classes of ‘code smells’ may be irrelevant for a particular database. The use of proprietary SQL, for example, is only a ‘code smell’ if there is a chance that the database will have to be ported to another RDBMS. The use of dynamic SQL is a risk only with certain security models. As the saying goes,  a CodeSmell is a hint of possible bad practice to a pragmatist, but a sure sign of bad practice to a purist. Plamen Ratchev’s wonderful article Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes lists some of these ‘code smells’ along with out-and-out mistakes, but there are more. The use of nested transactions, for example, isn’t entirely incorrect, even though the database engine ignores all but the outermost: but it does flag up the possibility that the programmer thinks that nested transactions are supported. If anything requires some sort of general agreement, the definition of code smells is one. I’m therefore going to make this Blog ‘dynamic, in that, if anyone twitters a suggestion with a #SQLCodeSmells tag (or sends me a twitter) I’ll update the list here. If you add a comment to the blog with a suggestion of what should be added or removed, I’ll do my best to oblige. In other words, I’ll try to keep this blog up to date. The name against each 'smell' is the name of the person who Twittered me, commented about or who has written about the 'smell'. it does not imply that they were the first ever to think of the smell! Use of deprecated syntax such as *= (Dave Howard) Denormalisation that requires the shredding of the contents of columns. (Merrill Aldrich) Contrived interfaces Use of deprecated datatypes such as TEXT/NTEXT (Dave Howard) Datatype mis-matches in predicates that rely on implicit conversion.(Plamen Ratchev) Using Correlated subqueries instead of a join   (Dave_Levy/ Plamen Ratchev) The use of Hints in queries, especially NOLOCK (Dave Howard /Mike Reigler) Few or No comments. Use of functions in a WHERE clause. (Anil Das) Overuse of scalar UDFs (Dave Howard, Plamen Ratchev) Excessive ‘overloading’ of routines. The use of Exec xp_cmdShell (Merrill Aldrich) Excessive use of brackets. (Dave Levy) Lack of the use of a semicolon to terminate statements Use of non-SARGable functions on indexed columns in predicates (Plamen Ratchev) Duplicated code, or strikingly similar code. Misuse of SELECT * (Plamen Ratchev) Overuse of Cursors (Everyone. Special mention to Dave Levy & Adrian Hills) Overuse of CLR routines when not necessary (Sam Stange) Same column name in different tables with different datatypes. (Ian Stirk) Use of ‘broken’ functions such as ‘ISNUMERIC’ without additional checks. Excessive use of the WHILE loop (Merrill Aldrich) INSERT ... EXEC (Merrill Aldrich) The use of stored procedures where a view is sufficient (Merrill Aldrich) Not using two-part object names (Merrill Aldrich) Using INSERT INTO without specifying the columns and their order (Merrill Aldrich) Full outer joins even when they are not needed. (Plamen Ratchev) Huge stored procedures (hundreds/thousands of lines). Stored procedures that can produce different columns, or order of columns in their results, depending on the inputs. Code that is never used. Complex and nested conditionals WHILE (not done) loops without an error exit. Variable name same as the Datatype Vague identifiers. Storing complex data  or list in a character map, bitmap or XML field User procedures with sp_ prefix (Aaron Bertrand)Views that reference views that reference views that reference views (Aaron Bertrand) Inappropriate use of sql_variant (Neil Hambly) Errors with identity scope using SCOPE_IDENTITY @@IDENTITY or IDENT_CURRENT (Neil Hambly, Aaron Bertrand) Schemas that involve multiple dated copies of the same table instead of partitions (Matt Whitfield-Atlantis UK) Scalar UDFs that do data lookups (poor man's join) (Matt Whitfield-Atlantis UK) Code that allows SQL Injection (Mladen Prajdic) Tables without clustered indexes (Matt Whitfield-Atlantis UK) Use of "SELECT DISTINCT" to mask a join problem (Nick Harrison) Multiple stored procedures with nearly identical implementation. (Nick Harrison) Excessive column aliasing may point to a problem or it could be a mapping implementation. (Nick Harrison) Joining "too many" tables in a query. (Nick Harrison) Stored procedure returning more than one record set. (Nick Harrison) A NOT LIKE condition (Nick Harrison) excessive "OR" conditions. (Nick Harrison) User procedures with sp_ prefix (Aaron Bertrand) Views that reference views that reference views that reference views (Aaron Bertrand) sp_OACreate or anything related to it (Bill Fellows) Prefixing names with tbl_, vw_, fn_, and usp_ ('tibbling') (Jeremiah Peschka) Aliases that go a,b,c,d,e... (Dave Levy/Diane McNurlan) Overweight Queries (e.g. 4 inner joins, 8 left joins, 4 derived tables, 10 subqueries, 8 clustered GUIDs, 2 UDFs, 6 case statements = 1 query) (Robert L Davis) Order by 3,2 (Dave Levy) MultiStatement Table functions which are then filtered 'Sel * from Udf() where Udf.Col = Something' (Dave Ballantyne) running a SQL 2008 system in SQL 2000 compatibility mode(John Stafford)

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• How to Upload a file from client to server using OFBIZ?

  - by SIVAKUMAR.J

  I'm new to ofbiz so try to keep your answer as simple as possibly. If you can give examples that would be kind. My problem is I created a project inside the ofbiz/hot-deploy folder namely productionmgntSystem. Inside the folder ofbiz\hot-deploy\productionmgntSystem\webapp\productionmgntSystem I created a file app_details_1.ftl. The following are the code of this file <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title>Insert title here</title> <script TYPE="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT" language=""JAVASCRIPT"> function uploadFile() { //alert("Before calling upload.jsp"); window.location='<@ofbizUrl>testing_service1</@ofbizUrl>' } </script> </head> <!-- <form action="<@ofbizUrl>testing_service1</@ofbizUrl>" enctype="multipart/form-data" name="app_details_frm"> --> <form action="<@ofbizUrl>logout1</@ofbizUrl>" enctype="multipart/form-data" name="app_details_frm"> <center style="height: 299px; "> <table border="0" style="height: 177px; width: 788px"> <tr style="height: 115px; "> <td style="width: 103px; "> <td style="width: 413px; "><h1>APPLICATION DETAILS</h1> <td style="width: 55px; "> </tr> <tr> <td style="width: 125px; ">Application name : </td> <td> <input name="app_name_txt" id="txt_1" value=" " /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td style="width: 125px; ">Excell sheet &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;: </td> <td> <input type="file" name="filename"/> </td> </tr> <tr> <td> <!-- <input type="button" name="logout1_cmd" value="Logout" onclick="logout1()"/> --> <input type="submit" name="logout_cmd" value="logout"/> </td> <td> <!-- <input type="submit" name="upload_cmd" value="Submit" /> --> <input type="button" name="upload1_cmd" value="Upload" onclick="uploadFile()"/> </td> </tr> </table> </center> </form> </html> the following coding is present in the file ofbiz\hot-deploy\productionmgntSystem\webapp\productionmgntSystem\WEB-INF\controller.xml ...... ....... ........ <request-map uri="testing_service1"> <security https="true" auth="true"/> <event type="java" path="org.ofbiz.productionmgntSystem.web_app_req.WebServices1" invoke="testingService"/> <response name="ok" type="view" value="ok_view"/> <response name="exception" type="view" value="exception_view"/> </request-map> .......... ............ .......... <view-map name="ok_view" type="ftl" page="ok_view.ftl"/> <view-map name="exception_view" type="ftl" page="exception_view.ftl"/> ................ ............. ............. The following are the coding present in the file ofbiz\hot-deploy\productionmgntSystem\src\org\ofbiz\productionmgntSystem\web_app_req\WebServices1.java package org.ofbiz.productionmgntSystem.web_app_req; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; import java.io.DataInputStream; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; public class WebServices1 { public static String testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) { //int i=0; String result="ok"; System.out.println("\n\n\t*************************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)- Start"); String contentType=request.getContentType(); System.out.println("\n\n\t*************************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)- contentType : "+contentType); String str=new String(); // response.setContentType("text/html"); //PrintWriter writer; if ((contentType != null) && (contentType.indexOf("multipart/form-data") >= 0)) { System.out.println("\n\n\t**********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) after if (contentType != null)"); try { // writer=response.getWriter(); System.out.println("\n\n\t**********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - try Start"); DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(request.getInputStream()); int formDataLength = request.getContentLength(); byte dataBytes[] = new byte[formDataLength]; int byteRead = 0; int totalBytesRead = 0; //this loop converting the uploaded file into byte code while (totalBytesRead < formDataLength) { byteRead = in.read(dataBytes, totalBytesRead,formDataLength); totalBytesRead += byteRead; } String file = new String(dataBytes); //for saving the file name String saveFile = file.substring(file.indexOf("filename=\"") + 10); saveFile = saveFile.substring(0, saveFile.indexOf("\n")); saveFile = saveFile.substring(saveFile.lastIndexOf("\\")+ 1,saveFile.indexOf("\"")); int lastIndex = contentType.lastIndexOf("="); String boundary = contentType.substring(lastIndex + 1,contentType.length()); int pos; //extracting the index of file pos = file.indexOf("filename=\""); pos = file.indexOf("\n", pos) + 1; pos = file.indexOf("\n", pos) + 1; pos = file.indexOf("\n", pos) + 1; int boundaryLocation = file.indexOf(boundary, pos) - 4; int startPos = ((file.substring(0, pos)).getBytes()).length; int endPos = ((file.substring(0, boundaryLocation)).getBytes()).length; //creating a new file with the same name and writing the content in new file FileOutputStream fileOut = new FileOutputStream("/"+saveFile); fileOut.write(dataBytes, startPos, (endPos - startPos)); fileOut.flush(); fileOut.close(); System.out.println("\n\n\t**********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - try End"); } catch(IOException ioe) { System.out.println("\n\n\t*********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - Catch IOException"); //ioe.printStackTrace(); return("exception"); } catch(Exception ex) { System.out.println("\n\n\t*********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) - Catch Exception"); return("exception"); } } else { System.out.println("\n\n\t********************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) else part"); result="exception"; } System.out.println("\n\n\t*************************************\n\tInside WebServices1.testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)- End"); return(result); } } I want to upload a file to the server. The file is get from user " tag in the "app_details_1.ftl" file & it is updated into the server by using the method "testingService(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)" in the class "WebServices1". But the file is not uploaded. Give me a good solution for uploading a file to the server.

