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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 13, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 13, 2012Popular ReleasesCatel - WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 MVVM toolkit: 3.1 beta 1: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com Documentation can be found at: http://catel.catenalogic.com ********************************************************** =========== Version 3.1 =========== Release date: ============= 2012/xx/xx Added/fixed: ============ (+) Added OnDataContextChanged and OnPropertyChanged to UserControl, DataWindow, Page ...Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching and Merging Guide: v2 - For Visual Studio 11: Welcome to the BETA of the Branching and Merging Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation has been reviewed by the quality and recording te...Media Companion: MC 3.435b Release: This release should be the last beta for 3.4xx. A handful of problems have been sorted out since last weeks release. If there are no major problems this time, it will upgraded to 3.500 Stable at the end of the week! General The .NET Framework has been modified to use the Client profile, as provided by normal Windows updates; no longer is there a requirement to download and install the Full profile! mc_com.exe has been worked on to mimic proper Media Companion output (a big thanks to vbat99...THE NVL Maker: The NVL Maker Ver 3.12: SIM??????，TRA??????，ZIP????。 ????????????????，??????~（??????????????????） ??????? simpatch1440x900 trapatch1440x900 ?????1400x900??1440x900，?????????????Data.xp3。 ???? ?????3.12?EXE????????????????， ??????????????，??Tool/krkrconf.exe，??Editor.exe， ???????????????「??????」。 ?????Editor.exe??????。 ???? ???? http://etale.us/gameupload/THE_NVL_Maker_ver3.12_sim.zip ???? http://www.mediafire.com/?je51683g22bz8vo ??Infinite Creation?? http://bbs.etale.us/forum.php ?????? ???? 3.12 ??? ???、????...SQL DAC Examples: DAC SQL Azure Import Export Service Client v 1.5: Latest version for the service client. Changes Refactored the sources to make the client implemenation as simple and streamlined as possible Fixed "type initializer" configuration issues in the previous release Updated SQL Azure datacenter mappingsSnmpMessenger: 0.1.1.1: Project Description SnmpMessenger, a messenger. Using the SNMP protocol to exchange messages. It's developed in C#. SnmpMessenger For .Net 4.0, Mono 2.8. Support SNMP V1, V2, V3. Features Send get, set and other requests and get the response. Send and receive traps. Handle requests and return the response. Note This library is compliant with the Common Language Specification(CLS). The latest version is 0.1.1.1. It is only a messenger, does not involve VACM. Any problems, Please mailto: wa...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.1.1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython and IronPython • Python editor with advanced member and signature intellisense • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging • Profiling with multiple view...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Team Foundation Service Whitepapers: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Service Whitepapers preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issue...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.42.550 (BETA): Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core RELEASE NOTES Version 2.42.550 11 April 2012 BETA VERSION WARNING: This is a beta version! Please note: - API changes may be made before the next version (2.42.600) - The designer will not show modules/mainboards for NETMF 4.2 until you get upgraded libraries from the module/mainboard vendors - Install NETMF 4.2 (see link below) to use the new features of this release That warning aside, this version should continue to sup...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.24: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, and Client Profile. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Kendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-04-11): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 2: New feature - Added support for the SerializableAttribute and serializing a type's internal fields New feature - Added MaxDepth to JsonReader/JsonSerializer/JsonSerializerSettings New feature - Added support for ignoring properties with the NonSerializableAttribute Fix - Fixed deserializing a null string throwing a NullReferenceException Fix - Fixed JsonTextReader reading from a slow stream Fix - Fixed CultureInfo not being overridden on JsonSerializerProxy Fix - Fixed full trust ...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Improved WMI date conversion to be aware of timezone differences and DST. Fixed new version check. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively availab...Dual Browsing: Dual Browser: Please note the following: I setup the address bar temporarily to only accepts http:// .com addresses. Just type in the name of the website excluding: http://, www., and .com; (Ex: for www.youtube.com just type: youtube then click OK). The page splitter can be grabbed by holding down your left mouse button and move left or right. By right clicking on the page background, you can choose to refresh, go back a page and so on. Demo video: http://youtu.be/L7NTFVM3JUYPhoenix Service Bus: PServiceBus 2.0.0: Note Before installing 2.0.0, please uninstall 1.0.2 to make sure that 2.0.0 is not corrupted when installed. If you download the 2.0.0 version from 4/10/2012 9am-2pm, you might want to re-download because the version was corrupted. Feature/Changes Replace WCF Gateway Service with a ZeroMQ implementation Improve performance of TCP based transports such as (Low Level TCP Itself, RabbitMQ, Redis, e.t.c) Improve performance of message publishing when dealing with single message rather...Liberty: v3.2.0.1 Release 9th April 2012: Change Log-Fixed -Reach Fixed a bug where the object editor did not work on non-English operating systemsPath Copy Copy: 10.1: This release addresses the following work items: 11357 11358 11359 This release is a recommended upgrade, especially for users who didn't install the 10.0.1 version.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.3: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-04-08 v3.1.3 -??Language="zh_TW"?JS???BUG（??）。 +?D...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.5: New Controls ChatBubble ChatBubbleTextBox OpacityToggleButton New Stuff TimeSpan languages added: RU, SK, CS Expose the physics math from TimeSpanPicker Image Stretch now on buttons Bug Fixes Layout fix so RoundToggleButton and RoundButton are exactly the same Fix for ColorPicker when set via code behind ToastPrompt bug fix with OnNavigatedTo Toast now adjusts its layout if the SIP is up Fixed some issues with Expression Blend supportHarness - Internet Explorer Automation: Harness 2.0.3: support the operation fo frameset, frame and iframe Add commands SwitchFrame GetUrl GoBack GoForward Refresh SetTimeout GetTimeout Rename commands GetActiveWindow to GetActiveBrowser SetActiveWindow to SetActiveBrowser FindWindowAll to FindBrowser NewWindow to NewBrowser GetMajorVersion to GetVersionNew Projects.NET Gadgeteer Light: This is a light weight version of the Gadgeteer framework. Although it lacks quite some support (making it lighter), it can be very useful to use Gadgeteer drivers and modules on non-gadgeteer hardware.Bloog: Yet another frickin' blog appC# compiler improvements: This project is a proof of concept which demonstrate how to improve a compiler using Roslyn. CallBack: Callback is a library written in pure Lua which helps you trigger custom defined functions automatically when your code is running according to the time. Functions can be runned once after a set time, periodically after an amount time, or many times successively.CeairCarbin: One Project About A Carbin Department Manager System About News WrokFlow SaraleChinchilla: Advanced Programming using Small Basic to create a cool 2-D video game. With enough depth (no pun intended) to branch into a 3-D version. This is a project based example for teaching a home school class for 13-17 year olds.ChlodnyWebApi: Created to demostrate ASP.NET WebAPI usefulness in a multi-targeted client scenario. See Examples and documentation at: http://researchaholic.com/Delete SharePoint List Column: preliminary on-going project to provide an easy to delete columns from a SharePoint list. Upload into SharePoint makes it easier for administrators to delete stuck columns. It's developed in C#.Directories Creater: <dirCreater> create lots of directories in simple way! <c#> <vs2010>Eclipse Project: Eclipse project Team ExplorerFlot.Net: Flot.Net provides a .Net wrapper around the Flot jQuery charting library. It is developed in C# 3.5 I created this project as I found the javascript notation difficult to create, and so developed an opbject model around the flot objects so I could cerate charts in a common language. I have used this project in an MVC environment and it serves my purpose for this. I wanted to keep the API as simple as possible.GRE Word Study: MVC application using ASP.NETJHWF Admin: Back end for jhwfKKZCodeHelper: KKOMZI Code HelperKkzSSIKORHelper: KKOMZI VB CS Helper AppLiMiao jiesuanshu: limiao de jiesuanshuManagement tool for MWT: This project though focused on creating a tool for the MWT management to use is a place to exercise the latest technology trends in the .NET community. I intend to use the best design practices the technologies like WCF, regex, HTML5, Jquery, WPF(maybe).MyHydroServer: MyHydroServer (HydroServer Lite) is a lightweight version of the CUAHSI HydroServer written in PHP. It can be run on any webhosting service that supports PHP and MySQL. The goal of this project is to make it easier to set up your own HydroServer.nanoCMS: nanoCMS is free, community driven modular CMS and platform designed for delivering rich web applications. It serves two main purposes. First for developers it provides easy expandable and customizable platform for creating web applications. Second for normal user it provides a siNetSysInfo: NetSysInfo is a free software which displays information about system like Uptime, CPU, Memory, Drives devices, Network adapters, Disk Usage, Processes, Services and more.NewFifa: My fifa the best technologyOrdinapoche: An implementation of the Ordinapoche (also known as CARDIAC in English) cardboard computer.Plan 9 Software: Home of our Open Source CodePrettyFormat: PrettyFormat is a small library of string formatters for .NET. It's developed in C# and is fully localizable.pruebasandroid: pruebas con eclipseRMath and RMath for .Net: We provide pre-compiled Windows binaries for RMath library. RMath provides stable implementation for commonly used special functions, e.g. bessel family. We also provide a .Net wrapper for the native RMath DLL with documentation and usage examples in C# and F#.Security with Visual Understanding: A Kinect home security camera. Security with Visual Understanding (SVU) is a hardware/software solution which provides a more accurate security camera. SVU uses the Microsoft Kinect to provide these capabilities. SVU recognizes when a human enters the image and furthermore, is able to differentiate between known and unknown persons by maintaining a database of known persons’ skeleton dimensions. These combined capabilities allow SVU to deliver an intelligent, autonomous security system ca...SPDeveloperDashboardFilter: This project contains the javascript code to enhance the useability of the developer dashboard.SSIS Checksum Transformation: The Checksum Transformation Calculates hash values for one or more rows using a variety of methods like MD5, RIPEMD160, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384 and SHA512.test01: firsttesttom04122012hg01: testtom04122012hg01testtom04122012tfs01: testtom04122012tfs01Tinter: Tinter is a online tool about personal information management. Such as post to-do list or notes, record financial activities, etc. It's developed in C# and will involve more new technologies as a practice project.Twicko: Simple twitter client.Vaffanculo: None.web2call: Providing live chat support over website is now an old technique to facilitate customer. web2call will allow you to place a callback button on your website where user can click and connect automatically to one of your call center representative.

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• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, April 12, 2012Popular ReleasesSnmpMessenger: 0.1.1.1: Project Description SnmpMessenger, a messenger. Using the SNMP protocol to exchange messages. It's developed in C#. SnmpMessenger For .Net 4.0, Mono 2.8. Support SNMP V1, V2, V3. Features Send get, set and other requests and get the response. Send and receive traps. Handle requests and return the response. Note This library is compliant with the Common Language Specification(CLS). The latest version is 0.1.1.1. It is only a messenger, does not involve VACM. Any problems, Please mailto: wa...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.1.1: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including: • Supports CPython and IronPython • Python editor with advanced member and signature intellisense • Code navigation: “Find all refs”, goto definition, and object browser • Local and remote debugging • Profiling with multiple view...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Team Foundation Service Whitepapers: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Service Whitepapers preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issue...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.42.550 (BETA): Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core RELEASE NOTES Version 2.42.550 11 April 2012 BETA VERSION WARNING: This is a beta version! Please note: - API changes may be made before the next version (2.42.600) - The designer will not show modules/mainboards for NETMF 4.2 until you get upgraded libraries from the module/mainboard vendors - Install NETMF 4.2 (see link below) to use the new features of this release That warning aside, this version should continue to sup...DISM GUI: DISM GUI 3.1.1: Fixes - Fixed a bug in the Delete Driver function - The Index field is now auto populated with the number 1LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.24: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, and Client Profile. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Kendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-04-11): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 2: New feature - Added support for the SerializableAttribute and serializing a type's internal fields New feature - Added MaxDepth to JsonReader/JsonSerializer/JsonSerializerSettings New feature - Added support for ignoring properties with the NonSerializableAttribute Fix - Fixed deserializing a null string throwing a NullReferenceException Fix - Fixed JsonTextReader reading from a slow stream Fix - Fixed CultureInfo not being overridden on JsonSerializerProxy Fix - Fixed full trust ...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Improved WMI date conversion to be aware of timezone differences and DST. Fixed new version check. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively availab...Dual Browsing: Dual Browser: Please note the following: I setup the address bar temporarily to only accepts http:// .com addresses. Just type in the name of the website excluding: http://, www., and .com; (Ex: for www.youtube.com just type: youtube then click OK). The page splitter can be grabbed by holding down your left mouse button and move left or right. By right clicking on the page background, you can choose to refresh, go back a page and so on. Demo video: http://youtu.be/L7NTFVM3JUYCslaGenFork: Rules sample v.1.1.0: On projects for CSLA v.4.2.2, added 5 new Business Rules: - DependencyFrom - RequiredWhenCanWrite - RequiredWhenIsNotNew - RequiredWhenNew - StopIfNotFieldExists Added new projects for CSLA v.4.3.10 with 6 new Business Rules: - DependencyFrom - FieldExists - RequiredWhenCanWrite - RequiredWhenIsNotNew - RequiredWhenNew - StopIfNotFieldExists Following CSLA convention, SL stands for Silverligth 5 and SL4 stands for Silverlight 4. NOTE - Although the projects for CSLA v.4.1.0 still exist, thi...Multiwfn: Multiwfn 2.3.3: Multiwfn 2.3.3Liberty: v3.2.0.1 Release 9th April 2012: Change Log-Fixed -Reach Fixed a bug where the object editor did not work on non-English operating systemsCommonData - Common Functions for ASP.NET projects: CommonData 0.3L: Common Data has been updated to the latest NUnit (2.6.0) The demo project has been updated with an example on how to correctly compare a floating point value.ASP.Net MVC Dynamic JS/CSS Script Compression Framework: Initial Stable: Initial Stable Version Contains Source for Compression Library and example for usage in web application.Path Copy Copy: 10.1: This release addresses the following work items: 11357 11358 11359 This release is a recommended upgrade, especially for users who didn't install the 10.0.1 version.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.3: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-04-08 v3.1.3 -??Language="zh_TW"?JS???BUG（??）。 +?D...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.5: New Controls ChatBubble ChatBubbleTextBox OpacityToggleButton New Stuff TimeSpan languages added: RU, SK, CS Expose the physics math from TimeSpanPicker Image Stretch now on buttons Bug Fixes Layout fix so RoundToggleButton and RoundButton are exactly the same Fix for ColorPicker when set via code behind ToastPrompt bug fix with OnNavigatedTo Toast now adjusts its layout if the SIP is up Fixed some issues with Expression Blend supportHarness - Internet Explorer Automation: Harness 2.0.3: support the operation fo frameset, frame and iframe Add commands SwitchFrame GetUrl GoBack GoForward Refresh SetTimeout GetTimeout Rename commands GetActiveWindow to GetActiveBrowser SetActiveWindow to SetActiveBrowser FindWindowAll to FindBrowser NewWindow to NewBrowser GetMajorVersion to GetVersionBetter Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.861 Alpha: - fixed new folder button operation not work well in some situations - removed some unnecessary code like subclassing that is not needed anymore - Added option to make Better Exlorer default (at least for WIN+E operations) - Added option to enable file operation replacements (like Terracopy) to work with Better Explorer - Added some basic usability to "Share" button - Other fixesNew ProjectsAzure Diagnostics Monitor: Just another tool to monitor the Windows Azure Diagnostics logs. The tool runs on Windows and requires .NET Framework 4.0.BSF - Business solution framework: BSF covers components and patterns that span from server to client side. It focuses on developer's productivity and rich configurable operational support. Its main goal is to streamline business solution development letting developers focus on business requirements.ceshi: makes it easier for cms cmdb hierarquico: CMDB leve organizado de forma hierárquica, e com opção para ter informações criptografadas CRCMS: CRCMS PhoenixFong Plugin Engine: This is a basic plugin engine that was written in Visual Basic.NET. It can be placed in applications so that they can easily be extended.Golabetoon: This is my AI Project trying to change Finglish writing to FarsiHomeProjects: Collection of Many "Home" ProjectsHyper-V Management Library in C#: A C# library to manage Hyper-V server (network switch settings, VM configurations, etc.) via WMI APIsIQ.DbA: IQ.DbA is a light weight database management tool. - Easily browse through your table's data, run queries. - Compare schema / meta data. - Compare & synchronize table data (schema must be the same). - Create, Backup & Restore Db. - View & kill connections.JavaProjects: Proyectos en javaLLBLGen Pro LINQPad Driver: LINQPad driver for LLBLGen Pro v3.5 or higher. The LLBLGen Pro v3.5 LINQPad driver is the official LINQPad driver for LLBLGen Pro v3.5 from Solutions Design bv. It contains all the features necessary to use your generated code assemblies (adapter or selfservicing) directly onto your database using Linq, QuerySpec or the low-level query api. Developed by Solutions Design and Jeremy Thomas.Mini-C#: Interactive C# interpreter using Roslyn.Orchard HTML KickStart: This Orchard CMS module allows you to activate the HTML KickStart scripts and stylesheets without changing your existing theme. The HTML KickStart scripts and stylesheets can be turned on through settings.persistance_personnels_elabouyi: Projet d'étude test TFSqBugger: Powered by qSoftware the fast ajax Professional Issue Tracker.Realm Offline Server: Nonesaleprice: This project is about sale systemScrum Factory 2012: This is the newest and improved version of The Scrum Factory. Scrum Factory is a client-server application that helps teams to conduct software development projects using Scrum methodology. SQL Server Error Log Parsing module: The SQL Server Error Log Parsing module enables efficient analysis of SQL Server's error log (ERRORLOG). This binary PowerShell module parses the ERRORLOG text file and returns the corresponding message IDs and message parameters.Sql Team Server: Sql Team Server aims to provide database compare and synchronization across project teams and members.T4MVC: T4MVC is a T4 template for ASP.NET MVC apps that creates strongly typed helpers that eliminate the use of literal strings when referring the controllers, actions and views.The HTTP Web Server: The HTTP Web Server is an easy-to-use, FAST web hosting server that is written in C#. It has a built-in Install/Uninstall menu and is console based.The Uncle Tony Project: We're going to test the team explorer thing.tigera: a source depot from 2007-now I had written. + ---- exchanges api & framework VxiChat: P2P chatingWCF Data Services Action Provider for Entity Framework: This is a sample implementation of a WCF Data Services IDataServiceActionProvider for the Entity FrameworkWindows Phone SSLStream: WIPWorld of Warcraft Backit up(wow backit up): a project that helps you backup and restore your settings in wow easilyWT Analyse: A GUI Front end for FAST, using XFOIL, utilising AirfoilPrep Code. Written in C#.wuhua tutorial: wuhuaXSockets.WebRTC.Prototype: This example project of XSockets.NET WebRTC Support using WebSockets, PeerConnection, getUserMedia and more is built to show you how we can put together powerfull Realtime audio/video chats just using the browser.????SDK: Help people find your project. Write a concise, reader-focused summary.