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• SQL SERVER – Extending SQL Azure with Azure worker role – Guest Post by Paras Doshi

  - by pinaldave

  This is guest post by Paras Doshi. Paras Doshi is a research Intern at SolidQ.com and a Microsoft student partner. He is currently working in the domain of SQL Azure. SQL Azure is nothing but a SQL server in the cloud. SQL Azure provides benefits such as on demand rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability and reduced management overhead. To see an introduction on SQL Azure, check out the post by Pinal here In this article, we are going to discuss how to extend SQL Azure with the Azure worker role. In other words, we will attempt to write a custom code and host it in the Azure worker role; the aim is to add some features that are not available with SQL Azure currently or features that need to be customized for flexibility. This way we extend the SQL Azure capability by building some solutions that run on Azure as worker roles. To understand Azure worker role, think of it as a windows service in cloud. Azure worker role can perform background processes, and to handle processes such as synchronization and backup, it becomes our ideal tool. First, we will focus on writing a worker role code that synchronizes SQL Azure databases. Before we do so, let’s see some scenarios in which synchronization between SQL Azure databases is beneficial: scaling out access over multiple databases enables us to handle workload efficiently As of now, SQL Azure database can be hosted in one of any six datacenters. By synchronizing databases located in different data centers, one can extend the data by enabling access to geographically distributed data Let us see some scenarios in which SQL server to SQL Azure database synchronization is beneficial To backup SQL Azure database on local infrastructure Rather than investing in local infrastructure for increased workloads, such workloads could be handled by cloud Ability to extend data to different datacenters located across the world to enable efficient data access from remote locations Now, let us develop cloud-based app that synchronizes SQL Azure databases. For an Introduction to developing cloud based apps, click here Now, in this article, I aim to provide a bird’s eye view of how a code that synchronizes SQL Azure databases look like and then list resources that can help you develop the solution from scratch. Now, if you newly add a worker role to the cloud-based project, this is how the code will look like. (Note: I have added comments to the skeleton code to point out the modifications that will be required in the code to carry out the SQL Azure synchronization. Note the placement of Setup() and Sync() function.) Click here (http://parasdoshi1989.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/code-snippet-1-for-extending-sql-azure-with-azure-worker-role1.pdf ) Enabling SQL Azure databases synchronization through sync framework is a two-step process. In the first step, the database is provisioned and sync framework creates tracking tables, stored procedures, triggers, and tables to store metadata to enable synchronization. This is one time step. The code for the same is put in the setup() function which is called once when the worker role starts. Now, the second step is continuous (or on demand) synchronization of SQL Azure databases by propagating changes between databases. This is done on a continuous basis by calling the sync() function in the while loop. The code logic to synchronize changes between SQL Azure databases should be put in the sync() function. Discussing the coding part step by step is out of the scope of this article. Therefore, let me suggest you a resource, which is given here. Also, note that before you start developing the code, you will need to install SYNC framework 2.1 SDK (download here). Further, you will reference some libraries before you start coding. Details regarding the same are available in the article that I just pointed to. You will be charged for data transfers if the databases are not in the same datacenter. For pricing information, go here Currently, a tool named DATA SYNC, which is built on top of sync framework, is available in CTP that allows SQL Azure <-> SQL server and SQL Azure <-> SQL Azure synchronization (without writing single line of code); however, in some cases, the custom code shown in this blogpost provides flexibility that is not available with Data SYNC. For instance, filtering is not supported in the SQL Azure DATA SYNC CTP2; if you wish to have such a functionality now, then you have the option of developing a custom code using SYNC Framework. Now, this code can be easily extended to synchronize at some schedule. Let us say we want the databases to get synchronized every day at 10:00 pm. This is what the code will look like now: (http://parasdoshi1989.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/code-snippet-2-for-extending-sql-azure-with-azure-worker-role.pdf) Don’t you think that by writing such a code, we are imitating the functionality provided by the SQL server agent for a SQL server? Think about it. We are scheduling our administrative task by writing custom code – in other words, we have developed a “Light weight SQL server agent for SQL Azure!” Since the SQL server agent is not currently available in cloud, we have developed a solution that enables us to schedule tasks, and thus we have extended SQL Azure with the Azure worker role! Now if you wish to track jobs, you can do so by storing this data in SQL Azure (or Azure tables). The reason is that Windows Azure is a stateless platform, and we will need to store the state of the job ourselves and the choice that you have is SQL Azure or Azure tables. Note that this solution requires custom code and also it is not UI driven; however, for now, it can act as a temporary solution until SQL server agent is made available in the cloud. Moreover, this solution does not encompass functionalities that a SQL server agent provides, but it does open up an interesting avenue to schedule some of the tasks such as backup and synchronization of SQL Azure databases by writing some custom code in the Azure worker role. Now, let us see one more possibility – i.e., running BCP through a worker role in Azure-hosted services and then uploading the backup files either locally or on blobs. If you upload it locally, then consider the data transfer cost. If you upload it to blobs residing in the same datacenter, then no transfer cost applies but the cost on blob size applies. So, before choosing the option, you need to evaluate your preferences keeping the cost associated with each option in mind. In this article, I have shown that Azure worker role solution could be developed to synchronize SQL Azure databases. Moreover, a light-weight SQL server agent for SQL Azure can be developed. Also we discussed the possibility of running BCP through a worker role in Azure-hosted services for backing up our precious SQL Azure data. Thus, we can extend SQL Azure with the Azure worker role. But remember: you will be charged for running Azure worker roles. So at the end of the day, you need to ask – am I willing to build a custom code and pay money to achieve this functionality? I hope you found this blog post interesting. If you have any questions/feedback, you can comment below or you can mail me at Paras[at]student-partners[dot]com Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Azure, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Upcoming UPK Events

  - by kathryn.lustenberger(at)oracle.com

  February 15th: UPK: Follow Panduit's Lead and Leverage Oracle's User Productivity Kit To Achieve Your Goals - Join us for a live webcast to learn how Oracle's User Productivity Kit can help you meet and exceed your goals. The webcast will feature Jim Boss, from the Panduit Corporation, who will share how Oracle's User Productivity Kit was used with both Oracle and Non-Oracle applications to helped Panduit to meet their goals. Date: February 15th, 2011 at 12:00 PST / 3:00 EST Evite: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/65630-naod10046029mpp005c010-se-300908.html March 2nd: Synaptis teams with Oracle to deliver a UPK customer success story - Webinar Offering The Value of UPK (Customer Success Story): How to leverage the value of UPK to streamline processes and maximize end user adoption for a global implementation Join us to learn how the power of UPK can be leveraged to train end users globally in a successful and cost effective manner. A valued Oracle UPK customer will share experiences, successes, challenges, and strategies. The webinar will also include a question and answer session to give the attendees an opportunity to interact directly with the Oracle UPK customer, Synaptis, and the Oracle UPK Team. Date: March 2, 2011 Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm EST Register for this webinar March 27 - 30th: The Alliance 2011 conference is an annual event for all higher education, government, and public sector users of Oracle applications. The Alliance conference is organized and managed by the Higher Education User Group (www.heug.org). This is the 14th annual event for the HEUG. This is your opportunity to join with over 3200 other Higher Education, Federal, State and Local Government users to network, learn and share in our amazing combined experiences. The Alliance conference team is hard at work, putting together the best conference ever for 2011 - so don't delay, make your plans now to be part of Alliance 2011! When: Sunday, March 27th, 2011 - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 Where: The Colorado Convention Center (Denver, Colorado) Registration for Alliance 2011 is Now Open! UPK will be represented at this event offering: Pre-Conference Training Learn the Basics of Oracle User Productivity Kit (UPK) Taking Your UPKs to a Whole New Level, Advanced Use of UPK Demo Pod Staff Sessions: Oracle User Productivity Kit: Creating Value throughout the Project Lifecycle Beyond Basic UPK -- User Tracking and SmartHelp Leveraging Oracle and User Productivity Kit (UPK) to Develop a Comprehensive Training Program Oracle User Productivity Kit Strategy and Roadmap -- Key to User Adoption April 10 - 14th: Registration for COLLABORATE 11 has begun - Don't miss the most comprehensive, user-driven conference devoted to Oracle applications and technology. Collaborate with a global network of more than 5,000 peers and experts to share real-world experiences, solve your challenges and gain insights to validate your technology plans. Read below to discover which group to register with for the best value. UPK will be represented at this event offering: Demo Pod Staff Sessions: Oracle User Productivity Kit: Creating Value throughout the Project Lifecycle Centralize all Project Team assets, AND, Deploy Fully Measurable Training with UPK Pro Oracle User Productivity Kit Strategy and Roadmap - Key to User Adoption Registration is Now Open!

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• How to Organize a Programming Language Club

  - by Ben Griswold

  I previously noted that we started a language club at work.  You know, I searched around but I couldn’t find a copy of the How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook. Maybe it’s sold out?  Yes, Stack Overflow has quite a bit of information on how to learn and teach new languages and there’s also a good number of online tutorials which provide language introductions but I was interested in group learning.  After   two months of meetings, I present to you the Unofficial How to Organize a Programming Language Club Handbook.  1. Gauge interest. Start by surveying prospects. “Excuse me, smart-developer-whom-I-work-with-and-I-think-might-be-interested-in-learning-a-new-coding-language-with-me. Are you interested in learning a new language with me?” If you’re lucky, you work with a bunch of really smart folks who aren’t shy about teaching/learning in a group setting and you’ll have a collective interest in no time.  Simply suggesting the idea is the only effort required.  If you don’t work in this type of environment, maybe you should consider a new place of employment.  2. Make it official. Send out a “Welcome to the Club” email: There’s been talk of folks itching to learn new languages – Python, Scala, F# and Haskell to name a few.  Rather than taking on new languages alone, let’s learn in the open.  That’s right.  Let’s start a languages club.  We’ll have everything a real club needs – secret handshake, goofy motto and a high-and-mighty sense that we’re better than everybody else. T-shirts?  Hell YES!  Anyway, I’ve thrown this idea around the office and no one has laughed at me yet so please consider this your very official invitation to be in THE club. [Insert your ideas about how the club might be run, solicit feedback and suggestions, ask what other folks would like to get out the club, comment about club hazing practices and talk up the T-shirts even more. Finally, call out the languages you are interested in learning and ask the group for their list.] 3.  Send out invitations to the first meeting.  Don’t skimp!  Hallmark greeting cards for everyone.  Personalized.  Hearts over the I’s and everything.  Oh, and be sure to include the list of suggested languages with vote count.  Here the list of languages we are interested in: Python 5 Ruby 4 Objective-C 3 F# 2 Haskell 2 Scala 2 Ada 1 Boo 1 C# 1 Clojure 1 Erlang 1 Go 1 Pi 1 Prolog 1 Qt 1 4.  At the first meeting, there must be cake.  Lots of cake. And you should tackle some very important questions: Which language should we start with?  You can immediately go with the top vote getter or you could do as we did and designate each person to provide a high-level review of each of the proposed languages over the next two weeks.  After all presentations are completed, vote on the language. Our high-level review consisted of answers to a series of questions. Decide how often and where the group will meet.  We, for example, meet for a brown bag lunch every Wednesday.  Decide how you’re going to learn.  We determined that the best way to learn is to just dive in and write code.  After choosing our first language (Python), we talked about building an application, or performing coding katas, but we ultimately choose to complete a series of Project Euler problems.  We kept it simple – each member works out the same two problems each week in preparation of a code review the following Wednesday. 5.  Code, Review, Learn.  Prior to the weekly meeting, everyone uploads their solutions to our internal wiki.  Each Project Euler problem has a dedicated page.  In the meeting, we use a really fancy HD projector to show off each member’s solution.  It is very important to use an HD projector.  Again, don’t skimp!  Each code author speaks to their solution, everyone else comments, applauds, points fingers and laughs, etc.  As much as I’ve learned from solving the problems on my own, I’ve learned at least twice as much at the group code review.  6.  Rinse. Lather. Repeat.  We’ve hosted the language club for 7 weeks now.  The first meeting just set the stage.  The next two meetings provided a review of the languages followed by a first language selection.  The remaining meetings focused on Python and Project Euler problems.  Today we took a vote as to whether or not we’re ready to switch to another language and/or another problem set.  Pretty much everyone wants to stay the course for a few more weeks at least.  Until then, we’ll continue to code the next two solutions, review and learn. Again, we’ve been having a good time with the programming language club.  I’m glad it got off the ground.  What do you think?  Would you be interested in a language club?  Any suggestions on what we might do better?

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• Deploying an ADF Secure Application using WLS Console

  - by juan.ruiz

  Last week I worked on a requirement from a customer that wanted to understand how to deploy to WLS an application with ADF Security without using JDeveloper. The main question was, what steps where needed in order to set up Enterprise Roles, Security Policies and Application Credentials. In this entry I will explain the steps taken using JDeveloper 11.1.1.2. 0 Requirements: Instead of building a sample application from scratch, we can use Andrejus 's sample application that contains all the security pieces that we need. Open and migrate the project. Also make sure you adjust the database settings accordingly. Creating the EAR file Review the Security settings of the application by going into the Application -> Secure menu and see that there are two enterprise roles as well as the ADF Policies enforcing security on the main page. Make sure the Application Module uses the Data Source instead of JDBC URL for its connection type, also take note of the data source name - in my case I have: java:comp/env/jdbc/HrDS To facilitate the access to this application once we deploy it. Go to your ViewController project properties select the Java EE Application category and give it a meaningful name to the context root as well to the Application Name Go to the ADFSecurityWL Application properties -> Deployment  and create a new EAR deployment profile. Uncheck the Auto generate and Synchronize weblogic-jdbc.xml Descriptors During Deployment Deploy the application as an EAR file. Deploying the Application to WLS using the WLS Console On the WLS console create a JNDI data source. This is the part that I found more tricky of the hole exercise given that the name should match the AM's data source name, however the naming convention that worked for me was jdbc.HrDS Now, deploy the application manually by selecting deployments ->Install look for the EAR and follow the default steps. If this is the firs time you deploy the application, once the deployment finishes you will be asked to Activate Changes on the domain, these changes contain all the security policies and application roles insertion into the WLS instance. Creating Roles and User Groups for the Application To finish the after-deployment set up, we need to create the groups that are the equivalent of the Enterprise Roles of ADF Security. For our sample we have two Enterprise Roles employeesApplication and managersApplication. After that, we create the application users and assign them into their respective groups. Now we can run the application and test the security constraints

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• INETA Community Leadership Summit

  - by Scott Spradlin

  INETA Community Leadership Summit will be taking place on Sunday June 6th at 1PM at Tech·Ed North America in New Orleans. INETA is hosting a free Community Leadership Summit in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Sunday June 6th at 1:00 PM prior to the start of Tech·Ed 2010. The summit is open to Community Leaders from the area, as well as those attending Tech·Ed from across the country and around the world. It is an excellent opportunity for exchanging information and ideas. If you are a user group leader, or are involved in the leadership, planning, promotion, or day-to-day operations of a user group community, this event is for YOU! The summit is an open forum to share ideas, discuss common challenges, and gain from the experience of other leaders. INETA Community Leadership summits are part of an ongoing effort by INETA to create, improve and share resources designed to strengthen individual user groups and the community. This meeting will be the perfect opportunity to meet leaders from other groups, benefit from their success stories, and expand your network of contacts.   Quick FAQs Who can attend? Any leader or volunteer of any INETA User Group. Do I need to be attending Tech·Ed? No, you do NOT need to purchase a pass for Tech·Ed to attend the Leadership Summit. What does it cost to attend? There is NO cost to attend summit, but the knowledge that will be available about User Groups will be priceless. I want to help out, who do I contact? Send an email to [email protected] if you are interested. I want to attend, where do I register? We are putting together a registration link now, it will be published in a future newsletter and on the website. What will the format of the summit be? The summit will be like our Birds of a Feather Sessions but focused on User Group topics. Moderators will be armed with some broad topics to kick off the conversation, however the real value of these sessions is getting the chance to learn from each other. What topics will be covered? We are thinking of focusing on 4 areas: Running a User Group, Effective Content and Presenters, User Group Promotion and Developing Partnerships. However the agenda is yours! If there is a topic you want to see covered, or a topic that you would like to lead then email  [email protected]. Technorati Tags: conference

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• Static background noise while using new headset Ubuntu 13.04