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• ASPNET WebAPI REST Guidance

  - by JoshReuben

  ASP.NET Web API is an ideal platform for building RESTful applications on the .NET Framework. While I may be more partial to NodeJS these days, there is no denying that WebAPI is a well engineered framework. What follows is my investigation of how to leverage WebAPI to construct a RESTful frontend API.   The Advantages of REST Methodology over SOAP Simpler API for CRUD ops Standardize Development methodology - consistent and intuitive Standards based à client interop Wide industry adoption, Ease of use à easy to add new devs Avoid service method signature blowout Smaller payloads than SOAP Stateless à no session data means multi-tenant scalability Cache-ability Testability   General RESTful API Design Overview · utilize HTTP Protocol - Usage of HTTP methods for CRUD, standard HTTP response codes, common HTTP headers and Mime Types · Resources are mapped to URLs, actions are mapped to verbs and the rest goes in the headers. · keep the API semantic, resource-centric – A RESTful, resource-oriented service exposes a URI for every piece of data the client might want to operate on. A REST-RPC Hybrid exposes a URI for every operation the client might perform: one URI to fetch a piece of data, a different URI to delete that same data. utilize Uri to specify CRUD op, version, language, output format: http://api.MyApp.com/{ver}/{lang}/{resource_type}/{resource_id}.{output_format}?{key&filters} · entity CRUD operations are matched to HTTP methods: · Create - POST / PUT · Read – GET - cacheable · Update – PUT · Delete - DELETE · Use Uris to represent a hierarchies - Resources in RESTful URLs are often chained · Statelessness allows for idempotency – apply an op multiple times without changing the result. POST is non-idempotent, the rest are idempotent (if DELETE flags records instead of deleting them). · Cache indication - Leverage HTTP headers to label cacheable content and indicate the permitted duration of cache · PUT vs POST - The client uses PUT when it determines which URI (Id key) the new resource should have. The client uses POST when the server determines they key. PUT takes a second param – the id. POST creates a new resource. The server assigns the URI for the new object and returns this URI as part of the response message. Note: The PUT method replaces the entire entity. That is, the client is expected to send a complete representation of the updated product. If you want to support partial updates, the PATCH method is preferred DELETE deletes a resource at a specified URI – typically takes an id param · Leverage Common HTTP Response Codes in response headers 200 OK: Success 201 Created - Used on POST request when creating a new resource. 304 Not Modified: no new data to return. 400 Bad Request: Invalid Request. 401 Unauthorized: Authentication. 403 Forbidden: Authorization 404 Not Found – entity does not exist. 406 Not Acceptable – bad params. 409 Conflict - For POST / PUT requests if the resource already exists. 500 Internal Server Error 503 Service Unavailable · Leverage uncommon HTTP Verbs to reduce payload sizes HEAD - retrieves just the resource meta-information. OPTIONS returns the actions supported for the specified resource. PATCH - partial modification of a resource. · When using PUT, POST or PATCH, send the data as a document in the body of the request. Don't use query parameters to alter state. · Utilize Headers for content negotiation, caching, authorization, throttling o Content Negotiation – choose representation (e.g. JSON or XML and version), language & compression. Signal via RequestHeader.Accept & ResponseHeader.Content-Type Accept: application/json;version=1.0 Accept-Language: en-US Accept-Charset: UTF-8 Accept-Encoding: gzip o Caching - ResponseHeader: Expires (absolute expiry time) or Cache-Control (relative expiry time) o Authorization - basic HTTP authentication uses the RequestHeader.Authorization to specify a base64 encoded string "username:password". can be used in combination with SSL/TLS (HTTPS) and leverage OAuth2 3rd party token-claims authorization. Authorization: Basic sQJlaTp5ZWFslylnaNZ= o Rate Limiting - Not currently part of HTTP so specify non-standard headers prefixed with X- in the ResponseHeader. X-RateLimit-Limit: 10000 X-RateLimit-Remaining: 9990 · HATEOAS Methodology - Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State – leverage API as a state machine where resources are states and the transitions between states are links between resources and are included in their representation (hypermedia) – get API metadata signatures from the response Link header - in a truly REST based architecture any URL, except the initial URL, can be changed, even to other servers, without worrying about the client. · error responses - Do not just send back a 200 OK with every response. Response should consist of HTTP error status code (JQuery has automated support for this), A human readable message , A Link to a meaningful state transition , & the original data payload that was problematic. · the URIs will typically map to a server-side controller and a method name specified by the type of request method. Stuff all your calls into just four methods is not as crazy as it sounds. · Scoping - Path variables look like you’re traversing a hierarchy, and query variables look like you’re passing arguments into an algorithm · Mapping URIs to Controllers - have one controller for each resource is not a rule – can consolidate - route requests to the appropriate controller and action method · Keep URls Consistent - Sometimes it’s tempting to just shorten our URIs. not recommend this as this can cause confusion · Join Naming – for m-m entity relations there may be multiple hierarchy traversal paths · Routing – useful level of indirection for versioning, server backend mocking in development ASPNET WebAPI Considerations ASPNET WebAPI implements a lot (but not all) RESTful API design considerations as part of its infrastructure and via its coding convention. Overview When developing an API there are basically three main steps: 1. Plan out your URIs 2. Setup return values and response codes for your URIs 3. Implement a framework for your API.   Design · Leverage Models MVC folder · Repositories – support IoC for tests, abstraction · Create DTO classes – a level of indirection decouples & allows swap out · Self links can be generated using the UrlHelper · Use IQueryable to support projections across the wire · Models can support restful navigation properties – ICollection<T> · async mechanism for long running ops - return a response with a ticket – the client can then poll or be pushed the final result later. · Design for testability - Test using HttpClient , JQuery ( $.getJSON , $.each) , fiddler, browser debug. Leverage IDependencyResolver – IoC wrapper for mocking · Easy debugging - IE F12 developer tools: Network tab, Request Headers tab     Routing · HTTP request method is matched to the method name. (This rule applies only to GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests.) · {id}, if present, is matched to a method parameter named id. · Query parameters are matched to parameter names when possible · Done in config via Routes.MapHttpRoute – similar to MVC routing · Can alternatively: o decorate controller action methods with HttpDelete, HttpGet, HttpHead,HttpOptions, HttpPatch, HttpPost, or HttpPut., + the ActionAttribute o use AcceptVerbsAttribute to support other HTTP verbs: e.g. PATCH, HEAD o use NonActionAttribute to prevent a method from getting invoked as an action · route table Uris can support placeholders (via curly braces{}) – these can support default values and constraints, and optional values · The framework selects the first route in the route table that matches the URI. Response customization · Response code: By default, the Web API framework sets the response status code to 200 (OK). But according to the HTTP/1.1 protocol, when a POST request results in the creation of a resource, the server should reply with status 201 (Created). Non Get methods should return HttpResponseMessage · Location: When the server creates a resource, it should include the URI of the new resource in the Location header of the response. public HttpResponseMessage PostProduct(Product item) {     item = repository.Add(item);     var response = Request.CreateResponse<Product>(HttpStatusCode.Created, item);     string uri = Url.Link("DefaultApi", new { id = item.Id });     response.Headers.Location = new Uri(uri);     return response; } Validation · Decorate Models / DTOs with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations properties RequiredAttribute, RangeAttribute. · Check payloads using ModelState.IsValid · Under posting – leave out values in JSON payload à JSON formatter assigns a default value. Use with RequiredAttribute · Over-posting - if model has RO properties à use DTO instead of model · Can hook into pipeline by deriving from ActionFilterAttribute & overriding OnActionExecuting Config · Done in App_Start folder > WebApiConfig.cs – static Register method: HttpConfiguration param: The HttpConfiguration object contains the following members. Member Description DependencyResolver Enables dependency injection for controllers. Filters Action filters – e.g. exception filters. Formatters Media-type formatters. by default contains JsonFormatter, XmlFormatter IncludeErrorDetailPolicy Specifies whether the server should include error details, such as exception messages and stack traces, in HTTP response messages. Initializer A function that performs final initialization of the HttpConfiguration. MessageHandlers HTTP message handlers - plug into pipeline ParameterBindingRules A collection of rules for binding parameters on controller actions. Properties A generic property bag. Routes The collection of routes. Services The collection of services. · Configure JsonFormatter for circular references to support links: PreserveReferencesHandling.Objects Documentation generation · create a help page for a web API, by using the ApiExplorer class. · The ApiExplorer class provides descriptive information about the APIs exposed by a web API as an ApiDescription collection · create the help page as an MVC view public ILookup<string, ApiDescription> GetApis()         {             return _explorer.ApiDescriptions.ToLookup(                 api => api.ActionDescriptor.ControllerDescriptor.ControllerName); · provide documentation for your APIs by implementing the IDocumentationProvider interface. Documentation strings can come from any source that you like – e.g. extract XML comments or define custom attributes to apply to the controller [ApiDoc("Gets a product by ID.")] [ApiParameterDoc("id", "The ID of the product.")] public HttpResponseMessage Get(int id) · GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services – add the documentation Provider · To hide an API from the ApiExplorer, add the ApiExplorerSettingsAttribute Plugging into the Message Handler pipeline · Plug into request / response pipeline – derive from DelegatingHandler and override theSendAsync method – e.g. for logging error codes, adding a custom response header · Can be applied globally or to a specific route Exception Handling · Throw HttpResponseException on method failures – specify HttpStatusCode enum value – examine this enum, as its values map well to typical op problems · Exception filters – derive from ExceptionFilterAttribute & override OnException. Apply on Controller or action methods, or add to global HttpConfiguration.Filters collection · HttpError object provides a consistent way to return error information in the HttpResponseException response body. · For model validation, you can pass the model state to CreateErrorResponse, to include the validation errors in the response public HttpResponseMessage PostProduct(Product item) {     if (!ModelState.IsValid)     {         return Request.CreateErrorResponse(HttpStatusCode.BadRequest, ModelState); Cookie Management · Cookie header in request and Set-Cookie headers in a response - Collection of CookieState objects · Specify Expiry, max-age resp.Headers.AddCookies(new CookieHeaderValue[] { cookie }); Internet Media Types, formatters and serialization · Defaults to application/json · Request Accept header and response Content-Type header · determines how Web API serializes and deserializes the HTTP message body. There is built-in support for XML, JSON, and form-urlencoded data · customizable formatters can be inserted into the pipeline · POCO serialization is opt out via JsonIgnoreAttribute, or use DataMemberAttribute for optin · JSON serializer leverages NewtonSoft Json.NET · loosely structured JSON objects are serialzed as JObject which derives from Dynamic · to handle circular references in json: json.SerializerSettings.PreserveReferencesHandling =    PreserveReferencesHandling.All à {"$ref":"1"}. · To preserve object references in XML [DataContract(IsReference=true)] · Content negotiation Accept: Which media types are acceptable for the response, such as “application/json,” “application/xml,” or a custom media type such as "application/vnd.example+xml" Accept-Charset: Which character sets are acceptable, such as UTF-8 or ISO 8859-1. Accept-Encoding: Which content encodings are acceptable, such as gzip. Accept-Language: The preferred natural language, such as “en-us”. o Web API uses the Accept and Accept-Charset headers. (At this time, there is no built-in support for Accept-Encoding or Accept-Language.) · Controller methods can take JSON representations of DTOs as params – auto-deserialization · Typical JQuery GET request: function find() {     var id = $('#prodId').val();     $.getJSON("api/products/" + id,         function (data) {             var str = data.Name + ': $' + data.Price;             $('#product').text(str);         })     .fail(         function (jqXHR, textStatus, err) {             $('#product').text('Error: ' + err);         }); }            · Typical GET response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: ASP.NET Development Server/10.0.0.0 Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 04:30:33 GMT X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319 Cache-Control: no-cache Pragma: no-cache Expires: -1 Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 175 Connection: Close [{"Id":1,"Name":"TomatoSoup","Price":1.39,"ActualCost":0.99},{"Id":2,"Name":"Hammer", "Price":16.99,"ActualCost":10.00},{"Id":3,"Name":"Yo yo","Price":6.99,"ActualCost": 2.05}] True OData support · Leverage Query Options $filter, $orderby, $top and $skip to shape the results of controller actions annotated with the [Queryable]attribute. [Queryable]  public IQueryable<Supplier> GetSuppliers()  · Query: ~/Suppliers?$filter=Name eq ‘Microsoft’ · Applies the following selection filter on the server: GetSuppliers().Where(s => s.Name == “Microsoft”)  · Will pass the result to the formatter. · true support for the OData format is still limited - no support for creates, updates, deletes, $metadata and code generation etc · vnext: ability to configure how EditLinks, SelfLinks and Ids are generated Self Hosting no dependency on ASPNET or IIS: using (var server = new HttpSelfHostServer(config)) {     server.OpenAsync().Wait(); Tracing · tracability tools, metrics – e.g. send to nagios · use your choice of tracing/logging library, whether that is ETW,NLog, log4net, or simply System.Diagnostics.Trace. · To collect traces, implement the ITraceWriter interface public class SimpleTracer : ITraceWriter {     public void Trace(HttpRequestMessage request, string category, TraceLevel level,         Action<TraceRecord> traceAction)     {         TraceRecord rec = new TraceRecord(request, category, level);         traceAction(rec);         WriteTrace(rec); · register the service with config · programmatically trace – has helper extension methods: Configuration.Services.GetTraceWriter().Info( · Performance tracing - pipeline writes traces at the beginning and end of an operation - TraceRecord class includes aTimeStamp property, Kind property set to TraceKind.Begin / End Security · Roles class methods: RoleExists, AddUserToRole · WebSecurity class methods: UserExists, .CreateUserAndAccount · Request.IsAuthenticated · Leverage HTTP 401 (Unauthorized) response · [AuthorizeAttribute(Roles="Administrator")] – can be applied to Controller or its action methods · See section in WebApi document on "Claim-based-security for ASP.NET Web APIs using DotNetOpenAuth" – adapt this to STS.--> Web API Host exposes secured Web APIs which can only be accessed by presenting a valid token issued by the trusted issuer. http://zamd.net/2012/05/04/claim-based-security-for-asp-net-web-apis-using-dotnetopenauth/ · Use MVC membership provider infrastructure and add a DelegatingHandler child class to the WebAPI pipeline - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11535075/asp-net-mvc-4-web-api-authentication-with-membership-provider - this will perform the login actions · Then use AuthorizeAttribute on controllers and methods for role mapping- http://sixgun.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/asp-net-web-api-basic-authentication/ · Alternate option here is to rely on MVC App : http://forums.asp.net/t/1831767.aspx/1