  - by ThundLayr

  Today I bought a new gaming headset (Gx-Gaming Lychas), and when I tried to record some gameplay-comentary I noticed that there always is a static background noise, I just recorded an example so you guys can listen it (no downloaded needed): http://www47.zippyshare.com/v/65167832/file.html I'm using Kubuntu 13.04 and Kernel version is 3.8.0-19, my laptop is an Acer Travelmate 5760Z, I tried tons of configurations on Alsamixer and none of them made result, I really need to get this working so any kind of help will be very aprecciated. cat /proc/asound/cards: 0 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH HDA Intel PCH at 0xc6400000 irq 44 cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 Codec: Conexant CX20588 Address: 0 AFG Function Id: 0x1 (unsol 1) Vendor Id: 0x14f1506c Subsystem Id: 0x10250574 Revision Id: 0x100003 No Modem Function Group found Default PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Default Amp-In caps: N/A Default Amp-Out caps: N/A State of AFG node 0x01: Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold CLKSTOP EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 GPIO: io=4, o=0, i=0, unsolicited=1, wake=0 IO[0]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 IO[1]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 IO[2]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 IO[3]: enable=0, dir=0, wake=0, sticky=0, data=0, unsol=0 Node 0x10 [Audio Output] wcaps 0xc1d: Stereo Amp-Out R/L Control: name="Headphone Playback Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Headphone Playback Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Device: name="CX20588 Analog", type="Audio", device=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x4a, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-Out vals: [0x4a 0x4a] Converter: stream=8, channel=0 PCM: rates [0x560]: 44100 48000 96000 192000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x11 [Audio Output] wcaps 0xc1d: Stereo Amp-Out R/L Control: name="Speaker Playback Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Speaker Playback Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x4a, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-Out vals: [0x80 0x80] Converter: stream=8, channel=0 PCM: rates [0x560]: 44100 48000 96000 192000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x12 [Audio Output] wcaps 0x611: Stereo Digital Converter: stream=0, channel=0 Digital: Digital category: 0x0 IEC Coding Type: 0x0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x5]: PCM AC3 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x13 [Beep Generator Widget] wcaps 0x70000c: Mono Amp-Out Control: name="Beep Playback Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=1, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Beep Playback Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=1, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x07, nsteps=0x07, stepsize=0x0f, mute=0 Amp-Out vals: [0x00] Node 0x14 [Audio Input] wcaps 0x100d1b: Stereo Amp-In R/L Control: name="Capture Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=In, idx=0, ofs=0 Control: name="Capture Switch", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=In, idx=0, ofs=0 Device: name="CX20588 Analog", type="Audio", device=0 Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x50, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x50 0x50] [0x80 0x80] [0x80 0x80] [0x80 0x80] Converter: stream=4, channel=0 SDI-Select: 0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x17* 0x18 0x23 0x24 Node 0x15 [Audio Input] wcaps 0x100d1b: Stereo Amp-In R/L Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x50, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] Converter: stream=0, channel=0 SDI-Select: 0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x17* 0x18 0x23 0x24 Node 0x16 [Audio Input] wcaps 0x100d1b: Stereo Amp-In R/L Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x50, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] [0x4a 0x4a] Converter: stream=0, channel=0 SDI-Select: 0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x1]: PCM Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x17* 0x18 0x23 0x24 Node 0x17 [Audio Selector] wcaps 0x30050d: Stereo Amp-Out Control: name="Mic Boost Volume", index=0, device=0 ControlAmp: chs=3, dir=Out, idx=0, ofs=0 Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x00, nsteps=0x04, stepsize=0x27, mute=0 Amp-Out vals: [0x04 0x04] Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x1a 0x1b* 0x1d 0x1e Node 0x18 [Audio Selector] wcaps 0x30050d: Stereo Amp-Out Amp-Out caps: ofs=0x00, nsteps=0x04, stepsize=0x27, mute=0 Amp-Out vals: [0x00 0x00] Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 4 0x1a* 0x1b 0x1d 0x1e Node 0x19 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Control: name="Headphone Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x0000001c: OUT HP Detect Pin Default 0x04214040: [Jack] HP Out at Ext Right Conn = 1/8, Color = Green DefAssociation = 0x4, Sequence = 0x0 Pin-ctls: 0xc0: OUT HP Unsolicited: tag=01, enabled=1 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1a [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400481: Stereo Control: name="Internal Mic Phantom Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x00001324: IN Detect Vref caps: HIZ 50 80 Pin Default 0x90a70130: [Fixed] Mic at Int N/A Conn = Analog, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0x3, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x24: IN VREF_80 Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x1b [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Control: name="Mic Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x00011334: IN OUT EAPD Detect Vref caps: HIZ 50 80 EAPD 0x0: Pin Default 0x04a19020: [Jack] Mic at Ext Right Conn = 1/8, Color = Pink DefAssociation = 0x2, Sequence = 0x0 Pin-ctls: 0x24: IN VREF_80 Unsolicited: tag=02, enabled=1 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1c [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Pincap 0x00000014: OUT Detect Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1d [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400581: Stereo Pincap 0x00010034: IN OUT EAPD Detect EAPD 0x0: Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10* 0x11 Node 0x1e [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400481: Stereo Pincap 0x00000024: IN Detect Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x1f [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400501: Stereo Control: name="Speaker Phantom Jack", index=0, device=0 Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x92170110: [Fixed] Speaker at Int Front Conn = Analog, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0x1, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x40: OUT Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10 0x11* Node 0x20 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400781: Stereo Digital Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 1 0x12 Node 0x21 [Audio Output] wcaps 0x611: Stereo Digital Converter: stream=0, channel=0 Digital: Digital category: 0x0 IEC Coding Type: 0x0 PCM: rates [0x160]: 44100 48000 96000 bits [0xe]: 16 20 24 formats [0x5]: PCM AC3 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x22 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x400781: Stereo Digital Pincap 0x00000010: OUT Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Unsolicited: tag=00, enabled=0 Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 1 0x21 Node 0x23 [Pin Complex] wcaps 0x40040b: Stereo Amp-In Amp-In caps: ofs=0x00, nsteps=0x04, stepsize=0x2f, mute=0 Amp-In vals: [0x00 0x00] Pincap 0x00000020: IN Pin Default 0x40f001f0: [N/A] Other at Ext N/A Conn = Unknown, Color = Unknown DefAssociation = 0xf, Sequence = 0x0 Misc = NO_PRESENCE Pin-ctls: 0x00: Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Node 0x24 [Audio Mixer] wcaps 0x20050b: Stereo Amp-In Amp-In caps: ofs=0x4a, nsteps=0x4a, stepsize=0x03, mute=1 Amp-In vals: [0x00 0x00] [0x00 0x00] Power states: D0 D1 D2 D3 D3cold EPSS Power: setting=D0, actual=D0 Connection: 2 0x10 0x11 Node 0x25 [Vendor Defined Widget] wcaps 0xf00000: Mono

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• My Body Summary template for Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  By default, when Orchard displays a content item such as a blog post in a list, it uses a very basic summary template that removes all markup and then extracts the first 200 characters. Removing the markup has the unfortunate effect of removing all styles and images, in particular the image I like to add to the beginning of my posts. Fortunately, overriding templates in Orchard is a piece of cake. Here is the Common.Body.Summary.cshtml file that I drop into the Views/Parts folder of pretty much all Orchard themes I build: @{ Orchard.ContentManagement.ContentItem contentItem = Model.ContentPart.ContentItem; var bodyHtml = Model.Html.ToString(); var more = bodyHtml.IndexOf("<!--more-->"); if (more != -1) { bodyHtml = bodyHtml.Substring(0, more); } else { var firstP = bodyHtml.IndexOf("<p>"); var firstSlashP = bodyHtml.IndexOf("</p>"); if (firstP >=0 && firstSlashP > firstP) { bodyHtml = bodyHtml.Substring(firstP, firstSlashP + 4 - firstP); } } var body = new HtmlString(bodyHtml); } <p>@body</p> <p>@Html.ItemDisplayLink(T("Read more...").ToString(), contentItem)</p> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This template does not remove any tags, but instead looks for an HTML comment delimiting the end of the post’s intro: <!--more--> This is the same convention that is being used in WordPress, and it’s easy to add from the source view in TinyMCE or Live Writer. If such a comment is not found, the template will extract the first paragraph (delimited by <p> and </p> tags) as the summary. And if it finds neither, it will use the whole post. The template also adds a localizable link to the full post.