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 07, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 07, 2011Popular ReleasesDotNetAge -a lightweight Mvc jQuery CMS: DotNetAge 2: What is new in DotNetAge 2.0 ? Completely update DJME to DJME2, enhance user experience ,more beautiful and more interactively visit DJME project home to lean more about DJME http://www.dotnetage.com/sites/home/djme.html A new widget engine has came! Faster and easiler. Runtime performance enhanced. SEO enhanced. UI Designer enhanced. A new web resources explorer. Page manager enhanced. BlogML supports added that allows you import/export your blog data to/from dotnetage publishi...Master Data Services Manager: stable 1.0.3: Update 2011-03-07 : bug fixes added external configuration File : configuration.config added TreeView Display of model (still in dev) http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5067/screenshot073l.jpg added Connection Parameters (username, domain, password, stored encrypted in configuration file) http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/5350/screenshot072qc.jpgSharePoint Content Inventory: Release 1.1: Release 1.1Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.4 Beta: - Moved the core of the PopupMenu class to the new PopupMenuBase class. - Renamed the MenuTriggerElement class to MenuTriggerRelationship. - Renamed the ApplicationMenus property to MenuTriggers. - Renamed the ImageLeftOpacity property to ImageOpacity. - Renamed the ImageLeftVisibility property to ImageVisibility. - Renamed the ImageLeftMinWidth property to ImageMinWidth. - Renamed the ImagePathForRightMargin property to ImageRightPath. - Renamed the ImageSourceForRightMargin property to Ima...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.0 Beta: Files in this downloadkooboo_CMS.zip: The kooboo application files Content_DBProvider.zip: Additional content database implementation of MSSQL,SQLCE, RavenDB and MongoDB. Default is XML based database. To use them, copy the related dlls into web root bin folder and remove old content provider dlls. Content provider has the name like "Kooboo.CMS.Content.Persistence.SQLServer.dll" View_Engines.zip: Supports of Razor, webform and NVelocity view engine. Copy the dlls into web root bin folder t...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.2: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added fullscreen for the popup and popupformIronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 2: On behalf of the IronPython team, I am pleased to announce IronPython 2.7 Release Candidate 2. The releases contains a few minor bug fixes, including a working webbrowser module. Please see the release notes for 61395 for what was fixed in previous releases.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.20: Mono 2.8, Silverlight, OAuth, 100% Twitter API coverage, streaming, extensibility via Raw Queries, and added documentation.IIS Tuner: IIS Tuner 1.0: IIS and ASP.NET performance optimization toolMinemapper: Minemapper v0.1.6: Once again supports biomes, thanks to an updated Minecraft Biome Extractor, which added support for the new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format. Updated mcmap to support new biome format.CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: CRM 2011 OData Query Designer: The CRM 2011 OData Query Designer is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM 2011 Solution. This tool allows you to build OData queries by selecting filter criteria, select attributes and order by attributes. The tool also allows you to Execute the query and view the ATOM and JSON data returned. The look and feel of this component will improve and new functionality will be added in the near future so please provide feedback on your experience. Import this solution int...Sandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.3.0 Release: This release supports the Sandcastle June 2010 Release (v2.6.10621.1). It includes full support for generating, installing, and removing MS Help Viewer files. This new release is compiled under .NET 4.0, supports Visual Studio 2010 solutions and projects as documentation sources, and adds support for projects targeting the Silverlight Framework. This release uses the Sandcastle Guided Installation package used by Sandcastle Styles. Download and extract to a folder and then run SandcastleI...mytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 beta 2: New SEO Optimisation WEB.mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.5, MVC3 RTM WARNING For run and debug SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.53.0 dow...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.6.4: It is now possible to run the clicker anyway when it can't detect the Masteries Window Fixed a critical bug in the open file dialog Removed the resize button Some UI changes 3D camera movement is now more intuitive (Trackball rotation) When an error occurs on the clicker it will attempt to focus AutoLoLYAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.5.5 RTW: YAF v1.9.5.5 RTM (Date: 3/4/2011 Rev: 4742) Official Discussion Thread here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postsm47149_v1-9-5-5-RTW--Date-3-4-2011-Rev-4742.aspx Changes in v1.9.5.5 Rev. #4661 - Added "Copy" function to forum administration -- Now instead of having to manually re-enter all the access masks, etc, you can just duplicate an existing forum and modify after the fact. Rev. #4642 - New Setting to Enable/Disable Last Unread posts links Rev. #4641 - Added Arabic Language t...Snippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3.1: Snippet Designer 1.3.1 for Visual Studio 2010This is a bug fix release. Change logFixed bug where Snippet Designer would fail if you had the most recent Productivity Power Tools installed Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in non-english locales Fixed bug where opening a new .snippet file would fail in non-english localesChiave File Encryption: Chiave 1.0: Final Relase for Chave 1.0 Stable: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.2 to 1.0: ==================== Added: > Added Icon Overlay for Windows 7 Taskbar Icon. >Added Thumbnail Toolbar buttons to make the navigation easier...ASP.NET: Sprite and Image Optimization Preview 3: The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images. This is the third preview of the feature and works with ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 3, and ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) projects. The binaries are also available via NuGet: AspNetSprites-Core AspNetSprites-WebFormsControl AspNetSprites-MvcAndRazorHelper It includes the foll...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Microsoft Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2554: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, we have added 4 new protocol parsers and updated 79 existing parsers in the NetworkMonitor_Pa...Image Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 1: Prepare to have your minds blown. This is the first preview of what will eventually become 39613. There are still a lot of rough edges and plenty of areas still under construction, but for your basic needs, it should be relativly stable. Note: You will need the .NET Framework 4 installed to use this version. Below is a status report of where this release is in terms of the overall goal for version 3. If you're feeling a bit technically ambitious and want to check out some of the features th...New ProjectsAppFactory: Die AppFactory Dient zur Vereinfachung der entwicklung von WPF Anwedungen. Es ist in C# entwickelt.Change the Default Playback Sound Device: ChangePlaybackDevice makes it easier for personal user to change the default playback sound device. You'll no longer have to change the default playback sound device by hand. It's developed in C#. Conectayas: Conectayas is an open source "Connect Four" alike game but transformable to "Tic-Tac-Toe" and to a lot of similar games that uses mouse. Written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML). Very configurable. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.Diamond: The all in one toolkit for WPF and Silverligth projects.Digital Disk File Format: Digital Disk is a File format that uses a simple key system, it is currently in development. It is written in vb.net, but will be expanded into other languagesdotnetMvcMalll: this is a asp.net mvc mallEasyCache .NET: EasyCache .NET is a simplified API over the ASP.NET Cache object. Its purpose is to offer a more concise syntax for adding and retrieving items from the cache.Eric Fang SharePoint workflow activities: Eric Fang SharePoint workflow activitiesExpert.NET: Expert.NET is an expert system framework for .NET applications. Written in F#, it provides constructs for defining probabilistic rulesets, as well as an inference engine. Expert.NET is ideal for encoding domain knowledge used by troubleshooting applications.GameGolem: The GameGolem is an XNA Casual Gamers portal. The purpose is to create a single ClickOnce deployed "Game Launcher" which exposes simple API for games to keep track of highscores, achivements, etc. GameGolem will become a Kongregate-like XNA-based casual games portal.Hundiyas: Hundiyas is an open source "Battleship" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses mouse. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, *BSD, Windows and others.ISBC: Practicas ISBC 10/11maocaijun.database: databaseNCLI: A simple API for command line argument parsing, written in C#.nEMO: nEMO is a pure C# framework for Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization.N-tier architecture sample: A sample on how to practically design a system following an n-tier (multitier) architecture in line with the patterns and practices presented by Microsofts Application Architectural Guide 2.0. Focus is on a service application and it´s client applications of various types.PostsByMonth Widget: This is a simple widget for the Graffiti CMS application that allows you to get a monthly list of new posts to the site. It's configurable to allow for the # of posts to display as well as the the format of the month/year header, the title and the individual line entries. This is written in .Net 3.5 with Vb.Net.Puzzle Pal: Smartphone assistant for all your puzzling events.RavenDB Notification: Notification plugin for RavenDB. With this plugin you are able to subscribe to insert and delete notifications from the RavenDB server. Very helpfull if you need to process new documents on the remote clients and you do not like to query DB for new changes.Teamwork by Intrigue Deviation: A feature-rich team collaboration and project management effort built around Scrum methodology with MVC/2.test_flow: test flowTicari Uygulama Paketi: Ticari Uygulama Paketi (TUP), Microsoft Ofis 2010 ürünleri için gelistirilmis eklenti yazilimidir.XpsViewer: XpsVieweryaphan: yaphan cms.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 30, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, November 30, 2011Popular ReleasesLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.22: New support for Windows Phone 7.1, 100% Twitter API coverage.Anno 2070 Assistant: Anno 2070 Assistant v1.1: Anno 2070 Assistant v1.1 Released! Features Included: Building Layouts for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Production Chains for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Supply Calculator New Features: The new supply calculator will tell you how many of each production chain you need to sustain the current population. Simply plot in your total inhabitants of each type and calculate! Coming in v2.0: Population Calculator Port from hard coded data to XML data Calculate by Residence Feature and some more secret ...Rawr: Rawr 4.3.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.131: This is a bug fix release for 0.9 that fixes a number of pressing issues. FixesBGN-1989 - User verification is not working on the latest release BGN-1988 - Send password notification does not include the actual password and throws an error BGN-1987 - Issues revisions stop being updated BGN-1985 - Search by issue id no longer works Fixed issue when user is not authenticated and clicks on the Vote link the user is redirected to page not found (wrong location for the Login.aspx page) N...QuickStart Engine (3D Game Engine for XNA): QuickStart Engine v0.23: Main FeaturesXNA 4.0 compatible Clean engine architecture Makes it easy to make your own game using the engine. Messaging system allows you to communicate between systems and other entities without coupling your code in ways you wouldn't want to. Entity/Component system allows you to make your own objects and customize them very easily. Terrain engine Quad-tree culling Multi-texture splatting Multi-texture normal mapping Smoothing and scaling Physics engine integration Uses Ji...Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.2: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure SDK for .NET – November 2011. Updated BabelCam, CRUDSqlAzure, WPCloud.ACS, and WPCloud.SQL.ACS samples to include default ACS configuration to allow developers running the samples without owning an ACS namespace.VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.29: The new version add and correct many features : Add Medias list property to VlcControl Correction to implement Medias list property Add PlaybackMode property to VlcControl (Loop/Repeat/Default) Remove "--play-and-pause" option in WPF sample Add MediaList Interops Add MediaListPlayer Interops Correction on Interops (error) Add MediaSubItemAdded event on MediaBaseMFCMAPI: November 2011 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1029 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeWCF Community Site: WCF Web API Preview 6: Welcome to the sixth preview release of WCF Web API on Codeplex! Install WCF Web API Preview 6 using NuGet New Features/EnhancementsURL form encoding - Http request bodies sent as application/x-www-form-urlencoded can now deserialize into objects and participate in content negotiation. Custom OData entity keys - The ODataFormatter now supports custom conventions for determining which properties identify an entity key. [ServiceContract] is no longer required on the Web API class definiti...Devpad: 4.11: Whats new for Devpad 4.11: New Import Archive Improved Save Dialog Improved Replace Dialog Improved Go To Dialog Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsHome Access Plus+: v7.7: v7.7.1128.2200Added: ShowTo Option on Resources Added: Basic Authentication Logon Method Added: Button on the Live Tracker page to clear logons in the database but not do a remote logoff Updated: jquery from v1.6.2 to v1.7.1 Fixed: Another attempt at fixing the SIMS import in the booking system Fixed: JSON Issues with the Setup Added: More DEBUG Events to the Event Log (note DEBUG not RELEASE) Added: Support for Week A Week B instead of Week 1 and Week 2 Updated: The My Files ...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 - Alpha: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 AlphaNew Dynamic Scripting Language : workitem : 7493 Fixes 1622 6803Widget Suite for DotNetNuke: 01.04.00: The following features/enhancements are associated with this release: Bug: Removed the empty box/white space created by some widgets New Widget: FlexSlider New Widget: Google+ Button New Widget: Klout Badge Sample Widget Script FileFxCop Integrator for Visual Studio 2010: FxCop Integrator 2.0.0 RC: Replaced the MSBuild Tasks installer to fix the bug of the targets file. FxCop Integrator is not affected by this bug. (Nov 28 2011) New FeatureSupported calculating code metrics with Code Metrics PowerTool. (Work Item #6568: 6568). Provided MSBuild tasks. #7454: 7454 Supported to filter out auto-generated code from code analysis result. #7485: 7485 Supported exporting report of code analysis result. Supported multi-project analysis. Supported file level analysis. Added the featu...Terminals: Version 2 - Beta 4 Release: Beta 4 Refresh Build Dont forget to backup your config files BEFORE upgrading! As usual, please take time to use and abuse this release. We left logging in place, and this is a debug build so be sure to submit your logs on each bug reported, and please do report all bugs! Updated the About form to include the date and time of the build. Useful for CI builds to ensure we have the correct version "Favourites" and "History" save their expanded states after app restarts Code cleanup, secu...MiniTwitter: 1.76: MiniTwitter 1.76 ???? ?? ?????????? User Streams ???????????? User Streams ???????????、??????????????? REST ?????????? ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????Media Companion: MC 3.424b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movie Show Resolutions... Resolved issue when reverting multiselection of movies to "-none-" Added movie rename support for subtitle files '.srt' & '.sub' Finalised code for '-1' fix - radiobutton to choose either filename or title Fixed issue with Movie Batch Wizard Fanart - ...Advanced Windows Phone Enginering Tool: WPE Downloads: This version of WPE gives you basic updating, restoring, and, erasing for your Windows Phone device.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.37: Fix for issue #16936 - CSS strings containing ASP.NET replacement blocks that contain the same delimiter character(s) as the CSS string cause the CSS parser to barf. Need to use the -aspnet:1 flag to treat the ASP.NET blocks as single entities. Added support for CSS3 @keyframes syntax. Added NuGet package support to the DLL project. Expand the -line switch to also optionally specify the multiline/single line mode, and the spaces-per-tab for multiline mode. Tweak the -pretty switch to be more ...Get simpler, simpler, and simpler: UI 0.1 Binary: Inklude: you can use it with lib, header and dlls. Uzing: you can use it by adding it to your project.New ProjectsArchiveBytes: ArchiveBytes is an archiving solution with rolling archive capabilities. Arduino Controller: Arduino Controller is a GUI to control and arduino wirelessly using: - XBEES - WIFI - Bluetooth All that is required is: - Arduino Controller - Your wireless technology - And an Arduino If you would like info I'm trying to put together sets that include: - Software - Arduino - And a wireless technology (your choice)Artesis - Studiegids MVC: Artesis StudiegidsAzureHost: AzureHost is a synchronization framework that makes it easy to deploy web application files to Windows Azure and keep them synchronized between Web Roles and Blob Storage. AzureHost is a fork of the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco made more simple and generic.Codes Of My ACE Study: Activity-based Center ExpansionCoreGallery.NET: An extensible .NET-based photo gallery. Project has been inactive for some time and currently in very early planning/prototyping stages. Help is definitely welcome!Custom SharePoint Designer Activities for SharePoint 2010: This project adds to the power of SharePoint Designer workflows by adding additional activities that previously were not available including sending emails with attachments, custom from addresses, and much more. Created with visual studio 2010 for SharePoint 2010.Declarative command line parser: A powerful, declarative command-line parsing system in a single .cs file. This file is available as a nuget package (package id: declcmdparser) and can be easily included or excluded in your project.DevCow: This is a location for all of the community projects that help support DevCow.comejg: ejgFibo.Authority: a authority system based on nhibernate,autofac,asp.net MVC,jquery easyui and so on.Georgia Southern House Control: This is a semester project for a group of students at Georgia Southern university.JSAnalyse - Javascript Analyser and Dependency Checker: JSAnalyse - Javascript Analyser and Dependency CheckerLogger - logging for your .NET project using file, mail, debug output: A light weight yet competent logger for .NET with configurable output modules, such as log file, e-mail and debug log. Easy to add your own output module if needed.MetaEdit+ extension for Visual Studio: Visual Studio extension for integrating MetaEdit+ and Visual Studio. This extension allows you to browse MetaEdit+ models and use the main MetaEdit+ functions from Visual Studio. It can also automatically import into Visual Studio the source code generated from MetaEdit+. MonopolyPatrones: Proyecto de patrones de software universidad Javeriana ColombiaMulti-threaded simple Reversi game: XNA Reversi game supporting multi-core processors. NDuplicate: Finds duplicate code (methods) across a C# solution.Netduino-compatible embedded webserver: Embedded Webserver is a small footprint, multi-platform webserver implementation exposing IIS-like API to web enable your hobby project in four easy steps.Orchard UserReviewedItems: An Orchard module extension of the Contrib.Reviews module. Includes a orchard content part for showing the reviews that are written by the user of the current context.PivotViewer Extensions: PivotViewer Extensions is a collection of add-ons to the Silverlight 5 PivotViewer. PowerShell TFS Build Server CmdLets: A set of CmdLets for managing a Team Foundation Server (TFS) Build server through PowerShell. SABON: Simple Access Business Object Network. This is a JavaScript Library that provides quickest way on accessing HTML elements, and DOM this includes Object/Class Creator, Table Effects, Message Box, Object Pop-up, Email Notification, and caseed: Seed creates complete ASP.NET website from object oriented business model definitions. Programers serves programs? No... Programs serves programers, Yep! "Firstly, I think I will build a system with 90% solid functions, and 10% dynamiic functions, the dynamic functions is the flower blossoming from top of it."Sharpshooter: ????OOP??????，??????。Silverlight Front end calling WCF Service in Azure Web Role: I recently written a sample which has Windows Azure Web Role with Silverlight front end, calling to WCF service which is hosted in the same Windows Azure Web Role. SPWikiDialogFix: For SharePoint 2010: Fix to prevent users from receiving ‘The Ribbon Tab with id: "Ribbon.Read" has not been made available for this page or does not exist. Use Ribbon.MakeTabAvailable()’ when viewing wiki pages in dialog mode. For explanation and details, read the blog post at http://blog.furuknap.net/solving-the-ribbon-tab-with-id-ribbon-read-has-not-been-made-available-for-this-page-or-does-not-exist-use-ribbon-maketabavailable Written in C#, because you deserve it.Trinity Christian School Lunches: This is a semester project for a group of students at Georgia Southern University creating a software packages that allows a school to keep track of the lunch orders of students.wp7project: We`re just training...Zavida: C# learning curve.??: fff