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• A Good Developer is So Hard to Find

  - by James Michael Hare

  Let me start out by saying I want to damn the writers of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – 2. It is eating every last shred of my free time! But as I've been churning through each puzzle and marvelling at the brain teasers and trivia within, I began to think about interviewing developers and why it seems to be so hard to find good ones.  The problem is, it seems like no matter how hard we try to find the perfect way to separate the chaff from the wheat, inevitably someone will get hired who falls far short of expectations or someone will get passed over for missing a piece of trivia or a tricky brain teaser that could have been an excellent team member.   In shops that are primarily software-producing businesses or other heavily IT-oriented businesses (Microsoft, Amazon, etc) there often exists a much tighter bond between HR and the hiring development staff because development is their life-blood. Unfortunately, many of us work in places where IT is viewed as a cost or just a means to an end. In these shops, too often, HR and development staff may work against each other due to differences in opinion as to what a good developer is or what one is worth.  It seems that if you ask two different people what makes a good developer, often you will get three different opinions.   With the exception of those shops that are purely development-centric (you guys have it much easier!), most other shops have management who have very little knowledge about the development process.  Their view can often be that development is simply a skill that one learns and then once aquired, that developer can produce widgets as good as the next like workers on an assembly-line floor.  On the other side, you have many developers that feel that software development is an art unto itself and that the ability to create the most pure design or know the most obscure of keywords or write the shortest-possible obfuscated piece of code is a good coder.  So is it a skill?  An Art?  Or something entirely in between?   Saying that software is merely a skill and one just needs to learn the syntax and tools would be akin to saying anyone who knows English and can use Word can write a 300 page book that is accurate, meaningful, and stays true to the point.  This just isn't so.  It takes more than mere skill to take words and form a sentence, join those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into a document.  I've interviewed candidates who could answer obscure syntax and keyword questions and once they were hired could not code effectively at all.  So development must be more than a skill.   But on the other end, we have art.  Is development an art?  Is our end result to produce art?  I can marvel at a piece of code -- see it as concise and beautiful -- and yet that code most perform some stated function with accuracy and efficiency and maintainability.  None of these three things have anything to do with art, per se.  Art is beauty for its own sake and is a wonderful thing.  But if you apply that same though to development it just doesn't hold.  I've had developers tell me that all that matters is the end result and how you code it is entirely part of the art and I couldn't disagree more.  Yes, the end result, the accuracy, is the prime criteria to be met.  But if code is not maintainable and efficient, it would be just as useless as a beautiful car that breaks down once a week or that gets 2 miles to the gallon.  Yes, it may work in that it moves you from point A to point B and is pretty as hell, but if it can't be maintained or is not efficient, it's not a good solution.  So development must be something less than art.   In the end, I think I feel like development is a matter of craftsmanship.  We use our tools and we use our skills and set about to construct something that satisfies a purpose and yet is also elegant and efficient.  There is skill involved, and there is an art, but really it boils down to being able to craft code.  Crafting code is far more than writing code.  Anyone can write code if they know the syntax, but so few people can actually craft code that solves a purpose and craft it well.  So this is what I want to find, I want to find code craftsman!  But how?   I used to ask coding-trivia questions a long time ago and many people still fall back on this.  The thought is that if you ask the candidate some piece of coding trivia and they know the answer it must follow that they can craft good code.  For example:   What C++ keyword can be applied to a class/struct field to allow it to be changed even from a const-instance of that class/struct?  (answer: mutable)   So what do we prove if a candidate can answer this?  Only that they know what mutable means.  One would hope that this would infer that they'd know how to use it, and more importantly when and if it should ever be used!  But it rarely does!  The problem with triva questions is that you will either: Approve a really good developer who knows what some obscure keyword is (good) Reject a really good developer who never needed to use that keyword or is too inexperienced to know how to use it (bad) Approve a really bad developer who googled "C++ Interview Questions" and studied like hell but can't craft (very bad) Many HR departments love these kind of tests because they are short and easy to defend if a legal issue arrises on hiring decisions.  After all it's easy to say a person wasn't hired because they scored 30 out of 100 on some trivia test.  But unfortunately, you've eliminated a large part of your potential developer pool and possibly hired a few duds.  There are times I've hired candidates who knew every trivia question I could throw out them and couldn't craft.  And then there are times I've interviewed candidates who failed all my trivia but who I took a chance on who were my best finds ever.    So if not trivia, then what?  Brain teasers?  The thought is, these type of questions measure the thinking power of a candidate.  The problem is, once again, you will either: Approve a good candidate who has never heard the problem and can solve it (good) Reject a good candidate who just happens not to see the "catch" because they're nervous or it may be really obscure (bad) Approve a candidate who has studied enough interview brain teasers (once again, you can google em) to recognize the "catch" or knows the answer already (bad). Once again, you're eliminating good candidates and possibly accepting bad candidates.  In these cases, I think testing someone with brain teasers only tests their ability to answer brain teasers, not the ability to craft code. So how do we measure someone's ability to craft code?  Here's a novel idea: have them code!  Give them a computer and a compiler, or a whiteboard and a pen, or paper and pencil and have them construct a piece of code.  It just makes sense that if we're going to hire someone to code we should actually watch them code.  When they're done, we can judge them on several criteria: Correctness - does the candidate's solution accurately solve the problem proposed? Accuracy - is the candidate's solution reasonably syntactically correct? Efficiency - did the candidate write or use the more efficient data structures or algorithms for the job? Maintainability - was the candidate's code free of obfuscation and clever tricks that diminish readability? Persona - are they eager and willing or aloof and egotistical?  Will they work well within your team? It may sound simple, or it may sound crazy, but when I'm looking to hire a developer, I want to see them actually develop well-crafted code.

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• Going Inside the Store

  - by David Dorf

  Location was the first "killer-tech" for smartphones, and innovators have found several ways to use it. For retail, apps exist to find nearby stores, provide coupons, and give directions to the front door. But once you enter the store, location-finding ceases to work. That's because your location is usually found by finding GPS satellites in they sky, and the store's roof blocks the signal. But it won't take technology long to solve that problem. The first problem to solve is a lack of indoor maps. Navteq and others provide very accurate maps of the outdoors, enabling navigation for cars and pedestrians. Micello is building a business creating digital maps of indoor locations like malls, convention centers, office buildings. They have over 500 live maps, including maps of IKEA stores. They claim it took them only four hours to create a map of the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto with its 1.4 million square feet and 140 retail stores. And within stores, retailers are producing more accurate plan-o-grams. I'm always impressed watching demos of our space planning from AVT. It uses CAD software to allow you to walk the virtual store and see products on the shelves. The second problem is being able to determine location inside the store so it can be overlayed on the map. There are several goals for this endeavor. Your smartphone might direct you straight to particular products, it might summon a sales associate to your location for immediate assistance, and it might send you coupons based on the aisle you're viewing. Companies like Nearbuy, ZuluTime, and Skyhook are working to master indoor location using a combination of GPS signals, WiFi, and cell tower positioning to calculate a location. (Skyhook calls this WPS, as depicted in the chart.) Today they can usually hit 10 meters accuracy, but that number is improving all the time. When it gets inside 3 meters some the goals mentioned earlier will be in easy reach. I for one can't wait until the time my iPhone leads me directly to the sprinkler heads in Lowes and Home Depot.

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• XNA extending an existing Content type

  - by Maarten

  We are doing a game in XNA that reacts to music. We need to do some offline processing of the music data and therefore we need a custom type containing the Song and some additional data: // Project AudioGameLibrary namespace AudioGameLibrary { public class GameTrack { public Song Song; public string Extra; } } We've added a Content Pipeline extension: // Project GameTrackProcessor namespace GameTrackProcessor { [ContentSerializerRuntimeType("AudioGameLibrary.GameTrack, AudioGameLibrary")] public class GameTrackContent { public SongContent SongContent; public string Extra; } [ContentProcessor(DisplayName = "GameTrack Processor")] public class GameTrackProcessor : ContentProcessor<AudioContent, GameTrackContent> { public GameTrackProcessor(){} public override GameTrackContent Process(AudioContent input, ContentProcessorContext context) { return new GameTrackContent() { SongContent = new SongProcessor().Process(input, context), Extra = "Some extra data" // Here we can do our processing on 'input' }; } } } Both the Library and the Pipeline extension are added to the Game Solution and references are also added. When trying to use this extension to load "gametrack.mp3" we run into problems however: // Project AudioGame protected override void LoadContent() { AudioGameLibrary.GameTrack gameTrack = Content.Load<AudioGameLibrary.GameTrack>("gametrack"); MediaPlayer.Play(gameTrack.Song); } The error message: Error loading "gametrack". File contains Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media.Song but trying to load as AudioGameLibrary.GameTrack. AudioGame contains references to both AudioGameLibrary and GameTrackProcessor. Are we maybe missing other references? EDIT Selecting the correct content processor helped, it loads the audio file correctly. However, when I try to process some data, e.g: public override GameTrackContent Process(AudioContent input, ContentProcessorContext context) { int count = input.Data.Count; // With this commented out it works fine return new GameTrackContent() { SongContent = new SongProcessor().Process(input, context) }; } It crashes with the following error: Managed Debugging Assistant 'PInvokeStackImbalance' has detected a problem in 'C:\Users\Maarten\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AudioGame\DebugPipeline\bin\Debug\DebugPipeline.exe'. Additional Information: A call to PInvoke function 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline!Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.UnsafeNativeMethods+AudioHelper::OpenAudioFile' has unbalanced the stack. This is likely because the managed PInvoke signature does not match the unmanaged target signature. Check that the calling convention and parameters of the PInvoke signature match the target unmanaged signature. Information from logger right before crash: Using "BuildContent" task from assembly "Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipel ine, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=842cf8be1de50553". Task "BuildContent" Building gametrack.mp3 -> bin\x86\Debug\Content\gametrack.xnb Rebuilding because asset is new Importing gametrack.mp3 with Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Mp3Imp orter Im experiencing exactly this: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/75996.aspx