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 23, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 23, 2011Popular ReleasesMiniTwitter: 1.70: MiniTwitter 1.70 ???? ?? ????? xAuth ?? OAuth ??????? 1.70 ??????????????????????????。 ???????????????? Twitter ? Web ??????????、PIN ????????????????????。??????????????????、???????????????????????????。Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.7b: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.7b. Bug fixes: - BROKEN PLUGIN by upgrading SkyDriveServiceClient version 2.0.1b. Please do not forget to express your opinion of the plugin by rating it! Donate (EUR)SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 2.0.1b (RELOADED): SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly has been RELOADED in version 2.0.1b as a REAL API. It supports the followings: - Creating root and sub folders - Uploading and downloading files - Renaming and deleting folders and files Bug fixes: - BROKEN API (issue 6834) Please do not forget to express your opinion of the assembly by rating it! Donate (EUR)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query v1.0.0.59794: This release includes the following enhancements: Added a Most Recently Used file list Added Row counts to the query (per tab) and table view windows Added the Command Timeout option, only valid for MSSQL for now - see options If you have no idea what this thing is make sure you check out http://pksoftware.net/MiniSqlQuery/Help/MiniSqlQueryQuickStart.docx for an introduction. PK :-]HydroDesktop - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System Desktop Application: 1.2.591 Beta Release: 1.2.591 Beta ReleaseJavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: JavaScript Web Resource Manager (v1.0.521.54): Initial releasepatterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...MapWinGIS ActiveX Map and GIS Component: Second Release Candidate for v4.8: This is the second release candidate for v4.8. This is the ocx installer only, with the new dependancies like GDAL v1.8, GEOS v3.3 and updated libraries for MrSid and ECW.Epinova.CRMFramework: Epinova.CRMFramework 0.5: Beta Release Candidate. Issues solved in this release: http://crmframework.codeplex.com/workitem/593SQL Server HowTo: Version 1.0: Initial ReleaseDropBox Linker: DropBox Linker 1.3: Added "Get links..." dialog, that provides selective public files links copying Get links link added to tray menu as the default option Fixed URL encoding .NET Framework 4.0 Client Profile requiredDotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.00.00 Beta: Beta 1 (Build 2300) includes many important enhancements to the user experience. The control panel has been updated for easier access to the most important features and additional forms have been adapted to the new pattern. This release also includes many bug fixes that make it more stable than previous CTP releases. Beta ForumsTerraria World Viewer: Version 1.4: Update June 21st World file will be stored in memory to minimize chances of Terraria writing to it while we read it. Different set of APIs allow the program to draw the world much quicker. Loading world information (world variables, chest list) won't cause the GUI to freeze at all anymore. Re-introduced the "Filter chests" checkbox: Allow disabling of chest filter/finder so all chest symbos are always drawn. First-time users will have a default world path suggested to them: C:\Users\U...BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC: BlogEngine.NET Hosting - Click Here! 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! This is a Release Candidate version for BlogEngine.NET 2.5. The most current, stable version of BlogEngine.NET is version 2.0. Find out more about the BlogEngine.NET 2.5 RC here. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. To get started, be sure to check out our installation documentation. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please take a look at ...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: All-In-One Code Framework 2011-06-19: Alternatively, you can install Sample Browser or Sample Browser VS extension, and download the code samples from Sample Browser. Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for Windows Azure Sample Description Owner CSAzureStartupTask The sample demonstrates using the startup tasks to install the prerequisites or to modify configuration settings for your environment in Windows Azure Rafe Wu ...IronPython: 2.7.1 Beta 1: This is the first beta release of IronPython 2.7. Like IronPython 54498, this release requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4. This release will replace any existing IronPython installation. The highlights of this release are: Updated the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2. Add the ast, csv, and unicodedata modules. Fixed several bugs. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio are disabled by default. See http://pytools.codeplex.com for the next generation of Python Visual Studio support. See...Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.40: This is a RTW release which adds new features to v5.0.26 RTW. Support for multiple FacebookMediaObjects in one request. Allow FacebookMediaObjects in batch requests. Removes support for Cassini WebServer (visual studio inbuilt web server). Better support for unit testing and mocking. updated SimpleJson to v0.6 Refer to CHANGES.txt for details. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Multiple file uploads in Batch Requests Faceb...Candescent NUI: Candescent NUI (7774): This is the binary version of the source code in change set 7774.EffectControls-Silverlight controls with animation effects: EffectControls: EffectControlsNLog - Advanced .NET Logging: NLog 2.0 Release Candidate: Release notes for NLog 2.0 RC can be found at http://nlog-project.org/nlog-2-rc-release-notesNew ProjectsA SharePoint Client Object Model Demo in Silverlight: This demo shows how to utilize the SharePoint 2010 Foundation's Client Object Model within a Silverlight application.Azure SDK Extentions (ja): Azure SDK Tools ????????VS??????????????????。 ??????????????????、????????????????。Bango Apple iOS Application Analytics SDK: Bango application analytics is an analytics solution for mobile applications. This SDK provides a framework you can use in your application to add analytics capabilities to your mobile applications. It's developed in Object C and targets the Apple iOS operating system. Binsembler: Binsembler allows assembler programmers to easily import files into their source code, so that they'll no longer have to use external flash memory just for a few bytes of data. The project is developed in C#.DataTool: Liver.DTEMICHAG: This project contains the .NET Microframework solution for the EMIC Home Automation Gateway (EMICHAG). This project created within the co-funded research project called HOMEPLANE (http://homeplane.org/). html5_stady: html5 DemoJavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: JavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 helps CRM developers to extract javascript web resources to disk, maintain them and import changes back to CRM database. You will no longer have to perform mutliple clicks operation to update you js web resourcesKiefer SharePoint 2010 Templates: The Kiefer Consulting SharePoint 2010 Site Templates allow you to quickly create SharePoint sites pre-configured to meet specific business needs. These sites use only out of the box SharePoint Foundation 2010 features and will run on SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 365.KxFrame: KxFrame is intended to be free, easy-to-use, rapid business application framework. How many times were you starting to develop application from scratch? And every time you say to yourself: "Just this time, next time I'll make some framework"? It's over now! Lets make business application framework together and enjoy creating applications faster than ever.Made In Hell: Small console game. Just a training in code writings.Merula SmartPages: When you want to remember your data in an ASP.NET site after a postback, you will have to use Session or ViewState to remember your data. It’s a lot work to use Session and ViewStates, I just want to declare variables like in a desktop application. So I created a library called Merula SmartPages. This library will remember the properties and variables of your page. MVC ASPX to Razor View Converter: So this project will convert your MVC ASPX pages you worked so hard to make into cshtml files. You simply drop the exe into the folder and it works. I hope you enjoy, thanks! Netduino Utilities: Netduino classes I use with various odds of hardware I have. Hope it's useful ;-) NetEssentialsBugtrackerProject: Bug tracker for telerikPin My Site: Site to help demonstrate pinning capabilities of IE9Python3 ????: Python3 ????RDI Open CTe: RDI Open CTeRDI Open SPED (Contábil): RDI Open SPED (Contábil)RDI Open SPED (Fiscal): RDI Open SPED (Fiscal)sbc: sbcSimply Helpdesk UserControl: Simply Helpdesk is a user control that allows people to embed a helpdesk directly into their active projects. It is design to be as simple as possible, Minimal configuration is required to get it up and running.SQL Server HowTo: Short T-SQL scripts for difficult tasks from everyday job of programmers and database administrators. Also contains links to external resources with such useful information.Stashy: Stash data simply. Stashy is a Micro-NoSql framework. Stashy is a tiny interface, plus four reference implementations, for adding data storage and retrieval to all your .net types. Drop a single stashy class into your application then you can save and load the lot. storeBags01: hacer pedido de bolsos maletas y morrales compra de bolsos y maletas storebags UMTS Net: Program optimizes deployment of UMTS devicesvAddins - A little different addins framework: vAddins transforms C# and VB into powerful scripting languages for making addins or scripts. With this, you no longer need to open Visual Studio or other IDEs, reference assemblies, write the code and then built, move and test... Now you only have to write the code and test!Visual Studio Tags: A Visual Studio extension for tagging your source code files, and then explore your files using the tags.Window Phone Private Media Library: Windows Phone application to protect your media files from unauthorized eyes using your phone.Windows Touch/Mouse/TUIO Multi-touch Gesture recognizer & Trainer: This projects based on Single point Gesture recognizer paper of http://faculty.washington.edu/wobbrock/pubs/uist-07.1.pdf of unistrokes alphabets. The project expand capabilities to allow multi-touch gestures. C# library for rapid use. Mono Client. And C++ Client.WPF, Silverlight PDF viewer: WPF, Silverlight PDF viewer