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• Premature-Optimization and Performance Anxiety

  - by James Michael Hare

  While writing my post analyzing the new .NET 4 ConcurrentDictionary class (here), I fell into one of the classic blunders that I myself always love to warn about.  After analyzing the differences of time between a Dictionary with locking versus the new ConcurrentDictionary class, I noted that the ConcurrentDictionary was faster with read-heavy multi-threaded operations.  Then, I made the classic blunder of thinking that because the original Dictionary with locking was faster for those write-heavy uses, it was the best choice for those types of tasks.  In short, I fell into the premature-optimization anti-pattern. Basically, the premature-optimization anti-pattern is when a developer is coding very early for a perceived (whether rightly-or-wrongly) performance gain and sacrificing good design and maintainability in the process.  At best, the performance gains are usually negligible and at worst, can either negatively impact performance, or can degrade maintainability so much that time to market suffers or the code becomes very fragile due to the complexity. Keep in mind the distinction above.  I'm not talking about valid performance decisions.  There are decisions one should make when designing and writing an application that are valid performance decisions.  Examples of this are knowing the best data structures for a given situation (Dictionary versus List, for example) and choosing performance algorithms (linear search vs. binary search).  But these in my mind are macro optimizations.  The error is not in deciding to use a better data structure or algorithm, the anti-pattern as stated above is when you attempt to over-optimize early on in such a way that it sacrifices maintainability. In my case, I was actually considering trading the safety and maintainability gains of the ConcurrentDictionary (no locking required) for a slight performance gain by using the Dictionary with locking.  This would have been a mistake as I would be trading maintainability (ConcurrentDictionary requires no locking which helps readability) and safety (ConcurrentDictionary is safe for iteration even while being modified and you don't risk the developer locking incorrectly) -- and I fell for it even when I knew to watch out for it.  I think in my case, and it may be true for others as well, a large part of it was due to the time I was trained as a developer.  I began college in in the 90s when C and C++ was king and hardware speed and memory were still relatively priceless commodities and not to be squandered.  In those days, using a long instead of a short could waste precious resources, and as such, we were taught to try to minimize space and favor performance.  This is why in many cases such early code-bases were very hard to maintain.  I don't know how many times I heard back then to avoid too many function calls because of the overhead -- and in fact just last year I heard a new hire in the company where I work declare that she didn't want to refactor a long method because of function call overhead.  Now back then, that may have been a valid concern, but with today's modern hardware even if you're calling a trivial method in an extremely tight loop (which chances are the JIT compiler would optimize anyway) the results of removing method calls to speed up performance are negligible for the great majority of applications.  Now, obviously, there are those coding applications where speed is absolutely king (for example drivers, computer games, operating systems) where such sacrifices may be made.  But I would strongly advice against such optimization because of it's cost.  Many folks that are performing an optimization think it's always a win-win.  That they're simply adding speed to the application, what could possibly be wrong with that?  What they don't realize is the cost of their choice.  For every piece of straight-forward code that you obfuscate with performance enhancements, you risk the introduction of bugs in the long term technical debt of the application.  It will become so fragile over time that maintenance will become a nightmare.  I've seen such applications in places I have worked.  There are times I've seen applications where the designer was so obsessed with performance that they even designed their own memory management system for their application to try to squeeze out every ounce of performance.  Unfortunately, the application stability often suffers as a result and it is very difficult for anyone other than the original designer to maintain. I've even seen this recently where I heard a C++ developer bemoaning that in VS2010 the iterators are about twice as slow as they used to be because Microsoft added range checking (probably as part of the 0x standard implementation).  To me this was almost a joke.  Twice as slow sounds bad, but it almost never as bad as you think -- especially if you're gaining safety.  The only time twice is really that much slower is when once was too slow to begin with.  Think about it.  2 minutes is slow as a response time because 1 minute is slow.  But if an iterator takes 1 microsecond to move one position and a new, safer iterator takes 2 microseconds, this is trivial!  The only way you'd ever really notice this would be in iterating a collection just for the sake of iterating (i.e. no other operations).  To my mind, the added safety makes the extra time worth it. Always favor safety and maintainability when you can.  I know it can be a hard habit to break, especially if you started out your career early or in a language such as C where they are very performance conscious.  But in reality, these type of micro-optimizations only end up hurting you in the long run. Remember the two laws of optimization.  I'm not sure where I first heard these, but they are so true: For beginners: Do not optimize. For experts: Do not optimize yet. This is so true.  If you're a beginner, resist the urge to optimize at all costs.  And if you are an expert, delay that decision.  As long as you have chosen the right data structures and algorithms for your task, your performance will probably be more than sufficient.  Chances are it will be network, database, or disk hits that will be your slow-down, not your code.  As they say, 98% of your code's bottleneck is in 2% of your code so premature-optimization may add maintenance and safety debt that won't have any measurable impact.  Instead, code for maintainability and safety, and then, and only then, when you find a true bottleneck, then you should go back and optimize further.

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• How to implement an email unsubscribe system for a site with many kinds of emails?

  - by Mike Liu

  I'm working on a website that features many different types of emails. Users have accounts, and when logged in they have access to a setting page that they can use to customize what types of emails they receive. However, I'd like to also give users an easy way to unsubscribe directly in the emails they receive. I've looked into list unsubscribe headers as well as creating some type of one click link that would unsubscribe a user from that type of email without requiring login or further action. The later would probably require me to break convention and make changes to the database in response to a GET on the link. However, am I incorrect in thinking that either of these would require me to generate and permanently store a unique identifier in my database for every email I ever send, really complicating email delivery? Without that, I'm not sure how I would be able to uniquely identify a user and a type of email in order to change their email preferences, and this identifier would need to be stored forever as a user could have an email sitting in their inbox for a long time before they decide to act on it. Alternatively, I was considering having a no-login page for managing email preferences. In contrast to above where I would need one of these identifiers for each email, this would only need one identifier per user, with no generation or other action required on sending an email. All of these raise security issues, and they could potentially be used by people to tamper with others' email preferences. This could be mitigated somewhat by ensuring that the identifier is really difficult to guess. For the once per user identifier approach, I was considering generating the identifier by passing a user's ID through some type of encryption algorithm, is this a sound approach? For the per-email identifiers, perhaps I could use a user's ID appended to the time. However, even this would not eliminate the problem entirely, as this would really just be security through obscurity, and anyone with the URL could tamper, and in the end the main defense would have to be that most people aren't so bored as to tamper with other people's email preferences. Are there any other alternatives I've missed, or issues or solutions with these that anyone can provide insight on? What are best practices in this area?

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• SQL University: What and why of database refactoring

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Tools of the trade This is a second part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at what database refactoring is and why do it. Why refactor a database To know why refactor we first have to know what refactoring actually is. Code refactoring is a process where we change module internals in a way that does not change that module’s input/output behavior. For successful refactoring there is one crucial thing we absolutely must have: Tests. Automated unit tests are the only guarantee we have that we haven’t broken the input/output behavior before refactoring. If you haven’t go back ad read my post on the matter. Then start writing them. Next thing you need is a code module. Those are views, UDFs and stored procedures. By having direct table access we can kiss fast and sweet refactoring good bye. One more point to have a database abstraction layer. And no, ORM’s don’t fall into that category. But also know that refactoring is NOT adding new functionality to your code. Many have fallen into this trap. Don’t be one of them and resist the lure of the dark side. And it’s a strong lure. We developers in general love to add new stuff to our code, but hate fixing our own mistakes or changing existing code for no apparent reason. To be a good refactorer one needs discipline and focus. Now we know that refactoring is all about changing inner workings of existing code. This can be due to performance optimizations, changing internal code workflows or some other reason. This is a typical black box scenario to the outside world. If we upgrade the car engine it still has to drive on the road (preferably faster) and not fly (no matter how cool that would be). Also be aware that white box tests will break when we refactor. What to refactor in a database Refactoring databases doesn’t happen that often but when it does it can include a lot of stuff. Let us look at a few common cases. Adding or removing database schema objects Adding, removing or changing table columns in any way, adding constraints, keys, etc… All of these can be counted as internal changes not visible to the data consumer. But each of these carries a potential input/output behavior change. Dropping a column can result in views not working anymore or stored procedure logic crashing. Adding a unique constraint shows duplicated data that shouldn’t exist. Foreign keys break a truncate table command executed from an application that runs once a month. All these scenarios are very real and can happen. With the proper database abstraction layer fully covered with black box tests we can make sure something like that does not happen (hopefully at all). Changing physical structures Physical structures include heaps, indexes and partitions. We can pretty much add or remove those without changing the data returned by the database. But the performance can be affected. So here we use our performance tests. We do have them, right? Just by adding a single index we can achieve orders of magnitude performance improvement. Won’t that make users happy? But what if that index causes our write operations to crawl to a stop. again we have to test this. There are a lot of things to think about and have tests for. Without tests we can’t do successful refactoring! Fixing bad code We all have some bad code in our systems. We usually refer to that code as code smell as they violate good coding practices. Examples of such code smells are SQL injection, use of SELECT *, scalar UDFs or cursors, etc… Each of those is huge code smell and can result in major code changes. Take SELECT * from example. If we remove a column from a table the client using that SELECT * statement won’t have a clue about that until it runs. Then it will gracefully crash and burn. Not to mention the widely unknown SELECT * view refresh problem that Tomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar on Twitter) and Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT on Twitter) talk about in detail. Go read about it, it’s informative. Refactoring this includes replacing the * with column names and most likely change to application using the database. Breaking apart huge stored procedures Have you ever seen seen a stored procedure that was 2000 lines long? I have. It’s not pretty. It hurts the eyes and sucks the will to live the next 10 minutes. They are a maintenance nightmare and turn into things no one dares to touch. I’m willing to bet that 100% of time they don’t have a single test on them. Large stored procedures (and functions) are a clear sign that they contain business logic. General opinion on good database coding practices says that business logic has no business in the database. That’s the applications part. Refactoring such behemoths requires writing lots of edge case tests for the stored procedure input/output behavior and then start to refactor it. First we split the logic inside into smaller parts like new stored procedures and UDFs. Those then get called from the master stored procedure. Once we’ve successfully modularized the database code it’s best to transfer that logic into the applications consuming it. This only leaves the stored procedure with common data manipulation logic. Of course this isn’t always possible so having a plethora of performance and behavior unit tests is absolutely necessary to confirm we’ve actually improved the codebase in some way.   Refactoring is not a popular chore amongst developers or managers. The former don’t like fixing old code, the latter can’t see the financial benefit. Remember how we talked about being lousy at estimating future costs in the previous post? But there comes a time when it must be done. Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas how to get started. In the last post of the series we’ll take a look at the tools to use and an example of testing and refactoring.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (12 of 25): Andre Barnett&ndash;Reform Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Barnett is an American politician and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the information technology (IT) company WiseDome Inc.  Barnett was born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1976. He attended Austin Peay State University and Western Governors University.  A former member of the United States Armed Forces, Barnett served in Sarajevo before being wounded in a helicopter accident.  Following his military service, Barnett became a fitness model in New York. In 2001, he founded WiseDome Incorporated, an IT company that provides information technology and data recovery services. Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA), generally known as the Reform Party USA or the Reform Party, is a political party in the United States, founded in 1995 by Ross Perot. Perot said Americans were disillusioned with the state of politics—as being corrupt and unable to deal with vital issues—and desired a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The party has nominated different candidates over the years, such as founder Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Ralph Nader. The party's most significant victory came when Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. Since then, the party has been torn by infighting and disagreements, which it seeks to overcome. The Reform Party platform includes the following: * Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt * Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of the Political action committee * Enforcement of existing immigration laws and opposition to illegal immigration * Opposition to free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Central America Free Trade Agreement, and a call for withdrawal from the World Trade Organization * Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators * Direct election of the United States President by popular vote * Federal elections held on weekends A noticeable absence from the Reform Party platform has been social issues, including abortion and gay rights. Reform Party representatives had long stated beliefs that their party could bring together people from both sides of these issues, which they consider divisive, to address what they considered to be more vital concerns as expressed in their platform. The idea was to form a large coalition of moderates; that intention was overridden in 2001 by the Buchanan takeover which rewrote the RPUSA Constitution to specifically include platform planks opposed to any form of abortion. The Buchananists, in turn, were overridden by the 2002 Convention which specifically reverted the Constitution to its 1996 version and the party's original stated goals. Barnett has Ballot Access in: FL Learn more about Andre Barnett and Reform Party on Wikipedia.

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• Waterfall Model (SDLC) vs. Prototyping Model

  The characters in the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare can easily be used to demonstrate the similarities and differences between the Waterfall and Prototyping software development models. This children fable is about a race between a consistently slow moving but steadfast turtle and an extremely fast but unreliable rabbit. After closely comparing each character’s attributes in correlation with both software development models, a trend seems to appear in that the Waterfall closely resembles the Tortoise in that Waterfall Model is typically a slow moving process that is broken up in to multiple sequential steps that must be executed in a standard linear pattern. The Tortoise can be quoted several times in the story saying “Slow and steady wins the race.” This is the perfect mantra for the Waterfall Model in that this model is seen as a cumbersome and slow moving. Waterfall Model Phases Requirement Analysis & Definition This phase focuses on defining requirements for a project that is to be developed and determining if the project is even feasible. Requirements are collected by analyzing existing systems and functionality in correlation with the needs of the business and the desires of the end users. The desired output for this phase is a list of specific requirements from the business that are to be designed and implemented in the subsequent steps. In addition this phase is used to determine if any value will be gained by completing the project. System Design This phase focuses primarily on the actual architectural design of a system, and how it will interact within itself and with other existing applications. Projects at this level should be viewed at a high level so that actual implementation details are decided in the implementation phase. However major environmental decision like hardware and platform decision are typically decided in this phase. Furthermore the basic goal of this phase is to design an application at the system level in those classes, interfaces, and interactions are defined. Additionally decisions about scalability, distribution and reliability should also be considered for all decisions. The desired output for this phase is a functional  design document that states all of the architectural decisions that have been made in regards to the project as well as a diagrams like a sequence and class diagrams. Software Design This phase focuses primarily on the refining of the decisions found in the functional design document. Classes and interfaces are further broken down in to logical modules based on the interfaces and interactions previously indicated. The output of this phase is a formal design document. Implementation / Coding This phase focuses primarily on implementing the previously defined modules in to units of code. These units are developed independently are intergraded as the system is put together as part of a whole system. Software Integration & Verification This phase primarily focuses on testing each of the units of code developed as well as testing the system as a whole. There are basic types of testing at this phase and they include: Unit Test and Integration Test. Unit Test are built to test the functionality of a code unit to ensure that it preforms its desired task. Integration testing test the system as a whole because it focuses on results of combining specific units of code and validating it against expected results. The output of this phase is a test plan that includes test with expected results and actual results. System Verification This phase primarily focuses on testing the system as a whole in regards to the list of project requirements and desired operating environment. Operation & Maintenance his phase primarily focuses on handing off the competed project over to the customer so that they can verify that all of their requirements have been met based on their original requirements. This phase will also validate the correctness of their requirements and if any changed need to be made. In addition, any problems not resolved in the previous phase will be handled in this section. The Waterfall Model’s linear and sequential methodology does offer a project certain advantages and disadvantages. Advantages of the Waterfall Model Simplistic to implement and execute for projects and/or company wide Limited demand on resources Large emphasis on documentation Disadvantages of the Waterfall Model Completed phases cannot be revisited regardless if issues arise within a project Accurate requirement are never gather prior to the completion of the requirement phase due to the lack of clarification in regards to client’s desires. Small changes or errors that arise in applications may cause additional problems The client cannot change any requirements once the requirements phase has been completed leaving them no options for changes as they see their requirements changes as the customers desires change. Excess documentation Phases are cumbersome and slow moving Learn more about the Major Process in the Sofware Development Life Cycle and Waterfall Model. Conversely, the Hare shares similar traits with the prototyping software development model in that ideas are rapidly converted to basic working examples and subsequent changes are made to quickly align the project with customers desires as they are formulated and as software strays from the customers vision. The basic concept of prototyping is to eliminate the use of well-defined project requirements. Projects are allowed to grow as the customer needs and request grow. Projects are initially designed according to basic requirements and are refined as requirement become more refined. This process allows customer to feel their way around the application to ensure that they are developing exactly what they want in the application This model also works well for determining the feasibility of certain approaches in regards to an application. Prototypes allow for quickly developing examples of implementing specific functionality based on certain techniques. Advantages of Prototyping Active participation from users and customers Allows customers to change their mind in specifying requirements Customers get a better understanding of the system as it is developed Earlier bug/error detection Promotes communication with customers Prototype could be used as final production Reduced time needed to develop applications compared to the Waterfall method Disadvantages of Prototyping Promotes constantly redefining project requirements that cause major system rewrites Potential for increased complexity of a system as scope of the system expands Customer could believe the prototype as the working version. Implementation compromises could increase the complexity when applying updates and or application fixes When companies trying to decide between the Waterfall model and Prototype model they need to evaluate the benefits and disadvantages for both models. Typically smaller companies or projects that have major time constraints typically head for more of a Prototype model approach because it can reduce the time needed to complete the project because there is more of a focus on building a project and less on defining requirements and scope prior to the start of a project. On the other hand, Companies with well-defined requirements and time allowed to generate proper documentation should steer towards more of a waterfall model because they are in a position to obtain clarified requirements and have to design and optimal solution prior to the start of coding on a project.

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• Is ASP.NET MVC completely (and exclusively) based on conventions?