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 20, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, March 20, 2012Popular ReleasesNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.0: Version 8.0 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing new features: Internationalization Custom authentication provider Access control list for forums and threads Webdeploy package checksum: abc62990189cf0d488ef915d4a55e4b14169bc01BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6: This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build ...JavaScript Web Resource Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: JavaScript Web Resource Manager (1.2.1420.191): BUG FIXED : When loading scripts from disk, the import of the web resource didn't do anything When scripts were saved to disk, it wasn't possible to edit them with an editorSQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQLMon 4.2 alpha 12: 1. improved process visualizer, now shows how many dead locks, and what are the locked objects 2. fixed some other problems.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 1: New feature - Windows 8 Metro build New feature - JsonTextReader automatically reads ISO strings as dates New feature - Added DateFormatHandling to control whether dates are written in the MS format or ISO format, with ISO as the default New feature - Added DateTimeZoneHandling to control reading and writing DateTime time zone details New feature - Added async serialize/deserialize methods to JsonConvert New feature - Added Path to JsonReader/JsonWriter/ErrorContext and exceptions w...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.11 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Fixed a bug when ping and cmd.exe kept running in endless loop after action progress was finished. Fixed update checking from Codeplex RSS feed. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA...WebSocket4Net: WebSocket4Net 0.5: Changes in this release fixed the wss's default port bug improved JsonWebSocket supported set client access policy protocol for silverlight fixed a handshake issue in Silverlight fixed a bug that "Host" field in handshake hadn't contained port if the port is not default supported passing in Origin parameter for handshaking supported reacting pings from server side fixed a bug in data sending fixed the bug sending a closing handshake with no message which would cause an excepti...SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.5: Changes included in this release: supported closing handshake queue checking improved JSON subprotocol supported sending ping from server to client fixed a bug about sending a closing handshake with no message refactored the code to improve protocol compatibility fixed a bug about sub protocol configuration loading in Mono improved BasicSubProtocol added JsonWebSocketSessionDaun Management Studio: Daun Management Studio 0.1 (Alpha Version): These are these the alpha application packages for Daun Management Studio to manage MongoDB Server. Please visit our official website http://www.daun-project.comSurvey™ - web survey & form engine: Survey™ 2.0: The new stable Survey™ Project 2.0.0.1 version contains many new features like: Technical changes: - Use of Jquery, ASTreeview, Tabs, Tooltips and new menuprovider Features & Bugfixes: Survey list and search function Folder structure for surveys New Menustructure Library list New Library fields User list and search functions Layout options for a survey with CSS, page header and footer New IP filter security feature Enhanced Token Management New Question fields as ID, Alias...RiP-Ripper & PG-Ripper: RiP-Ripper 2.9.28: changes NEW: Added Support for "PixHub.eu" linksSmartNet: V1.0.0.0: DY SmartNet ?????? V1.0callisto: callisto 2.0.21: Added an option to disable local host detection.Javascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.6: Upgraded to the latest stable branch of v8 (/tags/3.9.18), and switched to using their scons build system. We no longer include v8 source code as part of this project's source code. Simultaneous multithreaded use of v8 now supported (v8 Isolates), although different contexts may not share objects or call each other. 64-bit .Net 4.0 DLL now included. (Download now includes x86 and x64 for both .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0.)MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0.6: This release should be more stable there were a few bug fixes including the x64 issue as well as an error popping up when MyRouter started this was caused by a NULL valueGoogle Books Downloader for Windows: Google Books Downloader-2.0.0.0.: Google Books DownloaderFinestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4501: This is a very minor update release. Please see the information about the 2.5 and 2.5.4500 releases for more information on recent changes. This update did not even have an automatic update triggered for it. Adds error checking and reporting to all threads, not only those with message loopsAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.2: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Release Candidate: Your feedback is welcome - and this is your last chance to get your fixes in for this version! Includes installer for both Feature Server extension and Desktop extension, enhanced functionality for the Desktop tools, and enhanced built-in Javascript Editor for the Feature Server component. This release candidate includes fixes to beta 4 that accommodate domain users for setting up the Server Component, and fixes for reporting/uploading references tracked in the revision table. See Code In-P...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.6: 20 Issue trackers are closed and a lot of bugs too Localize view is now MVVM and delete is working. Added the unused flag (take care that it goes to true only when displaying screen elements) Backstage - new input/output format choice control for the conversion Backstage - Add display, behaviour and register file type options in the extended options dialog Explorer list view has been transformed to a custom control. New group header, colunms order and size are saved Single insta...New Projects{3S} SQL Smart Security "Protect your T-SQL know-how!": {3S} SQL Smart Security is an add-in which can be installed in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It enables software companies to create a secured content for database objects. The add-in brings much higher level of protection in comparison with SQL Server built in WITH ENCRYPTION feature.BETA - Content Slider for SharePoint 2010 / Office 365: SharePoint Banner / SharePoint 2010 Sliding Banner / Content Slider tools in Office 365/ Sliding Content in SharePoint is a general tool which could be used for sliding Banners or any other sliding content to be placed on any Office 365 / SharePoint 2010 / SharePoint Foundation.BF3 Development Server: The main issue of this project is to deliver a test server to all developers working on RCon (Remote-Administration-Console) Tools for Battlefield 3. Actually the only possibility to test the work made is to hire a real Game Server. BizTalk Server 2010 TCP/IP Adapter: This project is migration of existing BizTalk server 2009 TCPIP adapter to BizTalk server 2010. I have made few configuration changes which are making this adapter and installation compatible to BizTalk Server 2010. I have not modified adapter source code.BryhtCommon: It`s for easy to develope WP7 ,it contains some useful method Bug.Net Defect Tracking Components: Bug.Net server-side controls and components to add defect (bug) tracking to your current ASP.NET website.Customize Survey With Client Object Model: Customize OOB Survey/Vote/Poll in Share?Point With Client Object Model Visit http://swatipoint.blogspot.in/2011/12/sharepoint-client-object-modellist.html for more detailsDropboxToDo: A simple todo, synchronizing by Dropbox or, in future, by SkydriveFoggy: Foggy is a WPF dashboard for FogBugz information.Fort Myers High School Website: A website for Fort Myers High School in Fort Myers, Florida. This website will allow for both students and parents to better interact with the school. Developed in ASP.net (C#).Gonte.DataAccess: Data access for NET. It's developed in C#.Gonte.ObjectModel: Metadata about objects. It's developed in C#Gonte.SqlGenerator: Sql Generator It's developed in C#.kLib: This project space is for datastructures and classes, which should always be available. Any developer should use these in their projects. Liuyi.Phone.CharmScreen: Liuyi.Phone.CharmScreen Liuyi windows phone appLoU: Lord of Ultima helper suite.Managing Supplies: This WP7 project is able to manage your own suppliesNAV Fixed Assets 2012: Changes related to 'Dossier Fiscal' in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 - New Model 30 - Changes to model 31 and model 32NCAA Tourney DotNetNuke Module: The NCAA Tourney is a DotNetNuke 3.X - 6.X module that allows you to add a NCAA tournament to your portal. You can allow users to record their picks for the tournament and then manage the outcome of the tournament calculating the winner of your tourney based on customizable point system. The module has been designed to be very user friendly and efficient for the end user as well as the administrator of the tournament.nothing here anymore: nothing here anymoreOrchard Dream Store Project: A simple website using Orchard CMS. For a school projectPowerShell Management Library for TEM: A project to provide a PowerShell functionality for managing your Tivoli Endpoint Manager (built upon BigFix technology). You can locally or remotely manage endpoints and relays via these simple and easy to use PowerShell Module.PrismWebBuilder: Web Builder ProjectProjeto Northwind: Northwind - FPUQLCF: QLCFShipwire API: Shipwire makes it easier for consumers of Shipwire's international shipment fulfilment service to integrate their XML API quickly and easily. Current features are: Inventory Service Rate Service (Shipping Costs) Future features are: Order Entry Service Order Tracking ServiceSmith XNA tools: Smith's XNA tools is a set of useful that i make to improve some basics features to XNA and make the Game Design More Easy.ST Recover: ST Recover can read Atari ST floppy disks on a PC under Windows, including special formats as 800 or 900 KB and damaged or desynchronized disks, and produces standard .ST disk image files. Then the image files can be read in ST emulators as WinSTon or Steem.SyncSMS: Windows desktop client for the Android App SyncSMS. This code is not affiliated with SyncSMS in any way,tempzz: tempzzTruxtor: Truxtor modular concept for electronic gadgetsTT SA TEST1: TT SA Test 1VisualQuantCode: Neuroquants is a library in c# for quants It's developed in c#.Weeps: Generate Bass and drum line in type of midi to be guitar's backing track that was playing by userxxtest: xxtest???-????? "???????????": ?????-????????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012. ??? ????. ?????? ?: ?????????????????? ??????? ?????. ??????? ?????????? ????????? ????????. ?????????? ?????????????? ??????? ??????? ? ????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012.????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012. ??? ????. ?????? ?: ?????????????????? ??????? ?????. ??????? ?????????? ????????? ????????. ?????????? ?????????????? ??????? ??????? ? ????? ???????????? Digital Design 2012.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 06, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, February 06, 2011Popular ReleasesMVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.0: Finally the version 1.0 release! Sorry for the long delay since the last release, but I think that you'll find this release to be really smooth, really stable, and a really great enhancement to Windows. New features include: Windows 7 taskbar integration Major performance and usability improvements Redesigned look and feel New name: Finestra Better automatic updating Much faster full-screen switcher Fixes Windows 7 hotkey collisions by default Updated installerEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.4 ALPHA: 2.3.3 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated Unheeded ...Nuclex Framework: R1323: This release is a pure XNA 4.0 release that no longer includes any XNA 3.1 binaries or projects. All x86 assemblies have been compiled targeting the .NET 4.0 Client Profile. Requires either Visual C# 2010 Express or Visual Studio 2010, both with XNA Game Studio 4.0. 3rd party libraries needed to compile and run the source code are included, so everything will compile out of the box. Changes: - Thanks to a generous contribution by Adrian Tsai, the TrueType importer now accepts standard Windo...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V43: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has added some features / bugfixes: Bugfix: Now supporting multi-line headers in all headers ;) / Thanks to Kai Schätzl for reporting this! Debug output optimized / Added a "Copy to clipboard" button in the debug windowFacebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...Rawr: Rawr 4.0.18 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.Value Injecter - object(s) to -> object mapper: 2.3: it lets you define your own convention-based matching algorithms (ValueInjections) in order to match up (inject) source values to destination values. inject from multiple sources in one InjectFrom added ConventionInjectionTweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 10: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for trends Added support for Silverlight 4 Elevated WP7 fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.7: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comFacebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.7: Version 0.7 updates (2 Feb 2011)new Facebook Graph objects: Link, Note, StatusMessage new publish features: status update, post with link attachment new Graph Api connections in User object: statuses, links, notes internal code path improvement on Api object bug fixed: extra "r" character appears for strings with "\r" symbols in Json Objects bug fixed: error when performing Postback to the same page Tutorial and documentation available at http://fbgraph.computerbeacon.netChemistry Add-in for Word: Chemistry Add-in for Word - Version 1.0: On February 1, 2011, we announced the availability of version 1 of the Chemistry Add-in for Word, as well as the assignment of the open source project to the Outercurve Foundation by Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge. System RequirementsHardware RequirementsAny computer that can run Office 2007 or Office 2010. Software RequirementsYour computer must have the following software: Any version of Windows that can run Office 2007 or Office 2010, which includes Windows XP SP3 and...Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.4: Updated mcmap, now supports new block types. Added a Worlds->'View Cache Folder' menu item.StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.15005.000: Applied patch from rodpl for merging of stylecop setting files with settings in parent folder. Previous release: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new Objec...Minecraft Tools: Minecraft Topographical Survey 1.4: MTS requires version 4 of the .NET Framework - you must download it from Microsoft if you have not previously installed it. This version of MTS adds MCRegion support and fixes bugs that caused rendering to fail for some users. New in this version of MTS: Support for rendering worlds compressed with MCRegion Fixed rendering failure when encountering non-NBT files with the .dat extension Fixed rendering failure when encountering corrupt NBT files Minor GUI updates Note that the command...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 0.8: Fixed the following bugs: *Variable name error in the jvascript file that prevented the use of the deleted item template of the Datagrid *Now after the changes applied to an item of the DataGrid are cancelled all input fields are reset to the very initial value they had. *Other minor bugs. Added: *This version is available both for MVC2, and MVC 3. The MVC 3 version has a release number of 0.85. This way one can install both version. *Client Validation support has been added to all control...Office Web.UI: Beta preview (Source): This is the first Beta. it includes full source code and all available controls. Some designers are not ready, and some features are not finalized allready (missing properties, draft styles) ThanksASP.net Ribbon: Version 2.2: This release brings some new controls (part of Office Web.UI). A few bugs are fixed and it includes the "auto resize" feature as you resize the window. (It can cause an infinite loop when the window is too reduced, it's why this release is not marked as "stable"). I will release more versions 2.3, 2.4... until V3 which will be the official launch of Office Web.UI. Both products will evolve at the same speed. Thanks.xUnit.net - Unit Testing for .NET: xUnit.net 1.7: xUnit.net release 1.7Build #1540 Important notes for Resharper users: Resharper support has been moved to the xUnit.net Contrib project. Important note for TestDriven.net users: If you are having issues running xUnit.net tests in TestDriven.net, especially on 64-bit Windows, we strongly recommend you upgrade to TD.NET version 3.0 or later. This release adds the following new features: Added support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Added Assert.Equal(double expected, double actual, int precision) Ad...New ProjectsADE: ADE cmsAlicia - Elastic LoadBalancer: Alicia is a HTTP & HTTPS LoadBalancer. It is meant to be put in front of a server cluster. It implements a simple round robin mechanism. The default ports used are 1) HTTP 10080 2) HTTPS 10443 3) Admin 10010CMake syntax highlighting for Visual Studio 2010: CMake (http://cmake.org) is a cross platform build tool that works just as well with Visual Studio as it does with Xcode or the gnu make environment. This project aims to add syntax highlighting for the CMake script language to Visual Studio 2010 and is written in C#. ConCatJS: ConCatJS is a simple application that is capable of recursively processing directories and concatenating the JavaScript files therein into a single file.FicusFactor Image Watermarking Plugin for Windows Live Photo Gallery: Simple plugin for Windows Live Photo Gallery that can be used for applying watermarks to images. Can configure text, font, and placement of watermarks.FlMML: FlMML is a actionscript 3.0 library. It is made for generating sounds with MML. GSMock: GSMock is a mocking utility for the Google Search Appliance. It enables search responses to be mocked for search requests. GUIMaLoRT: The GUI for the MaLoRT.HushDB: This is a simple relational database. Its main purpose is to help people improve the understanding of how RDBMS is implemented after taking the database cource in university.Medical Log: Crear un registro de consultas medicas que facilite la gestión de los pacientes y manejo de información por reportes. Medical Log facilita el uso de registros de pacientes a médicos para obtener mayor información y más rápida de sus pacientes. Desarrollado con WPF .NET 4.0 MetaMold: semantic data through dynamic objects: MetaMold is a library to simplify the manipulation of semantic data through the usage of dynamic objects and pluggable convention-based mappings.My First Facebook Application: This is devoted to my first Facebook application.Nintemulator: A single software solution that offers support for a wide array of nintendo consoles.Orchard Facebook Like Widget: This is the project for the Facebook Like Widget module for the Orchard Project.Peggle: Its 2d game developed in c++ using qt and box2d. it helps developers to understand how to use box2d and qt efficiently. Pet Shelter - ASP.NET MVC 3 Learning Experiment: A web site for pet shelter managers and simple users who try to find their own pets, or to adopt one. This project is basically an ASP.NET MVC 3 learning experiment so if you want to join please contact me. It is developed in .NET 4.0, specifically C#. Robot-One ITI Cesena: Programma e documentazione per il Robot-One, il robottone cingolato dell'ITI di Cesena. Running Portal: Portal of 100loopRunning SharePoint List Based 404 Handler: A SharePoint WSP that customises the 404 handler for a web application, allowing you to define how to handle missing page requests via a SharePoint list.SharpSerializer: SharpSerializer is an open source XML and binary serializer for .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework and Silverlight. It was developed with C#. Actually SharpSerializer can serialize to Xml and to its own binary format.SocialTank: Fill up the tank with social stuff!SQL Space Map: SQL Space Map is a tool that lets you quickly and easily view the relative size of database objects on a map, so you can compare them visually. It helps identify large objects, objects with a high index/data ratio, and tables which may be growing more quickly than expected.Supernover framework: SAF( SuperNover Application Framework)ToolBlog: Space reserved for the ToolBlog, which is a study about a site/blog in ASP.NET MVC 3Useful C# Extensions and Code generator: Initially a private repository, I want to make my collection of extensions and a code generating framework public. XnaLoop: simple test of xna game loop