  - by Mike Valeriano

  --TL;DR Is there a "Hello World!" ASP.NET MVC tutorial out there that doesn't rely on conventions and "stock" projects? Is it even possible to take advantage of the technology without reusing the default file structure, and start from a single "hello_world.asp" file or something (like in PHP)? Am I completely mistaken and I should be looking somewhere else, maybe this? I'm interested in the MVC framework, not Web Forms --Background I've played a bit with PHP in the past, just for fun, and now I'm back to it since web development became relevant for me once again. I'm no professional, but I try to gain as much knowledge and control over the technology I'm working with as possible. I'm using Visual Studio 2012 for C# - my "desktop" language of choice - and since I got the Professional Edition from Dreamspark, the Web Development Tools are available, including ASP.NET MVC 4. I won't touch Web Forms, but the MVC Framework got my attention because the MVC pattern is something I can really relate to, since it provides the control I want but... not quite. Learning PHP was easy - and right form the start I could just create a "hello_world.php" file and just do something like this for immediate results: <!-- file: hello_world.php --> <?php> echo "Hello World!"; <?> But I couldn't find a single ASP.NET (MVC) tutorial out there (I'll be sure to buy one of the upcoming MVC 4 books, only a month away or so) that would start like that. They all start with a sample project, building up knowledge from the basics and heavily using conventions as they go along. Which is fine, I suppose, but it's now the best way for me to learn things. Even the "Empty" project template for a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Application in VS2012 is not empty at all: several files and folders are created for you - much like a new C# desktop application project, but with C# I can in fact start from scratch, creating the project structure myself. It is not the case with PHP: I can choose from a plethora of different MVC frameworks I can just create my own framework I can just skip frameworks altogether, and toss random PHP along with my HTML on a single file and make it work I understand the framework needs to establish some rules, but what if I just want to create a single page website with some C# logic behind it? Do I really need to create a whole bloat of files and folders for the sake of convention? Also, please understand that I haven't gotten far on any of those tutorials mainly because of this reason, but, if that's the only way to do it, I'll go for it using one of the books I've mentioned before. This is my first contact with ASP.NET but from the few comparisons I've read, I believe I should stay the hell away from Web Forms. Thank you. (Please forgive the broken English - it is not my primary language.)

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• Thoughts on Build 2013

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/06/30/153294.aspxAnd so another Build conference has come to an end. Below are my thoughts/perspectives on various aspects of the event. I’ll do a separate blog post on my thoughts of the Build message for developers. The Good Moscone center was a great venue for Build! Easy to get around, easy to get to, and well maintained, it was a very comfortable conference venue. Yeah, the free swag was nice. Build has built up an expectation that attendees will always get something; it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft maintains this expectation over the next few Build events. I still maintain that free swag should never be the main reason one attends an event, and for me this was definitely just an added bonus. I’m planning on trying to use the Surface as a dedicated 2nd device at work for meetings, I’ll share my experiences over the next few months. The hackathon event was a great idea, although personally I couldn’t justify spending the money on a conference registration just to spend the entire conference coding. Still, the apps that were created were really great and there was a lot of passion and excitement around the hackathon. I wonder if they couldn’t have had the hackathon on the Monday/Tuesday for those that wanted to participate so they didn’t miss any of the actual conference over Wed/Thurs. San Francisco was a great city to host Build. Getting from hotels to the conference center was very easy (well especially for me, I was only 3 blocks away) and the city itself felt very safe. However, if I never have to fly into SFO again I’ll be alright with that! Delays going into and out of SFO and both apparently were due to the airport itself. The Bad Build is one of those oddities on the conference landscape where people will pay to commit to attending an event without knowing anything about the sessions. We got our list of conference sessions when we registered on Tuesday, not before. And even then, we only got titles and not descriptions (those were eventually made available via the conference’s mobile application). I get it…they’re going to make announcements and they don’t want to give anything away through the session titles. But honestly, there wasn’t anything in the session titles that I would have considered a surprise. Breakfasts were brutal. High-carb pastries, donuts, and muffins with fruit and hard boiled eggs does not a conference breakfast make. I can’t believe that the difference between a continental breakfast per person and a hot breakfast buffet would have been a huge impact to a conference fee that was already around $2000. The vendor area was anemic. I don’t know why Microsoft forces the vendors into cookie-cutter booth areas (this year they were all made of plywood material). WPC, TechEd – booth areas there allow the vendors to be creative with their displays. Not so much for Build. Really odd was the lack of Microsoft’s own representation around Bing. In the day 1 keynote Microsoft made a big deal about Bing as an API. Yet there was nobody in the vendor area set up to provide more information or have discussions with about the Bing API. The Ugly Our name badges were NFC enabled. The purpose of this, beyond the vendors being able to scan your info, wasn’t really made clear. An attendee I talked to showed how you could get a reader app on your phone so you can scan other members cards and collect their contact info – which is a kewl idea; business cards are so 1990’s. But I was *shocked* at the amount of information that was on our name badges! Here’s what’s displayed on our name badge: - Name - Company - Twitter Handle I’m ok with that. But here’s what actually gets read: - Name - Company - Address Used for Registration - Phone Number Used for Registration So sharing that info with another attendee, they get way more of my info than just how to find me on Twitter! Microsoft, you need to fix this for the future. If vendors want to collect information on attendees, they should be able to collect an ID from the badge, then get a report with corresponding records afterwards. My personal information should not be so readily available, and without my knowledge! Final Verdict Maybe its my older age, maybe its where I’m at in life with family, maybe its where I’m at in my career, but when I consider whether a conference experience was valuable I get to the core reason I attend: opportunities to learn, opportunities to network, opportunities to engage with Microsoft. Opportunities to Learn:  Sessions I attended were generally OK, with some really stand out ones on Day 2. I would love to see Microsoft adopt the Dojo format for a portion of their sessions. Hands On Labs are dull, lecture style sessions are great for information sharing. But a guided hands-on coding session (Read: Dojo) provides the best of both worlds. Being that all content is publically available online to everyone (Build attendee or not), the value of attending the conference sessions is decreased. The value though is in the discussions that take part in person afterwards, which leads to… Opportunities to Network: I enjoyed getting together with old friends and connecting with Twitter friends in person for the first time. I also had an opportunity to meet total strangers. So from a networking perspective, Build was fantastic! I still think it would have been great to have an area for ad-hoc discussions – where speakers could announce they’d be available for more questions after their sessions, or attendees who wanted to discuss more in depth on a topic with other attendees could arrange space. Some people have no problems being outgoing and making these things happen, but others are not and a structured model is more attractive. Opportunities to Engage with Microsoft: Hit and miss on this one. Outside of the vendor area, unless you cornered or reached out to a speaker, there wasn’t any defined way to connect with blue badges. And as I mentioned above, Microsoft didn’t have full representation in the vendor area (no Bing). All in all, Build was a fun party where I was informed about some new stuff and got some free swag. Was it worth the time away from home and the hit to my PD budget? I’d say Somewhat. Build is a great informational conference, but I wouldn’t call it a learning conference. Considering that TechEd seems to be moving to more of an IT Pro focus, independent developer conferences seem to be the best value for those looking to learn and not just be informed. With the rapid development cycle Microsoft is embracing, we’re already seeing Build happening twice within a 12 month period. If that continues, the value of attending Build in person starts to diminish – especially with so much content available online. If Microsoft wants Build to be a must-attend event in the future, they need to start incorporating aspects of Tech Ed, past PDCs, and other conferences so those that want to leave with more than free swag have something to attract them.

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• What source code organization approach helps improve modularity and API/Implementation separation?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  Few languages are as restrictive as Java with file naming standards and project structure. In that language, the file name must match the public class declared in the file, and the file must live in a directory structure matching the class package. I have mixed feelings about that approach. While I never have to guess where a file lives, there's still a lot of empty directories and artificial constraints. There's several languages that define everything about a class in one file, at least by convention. C#, Python (I think), Ruby, Erlang, etc. The commonality in most these languages is that they are object oriented, although that statement can probably be rebuffed (there is one non-OO language in the list already). Finally, there's quite a few languages mostly in the C family that have a separate header and implementation file. For C I think this makes sense, because it is one of the few ways to separate the API interface from implementations. With C it seems that feature is used to promote modularity. Yet, with C++ the way header and implementation files are split seems rather forced. You don't get the same clean API separation that you do with C, and you are forced to include some private details in the header you would rather keep only in the implementation. There's quite a few languages that have a concept that overlaps with interfaces like Java, C#, Go, etc. Some languages use what feels like a hack to provide the same concept like C# using pure virtual abstract classes. Still others don't really have an interface concept and rely on "duck" typing--for example Ruby. Ruby has modules, but those are more along the lines of mixing in behaviors to a class than they are for defining how to interact with a class. In OO terms, interfaces are a powerful way to provide separation between an API client and an API implementation. So to hurry up and ask the question, from a personal experience point of view: Does separation of header and implementation help you write more modular code, or does it get in the way? (it helps to specify the language you are referring to) Does the strict file name to class name scheme of Java help maintainability, or is it unnecessary structure for structure's sake? What would you propose to promote good API/Implementation separation and project maintenance, how would you prefer to do it?

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