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 11, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 11, 2012Popular ReleasesCommand-Line Database Builder: 1.0.2012.0411: Utility now supports arbitrary key:value pairs on the command-line for performing replacements in the .pp.sql files. Removed the usage of '-' to prefix key:value arguments. AspNetAssemblyPath is no longer a known key:value pair but can still be used because the tool now supports arbitrary key:value pairs for replacements. This was provided previously to support setting up ASP.NET Membership and Roles in a database. I've added a .pp.sql file to the Examples archive that demonstrates this usage.Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1 - Team Foundation Service Whitepapers: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Service Whitepapers preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review All critical bugs have been resolved Known Issue...Scrum Task Board Card Creator: TaskCardCreator 3.2.0.0: What's New: New report template added: Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Detailed Report Supported Templates: Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 MSF for Agile Software Development v5.0Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.42.550 (BETA): Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer Core RELEASE NOTES Version 2.42.550 11 April 2012 BETA VERSION WARNING: This is a beta version! Please note: - API changes may be made before the next version (2.42.600) - The designer will not show modules/mainboards for NETMF 4.2 until you get upgraded libraries from the module/mainboard vendors - Install NETMF 4.2 (see link below) to use the new features of this release That warning aside, this version should continue to sup...DISM GUI: DISM GUI 3.1.1: Fixes - Fixed a bug in the Delete Driver function - The Index field is not auto populated with the number 1LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.24: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, and Client Profile. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also available via NuGet.Kendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-04-11): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 2: New feature - Added support for the SerializableAttribute and serializing a type's internal fields New feature - Added MaxDepth to JsonReader/JsonSerializer/JsonSerializerSettings New feature - Added support for ignoring properties with the NonSerializableAttribute Fix - Fixed deserializing a null string throwing a NullReferenceException Fix - Fixed JsonTextReader reading from a slow stream Fix - Fixed CultureInfo not being overridden on JsonSerializerProxy Fix - Fixed full trust ...SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.12 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Improved WMI date conversion to be aware of timezone differences and DST. Fixed new version check. The tool is downloadable as a ZIP file that contains four files: ClientActionsTool.hta – The tool itself. Cmdkey.exe – command line tool for managing cached credentials. This is needed for alternate credentials feature when running the HTA on Windows XP. Cmdkey.exe is natively availab...Dual Browsing: Dual Browser: Please note the following: I setup the address bar temporarily to only accepts http:// .com addresses. Just type in the name of the website excluding: http://, www., and .com; (Ex: for www.youtube.com just type: youtube then click OK). The page splitter can be grabbed by holding down your left mouse button and move left or right. By right clicking on the page background, you can choose to refresh, go back a page and so on. Demo video: http://youtu.be/L7NTFVM3JUYMultiwfn: Multiwfn 2.3.3: Multiwfn 2.3.3Liberty: v3.2.0.1 Release 9th April 2012: Change Log-Fixed -Reach Fixed a bug where the object editor did not work on non-English operating systemsPath Copy Copy: 10.1: This release addresses the following work items: 11357 11358 11359 This release is a recommended upgrade, especially for users who didn't install the 10.0.1 version.ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.3: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???，????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript，?? CSS，?? UpdatePanel，?? ViewState，?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????：Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??：http://extasp.net/ ??：http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??：http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??：http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????： +2012-04-08 v3.1.3 -??Language="zh_TW"?JS???BUG（??）。 +?D...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.5: New Controls ChatBubble ChatBubbleTextBox OpacityToggleButton New Stuff TimeSpan languages added: RU, SK, CS Expose the physics math from TimeSpanPicker Image Stretch now on buttons Bug Fixes Layout fix so RoundToggleButton and RoundButton are exactly the same Fix for ColorPicker when set via code behind ToastPrompt bug fix with OnNavigatedTo Toast now adjusts its layout if the SIP is up Fixed some issues with Expression Blend supportHarness - Internet Explorer Automation: Harness 2.0.3: support the operation fo frameset, frame and iframe Add commands SwitchFrame GetUrl GoBack GoForward Refresh SetTimeout GetTimeout Rename commands GetActiveWindow to GetActiveBrowser SetActiveWindow to SetActiveBrowser FindWindowAll to FindBrowser NewWindow to NewBrowser GetMajorVersion to GetVersionBetter Explorer: Better Explorer 2.0.0.861 Alpha: - fixed new folder button operation not work well in some situations - removed some unnecessary code like subclassing that is not needed anymore - Added option to make Better Exlorer default (at least for WIN+E operations) - Added option to enable file operation replacements (like Terracopy) to work with Better Explorer - Added some basic usability to "Share" button - Other fixesLightFarsiDictionary - ??????? ??? ?????/???????: LightFarsiDictionary - v1: LightFarsiDictionary - v1WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.3: Version: 2.5.0.3 (Milestone 3): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete [O] WAF: Mark the StringBuilderExtensions class as obsolete because the AppendInNewLine method can be replaced with string.Jo...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.65.2: Aside from many bug fixes we now have Conditional Formatting The conditional formatting was sponsored by http://www.bewing.nl (big thanks) New on v0.65.1 Fixed issue when loading conditional formatting with default values for icon sets New on v0.65.2 Fixed issue loading conditional formatting Improved inserts performanceNew Projects0x10c Tools: Tools for the 0x10c-CPU: Assembler, emulator and (maybe in the future) a small compiler. Just for fun and exercise.AzureWiki: AzureWiki is the Wiki developed using Windows Azure platform which would be similar to dotnetwikiCommand-Line Database Builder: A command-line tool for interacting with a DBMS command-line interface (e.g., sqlcmd.exe) to execute a sequential list of SQL scripts against the DBMS. Tool allows for expression replacement in the SQL scripts during execution.copydata: The CopyData command-line utility enables you to easily transfer sets of data from an Oracle or SQL server data source directly to a target SQL Server database. It is developed in C#.DinoDoc: The little friendly batch-upload tool designed for SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services, enabling you to easily upload multiple files and folders with a single click! For more information about DinoDoc and about SharePoint development: http://spdino.wordpress.comDiscovery House: This is a project demonstrating a green home.DocShare: DocShare illustrates the CQRS pattern on Windows Azure and also uses MVC4 Web API. DocShare uses two web roles, one for queries (reads) and one for command (writes). Each has a UI and a Web API service.EnderTecLauncher: EnderTecLauncherEntityFilter: This library provides a way to store filtering metadata, and reassemble it into dynamic lambda expressions. It allows for groups of filters to be created. Two implementations of IFilterRepository are in development:Database and XML. It's developed in C# for EntityFramework 4.1 and above.Epi Info™ - Web Analysis & Visualization: Epi Info™ is a public domain suite of software tools designed for the global community of public health practitioners and researchers. It provides for easy data entry form and database construction, a customized data entry experience, and data analyses with epidemiologic statistic Epi Info™ Web Analytics & Visualization is an open source project of the popular Epi Info™ suite of tools. The web product can be deployed as an intranet application and will provide analytical and visualization ...fOrganiz: This application allows you to automatically organize by date in specific subdirectories your picturesforwork: forworkGeneric Language - Mobile & Telephony Technologies: Genlang Mobile and Telephony Technologies, a complete application development platform for all platforms, Windows Mobile, Windows Desktop, Web, Apple, Android, BlackBerry.gindex: Graph has become increasingly important in modelling complicated structures and schemaless data such as proteins,chemical compounds, and XML documents. Given a graph query, it is desirable to retrieve graphs quickly from a large database via graph-based indices.Hijri Date SkinObject: Hijri date skin object for dotnetnuke copy to admin/skins use it in your skin file HorseRaces: Exercise inspired on example found in book "Designing for scalability with Microsoft Windows DNA" by Sten Sundblad and Per SundbladHotelMS: HotelManageSystemhtml5lmth: testjRulee: The jRulee javascript toolkit libraryKrishaTool: oloLegSec: LegSec is an small command line application for collating licence information based on that provided in Nuget packages. Modwind Domain Info: The program determines country of origin for top-level domains and purpose for international ones.MySCM Outlook Addin: This is another tool for SCM/TFS team. Use this add-in to create, update, refresh TFS work items from your Outlook emails. Not a substitution, but this little tool can help you to track your various work in TFS while educating and establishing the processes and policies.neptouni: This software can be used to convert nepali ttf text to the unicode characters.Northwind SSDT: An SSDT project for the Northwind database. This will enable you to deploy Northwind wherever you like. Note that to allow for hosting in a SQL Azure database that is used to host objects for other applications all the Northwind objects have been moved into a schema called [Northwind]Optional: Optional is a library to create options and commands from command-line arguments. It uses Convention over Configuration to get out of your way. Attributes can be used to set properties which differ from the convention.pbdevnpro1: pbdevnpro1，no1Projet LIF7 Snake: Projet LIF7 SnakePurpleStoat: A modular, extensible Silverlight application shell using Prism, Unity and the Enterprise Library, and written in C#. It includes WCF services which provide AuthZ and logging services to the shell, which are also available to the modules.Sharepoint 2010 Weather WebPart using Azure Data Market Met Office Feed: Sharepoint 2010 WebPart that displays a 5 day weather forecast for a given location. The weather data is retrieved from the Met Office feed hosted on the Windows Azure Data Market. This is a free data feed that provides weather data for the UK only.Silverlight Layouts: Silverlight Layouts is a project for controls that behave as content placeholders with pre-defined GUI layout for some of common scenarios: - frozen headers, - frozen columns, - cyrcle layouts etc.Snom Phone .NET Library: .NET Automation library for the snom IP phones. Provides simple class library to interact with you snom phone: - Press any key on the phone. - Dial numbers. - Answer or hang up call. - Mute and un-mute. - Hold and un-hold a call. - Navigate through a routing phone system using dial tone. - Get events on incoming or outgoing calls, as well as other events. - And more...Substrate Windows 8 XAML Framework: Framework for writing Windows 8 applications in XAMLTiger Converters: Tiger is a small languaje based on expressions, so it's perfect for writing the body of a WPF/SL converter.Time manager by bozheville: Time manager by bozhevilleUmbraco 501 on Windows Azure (with Dynamic Deploy): This project is configured to run Umbraco 5.0.1 on Windows Azure via the Dynamic Deploy platform. For more information on Dynamic Deploy visit http://www.dynamicdeploy.com Dynamic Deploy is a cloud deployment platform from where you can deploy applications directly to cloud platforms (like Windows Azure). UnitPrice: This is unit priceWebmedia: this is my webmedia projectWindows 8 Metro RSS Reader: A RSS Reader metro app for Windows 8 written in C# and XAML based on the sample Grid templateWindows Phone UPnP: The basics of a UPnP network stack for Windows Phone, based on a blog post originally. Written in C#, also requires the Async CTP. Includes device discovery via SSDP and method invocation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: A set of controls, extensions and helper classes for Windows Runtime XAML applicationsWmiGuru: WmiGuru is a lightweight F# library for WMI operations such as getting instances, creating instance, and querying associated instances.????: ???? ??.net mvc3??。??jquery+html5????。?????: openwebsite

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 19, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, November 19, 2011Popular ReleasesWPF Converters: WPF Converters V1.2.0.0: support for enumerations, value types, and reference types in the expression converter's equality operators the expression converter now handles DependencyProperty.UnsetValue as argument values correctly (#4062) StyleCop conformance (more or less)Json.NET: Json.NET 4.0 Release 4: Change - JsonTextReader.Culture is now CultureInfo.InvariantCulture by default Change - KeyValurPairConverter no longer cares about the order of the key and value properties Change - Time zone conversions now use new TimeZoneInfo instead of TimeZone Fix - Fixed boolean values sometimes being capitalized when converting to XML Fix - Fixed error when deserializing ConcurrentDictionary Fix - Fixed serializing some Uris returning the incorrect value Fix - Fixed occasional error when...Media Companion: MC 3.423b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Replaced 'Rebuild' with 'Refresh' throughout entire code. Rebuild will now be known as Refresh. mc_com.exe has been fully updated TV Show Resolutions... Resolved issue #206 - having to hit save twice when updating runtime manually Shrunk cache size and lowered loading times f...Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games: 1.1.1: Version 1.1.1: Updated to use Windows Azure SDK and Tools Version 1.6 Version 1.1.1: Performance improvements Separated Social Gaming Toolkit from Tankster Sample Added Tic-Tac-Toe and Four in a row game Simplified game API Simplified JavaScript Libraries Improved documentationASP.net Awesome Samples (Web-Forms): 1.0 samples: Full Demo VS2008 Very Simple Demo VS2010 (demos for the ASP.net Awesome jQuery Ajax Controls)SharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLR: SharpMap-0.9-AnyCPU-Trunk-2011.11.17: This is a build of SharpMap from the 0.9 development trunk as per 2011-11-17 For most applications the AnyCPU release is the recommended, but in case you need an x86 build that is included to. For some dataproviders (GDAL/OGR, SqLite, PostGis) you need to also referense the SharpMap.Extensions assembly For SqlServer Spatial you need to reference the SharpMap.SqlServerSpatial assemblySQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQLMon 4.1 alpha 5: 1. added basic schema support 2. added server instance name and process id 3. fixed problem with object search index out of range 4. improved version comparison with previous/next difference navigation 5. remeber main window spliter and object explorer spliter positionAJAX Control Toolkit: November 2011 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - November 2011 Release Version 51116November 2011 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 - Binary – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - The current version of the AJAX Control Toolkit is not compatible with ASP.NET 2.0. The latest version that is compatible with ASP.NET 2.0 can be found h...MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.5: Added: Now the DateRanteAttribute accepts complex expressions containing "Now" and "Today" as static minimum and maximum. Menu, MenuFor helpers capable of handling a "currently selected element". The developer can choose between using a standard nested menu based on a standard SimpleMenuItem class or specifying an item template based on a custom class. Added also helpers to build the tree structure containing all data items the menu takes infos from. Improved the pager. Now the developer ...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.7: Reworked API to be more consistent. See Supported formats table. Added some more helper methods - e.g. OpenEntryStream (RarArchive/RarReader does not support this) Fixed up testsCODE Framework: 4.0.11115.0: Added support for partial views in the WPF framework, as well as a new helper feature that allows hooking commands/actions to all WPF events.Silverlight Toolkit: Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK): This release is coming soon! What's new ListPicker once again works in a ScrollViewer LongListSelector bug fixes around OutOfRange exceptions, wrong ordering of items, grouping issues, and scrolling events. ItemTuple is now refactored to be the public type LongListSelectorItem to provide users better access to the values in selection changed handlers. PerformanceProgressBar binding fix for IsIndeterminate (item 9767 and others) There is no longer a GestureListener dependency with the C...DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 06.01.01: Major Highlights Fixed problem with the core skin object rendering CSS above the other framework inserted files, which caused problems when using core style skin objects Fixed issue with iFrames getting removed when content is saved Fixed issue with the HTML module removing styling and scripts from the content Fixed issue with inserting the link to jquery after the header of the page Security Fixesnone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesHTML version 6.1.0 ProvidersnoneDotNetNuke Performance Settings: 01.00.00: First release of DotNetNuke SQL update queries to set the DNN installation for optimimal performance. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)SCCM Client Actions Tool: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8: SCCM Client Actions Tool v0.8 is currently the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added "Wake On LAN" action. WOL.EXE is now included. Added new action "Get all active advertisements" to list all machine based advertisements on remote computers. Added new action "Get all active user advertisements" to list all user based advertisements for logged on users on remote computers. Added config.ini setting "enablePingTest" to control whether ping test is ru...C.B.R. : Comic Book Reader: CBR 0.3: New featuresAdd magnifier size and scale New file info view in the backstage Add dynamic properties on book and settings Sorting and grouping in the explorer with new design Rework on conversion : Images, PDF, Cbr/rar, Cbz/zip, Xps to the destination formats Images, Cbz and XPS ImprovmentsSuppress MainViewModel and ExplorerViewModel dependencies Add view notifications and Messages from MVVM Light for ViewModel=>View notifications Make thread better on open catalog, no more ihm freeze, less t...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.2: This release remove the like and the broadcast buttons as Google Reader stopped supporting them (no, we don't like this decission...) Additionally and to have at least a small plus: the login window now automaitcally logs you in if you stored username and passwort (no more extra click needed) Finally added WebKit .NET to the about window and removed Awesomium MD5-Hash: 5fccf25a2fb4fecc1dc77ebabc8d3897 SHA-Hash: d44ff788b123bd33596ad1a75f3b9fa74a862fdbFluent Validation for .NET: 3.2: Changes since 3.1: Fixed issue #7084 (NotEmptyValidator does not work with EntityCollection<T>) Fixed issue #7087 (AbstractValidator.Custom ignores RuleSets and always runs) Removed support for WP7 for now as it doesn't support co/contravariance without crashing.Rawr: Rawr 4.2.7: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...VidCoder: 1.2.2: Updated Handbrake core to svn 4344. Fixed the 6-channel discrete mixdown option not appearing for AAC encoders. Added handling for possible exceptions when copying to the clipboard, added retries and message when it fails. Fixed issue with audio bitrate UI not appearing sometimes when switching audio encoders. Added extra checks to protect against reported crashes. Added code to upgrade encoding profiles on old queued items.New ProjectsAnimateX: silverlight animate basic library C#code build storyboard object basic object build animate engine for silverlight 4.0Api diendandaihoc.vn: api news diendandaihoc.vnAviaCode Interview Project: This is an extension to the Apunta Notas project. It was created for interview purposes.BitTorrentSharp: BitTorrent Sharp is an open source bit torrent protocol and server/client implementation.BizTalk Archiving - SQL and File: BizTalk Message Archiving - it's a pipeline component that can be used for archiving incoming/outgoing message from any adapters. It provides an option to save the message to either file (local, shared, network) or in SQL Server. bpatch: Simple byte patch utilityCourseManager: Course Manager is an Application for course,instructor and students control.dise operating system: the name is get from Divine State. Our goal is to create a real-time, efficient, stable operating system.Electrum: Simple Windows Phone 7 toolkitendrocode: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril deleni...FinanceTool: FinanceTool makes a visual representation of your spending during a period of time. The Winforms application works on export files from the Dutch ING bank and the SNS bank. It's developed in C# based on .NET 4.0.Kinect Spots: Kinect Spots is a small little app that displays a stylized bubble image based on the input from the Microsoft Kinect's camera.MEF practises: Project Nebula: ASP.NET MVC 3 with Full MEF architectureNesoi 2D game engine: This is a 2D game engine witten for XNA to to use a component based architecture.nullllllllllllll: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~PolytechMango: Mobile application for DI courses Polytech'Tours developed in Windows Phone 7.5 platform Authors : ARKHIS - AZIRAR - FOFANA - JEBARI PowerPartsforSharePoint.CrossSiteViewer: CrossSite Viewer WebPart allows you to view SharePoint list or Document library from other sites without coding. Simply drag and drop the web part onto the page, select the source site collection , web , view and you are done. www.PowerPartsForSharePoint.ComQuix Utilities for SharePoint: Over the past decade of working with SharePoint, I've had to build many quick utilities for one purpose or another. It thus came to pass that it made sense to unify all these utilities together into a single project that I could share with my fellow geeks. The Quix Utilities for SharePoint tool set is a collection of utilities that perform a wide variety of tasks in SharePoint and SharePoint servers.ReactiveMVVM: ReactiveMVVM is MVVM patter, it impovert with Microsoft Reactive Extensions. Can used in silverlight, WPF and WP7. ReactiveMVVM makes it easier for you to develop multithreading program in Silverlight, WPF and WP7 project. To be good work with it, you need know Rx framework. Regatta: Regatta is a Window Phone application for sailboat racing. Its mission is to make it easier for people to participate in sailboat racing. The underlying technology is C# and WP7. Anyone with an interest in sailing and/or Windows Phone technology is welcome to contribute.SF for Windows Phone: This is an C# app for Windows Phone 7 that utilizes API's from www.sf.se to display new movies, closest bio etc.SimManning: SimManning is a C#.NET library containing a discrete-event simulation engine dedicated to manning / staffing, especially for domains involving a succession of phases. An example of basic domain is provided, but the idea is for users to implement their own domain. This originates from a research group of DTU, the Technical University of Denmark.Simple Authentication Toolkit: Simple Authentication ToolkitSparkline Generator: Generate symbols sparklineSSIS Package Configuration Editor: This utility identifies package configuration paths that are not valid and enables you to correct the paths without having to open the package in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).StreamingSoundtracks.com: My first Windows Phone 7.1 application. 1. Now Playing 2. View Queue 3. View Chat Message 4. Send Chat MessageTravellingEntrepreneur: A simple application for finding Green Government Opportunities for Small Businesses. The application based on your current location retrieves all the government programs for the state of location and then allows you to share your favorite program on Facebook. (US only, WP7).wp7msu: For Windows Phone Programming in MSU.

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• The Changing Face of PASS

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’m starting my sixth year on the PASS Board.  I served two years as the Program Director, two years as the Vice-President of Marketing and I’m starting my second year as the Executive Vice-President of Finance.  There’s a pretty good chance that if PASS has done something you don’t like or is doing something you don’t like, that I’m involved in one way or another. Andy Leonard asked in a comment on his blog if the Board had ever reversed itself based on community input.  He asserted that it hadn’t.  I disagree.  I’m not going to try and list all the changes we make inside portfolios based on feedback from and meetings with the community.  I’m going to focus on major governance issues since I was elected to the Board. Management Company The first big change was our management company.  Our old management company had a standard approach to running a non-profit.  It worked well when PASS was launched.  Having a ready-made structure and process to run the organization enabled the organization to grow quickly.  As time went on we were limited in some of the things we wanted to do.  The more involved you were with PASS, the more you saw these limitations.  Key volunteers were regularly providing feedback that they wanted certain changes that were difficult for us to accomplish.  The Board at that time wanted changes that were difficult or impossible to accomplish under that structure. This was not a simple change.  Imagine a $2.5 million dollar company letting all its employees go on a Friday and starting with a new staff on Monday.  We also had a very narrow window to accomplish that so that we wouldn’t affect the Summit – our only source of revenue.  We spent the year after the change rebuilding processes and putting on the Summit in Denver.  That’s a concrete example of a huge change that PASS made to better serve its members.  And it was a change that many in the community were telling us we needed to make. Financials We heard regularly from our members that they wanted our financials posted.  Today on our web site you can find audited financials going back to 2004.  We publish our budget at the start of each year.  If you ask a question about the financials on the PASS site I do my best to answer it.  I’m also trying to do a better job answering financial questions posted in other locations.  (And yes, I know I owe a few of you some blog posts.) That’s another concrete example of a change that our members asked for that the Board agreed was a good decision. Minutes When I started on the Board the meeting minutes were very limited.  The minutes from a two day Board meeting might fit on one page.  I think we did the bare minimum we were legally required to do.  Today Board meeting minutes run from 5 to 12 pages and go into incredible detail on what we talk about.  There are certain topics that are NDA but where possible we try to list the topic we discussed but that the actual discussion was under NDA.  We also publish the agenda of Board meetings ahead of time. This is another specific example where input from the community influenced the decision.  It was certainly easier to have limited minutes but I think the extra effort helps our members understand what’s going on. Board Q&A At the 2009 Summit the Board held its first public Q&A with our members.  We’d always been available individually to answer questions.  There’s a benefit to getting us all in one room and asking the really hard questions to watch us squirm.  We learn what questions we don’t have good answers for.  We get to see how many people in the crowd look interested in the various questions and answers. I don’t recall the genesis of how this came about.  I’m fairly certain there was some community pressure though. Board Votes Until last November, the Board only reported the vote totals and not how individual Board members voted.  That was one of the topics at a great lunch I had with Tim Mitchell and Kendal van Dyke at the Summit.  That was also the topic of the first question asked at the Board Q&A by Kendal.  Kendal expressed his opposition to to anonymous votes clearly and passionately and without trying to paint anyone into a corner.  Less than 24 hours later the PASS Board voted to make individual votes public unless the topic was under NDA.  That’s another area where the Board decided to change based on feedback from our members. Summit Location While this isn’t actually a governance issue it is one of the more public decisions we make that has taken some public criticism.  There is a significant portion of our members that want the Summit near them.  There is a significant portion of our members that like the Summit in Seattle.  There is a significant portion of our members that think it should move around the country.  I was one that felt strongly that there were significant, tangible benefits to our attendees to being in Seattle every year.  I’m also one that has been swayed by some very compelling arguments that we need to have at least one outside Seattle and then revisit the decision.  I can’t tell you how the Board will vote but I know the opinion of our members weighs heavily on the decision. Elections And that brings us to the grand-daddy of all governance issues.  My thesis for this blog post is that the PASS Board has implemented policy changes in response to member feedback.  It isn’t to defend or criticize our election process.  It’s just to say that is has been under going continuous change since I’ve been on the Board.  I ran for the Board in the fall of 2005.  I don’t know much about what happened before then.  I was actively volunteering for PASS for four years prior to that as a chapter leader and on the program committee.  I don’t recall any complaints about elections but that doesn’t mean they didn’t occur.  The questions from the Nominating Committee (NomCom) were trivial and the selection process rudimentary (For example, “Tell us about your accomplishments”).  I don’t even remember who I ran against or how many other people ran.  I ran for the VP of Marketing in the fall of 2007.  I don’t recall any significant changes the Board made in the election process for that election.  I think a lot of the changes in 2007 came from us asking the management company to work on the election process.  I was expecting a similar set of puff ball questions from my previous election.  Boy, was I in for a shock.  The NomCom had found a much better set of questions and really made the interview portion difficult.  The questions were much more behavioral in nature.  I’d already written about my vision for PASS and my goals.  They wanted to know how I handled adversity, how I handled criticism, how I handled conflict, how I handled troublesome volunteers, how I motivated people and how I responded to motivation. And many, many other things. They grilled me for over an hour.  I’ve done a fair bit of technical sales in my time.  I feel I speak well under pressure addressing pointed questions.  This interview intentionally put me under pressure.  In addition to wanting to know about my interpersonal skills, my work experience, my volunteer experience and my supervisory experience they wanted to see how I’d do under pressure.  They wanted to see who would respond under pressure and who wouldn’t.  It was a bit of a shock. That was the first big change I remember in the election process.  I know there were other improvements around the process but none of them stick in my mind quite like the unexpected hour-long grilling. The next big change I remember was after the 2009 elections.  Andy Warren was unhappy with the election process and wanted to make some changes.  He worked with Hannes at HQ and they came up with a better set of processes.  I think Andy moved PASS in the right direction.  Nonetheless, after the 2010 election even more people were very publicly clamoring for changes to our election process.  In August of 2010 we had a choice to make.  There were numerous bloggers criticizing the Board and our upcoming election.  The easy change would be to announce that we were changing the process in a way that would satisfy our critics.  I believe that a knee-jerk response to criticism is seldom correct. Instead the Board spent August and September and October and November listening to the community.  I visited two SQLSaturdays and asked questions of everyone I could.  I attended chapter meetings and asked questions of as many people as they’d let me.  At Summit I made it a point to introduce myself to strangers and ask them about the election.  At every breakfast I’d sit down at a table full of strangers and ask about the election.  I’m happy to say that I left most tables arguing about the election.  Most days I managed to get 2 or 3 breakfasts in. I spent less time talking to people that had already written about the election.  They were already expressing their opinion.  I wanted to talk to people that hadn’t spoken up.  I wanted to know what the silent majority thought.  The Board all attended the Q&A session where our members expressed their concerns about a variety of issues including the election. The PASS Board also chose to create the Election Review Committee.  We wanted people from the community that had been involved with PASS to look at our election process with fresh eyes while listening to what the community had to say and give us some advice on how we could improve the process.  I’m a part of this as is Andy Warren.  None of the other members are on the Board.  I’ve sat in numerous calls and interviews with this group and attended an open meeting at the Summit.  We asked anyone that wanted to discuss the election to come speak with us.  The ERC held an open meeting at the Summit and invited anyone to attend.  There are forums on the ERC web site where we’ve invited people to participate.  The ERC has reached to key people involved in recent elections.  The years that I haven’t mentioned also saw minor improvements in the election process.  Off the top of my head I don’t recall what exact changes were made each year.  Specifically since the 2010 election we’ve gone out of our way to seek input from the community about the process.  I’m not sure what more we could have done to invite feedback from the community. I think to say that we haven’t “fixed” the election process isn’t a fair criticism at this time.  We haven’t rushed any changes through the process.  If you don’t see any changes in our election process in July or August then I think it’s fair to criticize us for ignoring the community or ask for an explanation for what we’ve done. In Summary Andy’s main point was that the PASS Board hasn’t changed in response to our members wishes.  I think I’ve shown that time and time again the PASS Board has changed in response to what our members want.  There are only two outstanding issues: Summit location and elections.  The 2013 Summit location hasn’t been decided yet.  Our work on the elections is also in progress.  And at every step in the election review we’ve gone out of our way to listen to the community and incorporate their feedback on the process. I also hope I’m not encouraging everyone that wants some change in the organization to organize a “blog rush” against the Board.  We take public suggestions very seriously but we also take the time to evaluate those suggestions and learn what the rest of our members think and make a measured decision.

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• Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 18, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 18, 2011Popular ReleasesCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor v1.0.0.0 Beta: Game Files Open - Map Editor beta v1.0.0.0Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Document.Editor: 2011.5: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.5: New export to email New export to image New document background color Improved Tooltips Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsTerminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues listEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.0: 2.4.0This release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 - Upd...PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5.1: Changes from the previous version * Use dynamic layout to better fit text in other languages * Includes French and Spanish localizations Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0.5.1-setup.exe" (reccomended) 2. Down...New ProjectsAbstractSpoon: Development Code by AbstractSpoonBetchRenamer: ????????ChromeTabControl: I want to create wpf tab control. It will have same behavior that chrome.CLASonline: CS 307 Software Engineering - Purdue University A web based social and collaborative learning system.ElearningProject: ELearning TutorialEPICS .NET - Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System for .NET: EPICS .NET is the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System for .NET Framework 4.0 and above. Written in C#, this control toolkit consists of three sub projects: * EPICS .NET Library, * Virtual Accelerator: Demonstrates full capabilities of the library, * EPICS SimulatorException Manager: Having trouble with unhandled exceptions? Exception Manager will catch these exceptions for you and log them, and then continue running the program. You can choose whether or not to display a dialog box. Only invoked when *not* running from the debugger (Run without Debugging)FileTransferTool: The program is a file transfer client, it monitor one or several local directories, verify,ftp and backup files found to the directory or ftp server you assign. the program is developed by c# + .framework 2.0(to support previous windows version). Hope it can help.httpdSharp: Simple multi-threaded console http server written in C# and .NET 2.0. Simple configuration of wwwroot folder, port and mime-types served. Useful for serving static content when you are in a hurry.Image.Viewer: Basic Ribbon based image viewer for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.Imtihan: Imtihan is an online assessment system (OAS).Iphone: Project about I-PhotoKunalPishewsccsemb: KunalPishewsccsembMAT04 Integrationsprojekt - Stadt- und Sehenswürdigkeitenführer Bern: Für die Stadt Bern soll ein "Stadt- und Sehenswürdigkeitenführer" für Smartphones implementiert werden. Touristen und Besuchern sollen die Sehenswürdigkeiten von Bern näher gebracht, sowie das Zurechtfinden in der Altstadt erleichtert werden.MediaBrowser Silverlight: MediaBrowser Silverlight is a small application designed with Silverlight in an educational purpose. This application allows you to consult a series of media (Movies, Albums, Images, Books) and to administer them.MovieCalc: A small tool to calc the bitrate of a movie with given audio bitrate and destination size of the movie (divx, xvid)MPC Pattern for Microsoft Silverlight 4.0: If you have struggled with MVVM in Silverlight line of business applications and you want a good framework for building an application, MPC is for you. MPC is a Model, ViewModel, Presenter and Controller pattern enhanced with XAML defined States, Actions, and Async WCF.News Man: Rss feed News readerOpenQuestions: OpenQuestions is the leading open source source for exam simulators. Main features: * All type of questions supported (single choice, multiple choice, open answers, matching, fill the gaps, etc) * Customisable appearance (look and feel) with themes. * Multi-lingual support.Ordered images loading: Ordered image loading controls enables you to load images on pages in order you specify. It is nice for sites with lot of images where you want to control which images should be loaded first. It is developed using ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and jQuery.Over the fence: Share your gardening tips. This is a community site for gardeners to share their experiences. Discuss your successes and failures. Swap tips. Which plants grow well in your soil? Where is the best place to source plants? What are your favourites?Phoenix iBooking: Phoenix iBooking is an appointment management system. For salons, sports centers etc. It was originally written in VB .NET as a salon booking and till system. This project will see the conversion to C# .NET 4 and removal of the till functionality.PointlessBends: Simply move the four points around the white area and waste time! Yes, that’s right, its pointless!PRISMvvM: MvvM guidance and framework built on top of the PRISM framework. Makes it easier for developers to properly utilize PRISM to achieve best practices in creating a Silverlight project with MVVM. Sponsored and written by: http://www.architectinginnovation.comrsvp: Projectwork on the IT University in Copenhagen, building a survey system.SharePoint 2010 Silverlight Web Part JavaScript Bridge: This is a project template containing a number of base classes and JavaScript which allows SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web parts to communicate with each other inside the browser. It provides Silverlight web parts with the functionality normal web parts get from interfaces.StatlightTeamBuild: StatlightTeamBuild is a build activity plugin for TFS build 2010. The unittest results, generated by statlight, are processed and publish to TFS. After which, the results are shown in your build summary. TFS to TeamCity Build Notification Plugin: Have you ever wanted to turn VCS polling off? TFS to TeamCity Build Notification Plugin is a tool that will initiate a build request when your source code is checked in. The only configuration includes deploying the notification website and supplying your VCS roots to notify .tipolog: tipologTower Defense 3D with C# and XNA: A classical Tower Defense but in 3D. Developped in C# and using XNA, this game is aimed to be released on both Windows and Xbox 360. This project is a part of a course for the 1st y of IT MASTER in Besancon, France.Utility4Net: some base class such as xml,string,data,secerity,web... etc.. under Microsoft.NET Framework 4.0Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java: This starter kit was designed to work as a simple command line build tool or in the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) to help Java developers deploy their applications to the Windows Azure cloud.WSCCSemesterB: Web Scripting Semester BXaml Physics: Xaml Physics makes it possible to make a physics simulation with only xaml code. It is a wrapper around the Farseer Physics Engine.

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• PASS: Bylaw Change 2013

  - by Bill Graziano

  PASS launched a Global Growth Initiative in the Summer of 2011 with the appointment of three international Board advisors.  Since then we’ve thought and talked extensively about how we make PASS more relevant to our members outside the US and Canada.  We’ve collected much of that discussion in our Global Growth site.  You can find vision documents, plans, governance proposals, feedback sites, and transcripts of Twitter chats and town hall meetings.  We also address these plans at the Board Q&A during the 2012 Summit. One of the biggest changes coming out of this process is around how we elect Board members.  And that requires a change to the bylaws.  We published the proposed bylaw changes as a red-lined document so you can clearly see the changes.  Our goal in these bylaw changes was to address the changes required by the global growth initiatives, conduct a legal review of the document and address other minor issues in the document.  There are numerous small wording changes throughout the document.  For example, we replaced every reference of “The Corporation” with the word “PASS” so it now reads “PASS is organized…”. Board Composition The biggest change in these bylaw changes is how the Board is composed and elected.  This discussion starts in section VI.2.  This section now says that some elected directors will come from geographic regions.  I think this is the best way to make sure we give all of our members a voice in the leadership of the organization.  The key parts of this section are: The remaining Directors (i.e. the non-Officer Directors and non-Vendor Appointed Directors) shall be elected by the voting membership (“Elected Directors”). Elected Directors shall include representatives of defined PASS regions (“Regions”) as set forth below (“Regional Directors”) and at minimum one (1) additional Director-at-Large whose selection is not limited by region. Regional Directors shall include, but are not limited to, two (2) seats for the Region covering Canada and the United States of America. Additional Regions for the purpose of electing additional Regional Directors and additional Director-at-Large seats for the purpose of expanding the Board shall be defined by a majority vote of the current Board of Directors and must be established prior to the public call for nominations in the general election. Previously defined Regions and seats approved by the Board of Directors shall remain in effect and can only be modified by a 2/3 majority vote by the then current Board of Directors. Currently PASS has six At-Large Directors elected by the members.  These changes allow for a Regional Director position that is elected by the members but must come from a particular region.  It also stipulates that there must always be at least one Director-at-Large who can come from any region. We also understand that PASS is currently a very US-centric organization.  Our Summit is held in America, roughly half our chapters are in the US and Canada and most of the Board members over the last ten years have come from America.  We wanted to reflect that by making sure that our US and Canadian volunteers would continue to play a significant role by ensuring that two Regional seats are reserved specifically for Canada and the US. Other than that, the bylaws don’t create any specific regional seats.  These rules allow us to create Regional Director seats but don’t require it.  We haven’t fully discussed what the criteria will be in order for a region to have a seat designated for it or how many regions there will be.  In our discussions we’ve broadly discussed regions for United States and Canada Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Australia, New Zealand and Asia (also known as Asia Pacific or APAC) Mexico, South America, and Central America (LATAM) As you can see, our thinking is that there will be a few large regions.  I’ve also considered a non-North America region that we can gradually split into the regions above as our membership grows in those areas.  The regions will be defined by a policy document that will be published prior to the elections. I’m hoping that over the next year we can begin to publish more of what we do as Board-approved policy documents. While the bylaws only require a single non-region specific At-large Director, I would expect we would always have two.  That way we can have one in each election.  I think it’s important that we always have one seat open that anyone who is eligible to run for the Board can contest.  The Board is required to have any regions defined prior to the start of the election process. Board Elections – Regional Seats We spent a lot of time discussing how the elections would work for these Regional Director seats.  Ultimately we decided that the simplest solution is that every PASS member should vote for every open seat.  Section VIII.3 reads: Candidates who are eligible (i.e. eligible to serve in such capacity subject to the criteria set forth herein or adopted by the Board of Directors) shall be designated to fill open Board seats in the following order of priority on the basis of total votes received: (i) full term Regional Director seats, (ii) full term Director-at-Large seats, (iii) not full term (vacated) Regional Director seats, (iv) not full term (vacated) Director-at-Large seats. For the purposes of clarity, because of eligibility requirements, it is contemplated that the candidates designated to the open Board seats may not receive more votes than certain other candidates who are not selected to the Board. We debated whether to have multiple ballots or one single ballot.  Multiple ballot elections get complicated quickly.  Let’s say we have a ballot for US/Canada and one for Region 2.  After that we’d need a mechanism to merge those two together and come up with the winner of the at-large seat or have another election for the at-large position.  We think the best way to do this is a single ballot and putting the highest vote getters into the most restrictive seats.  Let’s look at an example: There are seats open for Region 1, Region 2 and at-large.  The election results are as follows: Candidate A (eligible for Region 1) – 550 votes Candidate B (eligible for Region 1) – 525 votes Candidate C (eligible for Region 1) – 475 votes Candidate D (eligible for Region 2) – 125 votes Candidate E (eligible for Region 2) – 75 votes In this case, Candidate A is the winner for Region 1 and is assigned that seat.  Candidate D is the winner for Region 2 and is assigned that seat.  The at-large seat is filled by the high remaining vote getter which is Candidate B. The key point to understand is that we may have a situation where a person with a lower vote total is elected to a regional seat and a person with a higher vote total is excluded.  This will be true whether we had multiple ballots or a single ballot.  Board Elections – Vacant Seats The other change to the election process is for vacant Board seats.  The actual changes are sprinkled throughout the document. Previously we didn’t have a mechanism that allowed for an election of a Board seat that we knew would be vacant in the future.  The most common case is when a Board members moves to an Officer role in the middle of their term.  One of the key changes is to allow the number of votes members have to match the number of open seats.  This allows each voter to express their preference on all open seats.  This only applies when we know about the opening prior to the call for nominations.  This all means that if there’s a seat will be open at the start of the next Board term, and we know about it prior to the call for nominations, we can include that seat in the elections.  Ultimately, the aim is to have PASS members decide who sits on the Board in as many situations as possible. We discussed the option of changing the bylaws to just take next highest vote-getter in all other cases.  I think that’s wrong for the following reasons: All voters aren’t able to express an opinion on all candidates.  If there are five people running for three seats, you can only vote for three.  You have no way to express your preference between #4 and #5. Different candidates may have different information about the number of seats available.  A person may learn that a Board member plans to resign at the end of the year prior to that information being made public. They may understand that the top four vote getters will end up on the Board while the rest of the members believe there are only three openings.  This may affect someone’s decision to run.  I don’t think this creates a transparent, fair election. Board members may use their knowledge of the election results to decide whether to remain on the Board or not.  Admittedly this one is unlikely but I don’t want to create a situation where this accusation can be leveled. I think the majority of vacancies in the future will be handled through elections.  The bylaw section quoted above also indicates that partial term vacancies will be filled after the full term seats are filled. Removing Directors Section VI.7 on removing directors has always had a clause that allowed members to remove an elected director.  We also had a clause that allowed appointed directors to be removed.  We added a clause that allows the Board to remove for cause any director with a 2/3 majority vote.  The updated text reads: Any Director may be removed for cause by a 2/3 majority vote of the Board of Directors whenever in its judgment the best interests of PASS would be served thereby. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the authority of any Director to act as in an official capacity as a Director or Officer of PASS may be suspended by the Board of Directors for cause. Cause for suspension or removal of a Director shall include but not be limited to failure to meet any Board-approved performance expectations or the presence of a reason for suspension or dismissal as listed in Addendum B of these Bylaws. The first paragraph is updated and the second and third are unchanged (except cleaning up language).  If you scroll down and look at Addendum B of these bylaws you find the following: Cause for suspension or dismissal of a member of the Board of Directors may include: Inability to attend Board meetings on a regular basis. Inability or unwillingness to act in a capacity designated by the Board of Directors. Failure to fulfill the responsibilities of the office. Inability to represent the Region elected to represent Failure to act in a manner consistent with PASS's Bylaws and/or policies. Misrepresentation of responsibility and/or authority. Misrepresentation of PASS. Unresolved conflict of interests with Board responsibilities. Breach of confidentiality. The bold line about your inability to represent your region is what we added to the bylaws in this revision.  We also added a clause to section VII.3 allowing the Board to remove an officer.  That clause is much less restrictive.  It doesn’t require cause and only requires a simple majority. The Board of Directors may remove any Officer whenever in their judgment the best interests of PASS shall be served by such removal. Other There are numerous other small changes throughout the document. Proxy voting.  The laws around how members and Board members proxy votes are specific in Illinois law.  PASS is an Illinois corporation and is subject to Illinois laws.  We changed section IV.5 to come into compliance with those laws.  Specifically this says you can only vote through a proxy if you have a written proxy through your authorized attorney.  English language proficiency.  As we increase our global footprint we come across more members that aren’t native English speakers.  The business of PASS is conducted in English and it’s important that our Board members speak English.  If we get big enough to afford translators, we may be able to relax this but right now we need English language skills for effective Board members. Committees.  The language around committees in section IX is old and dated.  Our lawyers advised us to clean it up.  This section specifically applies to any committees that the Board may form outside of portfolios.  We removed the term limits, quorum and vacancies clause.  We don’t currently have any committees that this would apply to.  The Nominating Committee is covered elsewhere in the bylaws. Electronic Votes.  The change allows the Board to vote via email but the results must be unanimous.  This is to conform with Illinois state law. Immediate Past President.  There was no mechanism to fill the IPP role if an outgoing President chose not to participate.  We changed section VII.8 to allow the Board to invite any previous President to fill the role by majority vote. Nominations Committee.  We’ve opened the language to allow for the transparent election of the Nominations Committee as outlined by the 2011 Election Review Committee. Revocation of Charters. The language surrounding the revocation of charters for local groups was flagged by the lawyers. We have allowed for the local user group to make all necessary payment before considering returning of items to PASS if required. Bylaw notification. We’ve spent countless meetings working on these bylaws with the intent to not open them again any time in the near future. Should the bylaws be opened again, we have included a clause ensuring that the PASS membership is involved. I’m proud that the Board has remained committed to transparency and accountability to members. This clause will require that same level of commitment in the future even when all the current Board members have rolled off. I think that covers everything.  I’d encourage you to look through the red-line document and see the changes.  It’s helpful to look at the language that’s being removed and the language that’s being added.  I’m happy to answer any questions here or you can email them to [email protected].

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• How to maintain encapsulation with composition in C++?

  - by iFreilicht

  I am designing a class Master that is composed from multiple other classes, A, Base, C and D. These four classes have absolutely no use outside of Master and are meant to split up its functionality into manageable and logically divided packages. They also provide extensible functionality as in the case of Base, which can be inherited from by clients. But, how do I maintain encapsulation of Master with this design? So far, I've got two approaches, which are both far from perfect: 1. Replicate all accessors: Just write accessor-methods for all accessor-methods of all classes that Master is composed of. This leads to perfect encapsulation, because no implementation detail of Master is visible, but is extremely tedious and makes the class definition monstrous, which is exactly what the composition should prevent. Also, adding functionality to one of the composees (is that even a word?) would require to re-write all those methods in Master. An additional problem is that inheritors of Base could only alter, but not add functionality. 2. Use non-assignable, non-copyable member-accessors: Having a class accessor<T> that can not be copied, moved or assigned to, but overrides the operator-> to access an underlying shared_ptr, so that calls like Master->A()->niceFunction(); are made possible. My problem with this is that it kind of breaks encapsulation as I would now be unable to change my implementation of Master to use a different class for the functionality of niceFunction(). Still, it is the closest I've gotten without using the ugly first approach. It also fixes the inheritance issue quite nicely. A small side question would be if such a class already existed in std or boost. EDIT: Wall of code I will now post the code of the header files of the classes discussed. It may be a bit hard to understand, but I'll give my best in explaining all of it. 1. GameTree.h The foundation of it all. This basically is a doubly-linked tree, holding GameObject-instances, which we'll later get to. It also has it's own custom iterator GTIterator, but I left that out for brevity. WResult is an enum with the values SUCCESS and FAILED, but it's not really important. class GameTree { public: //Static methods for the root. Only one root is allowed to exist at a time! static void ConstructRoot(seed_type seed, unsigned int depth); inline static bool rootExists(){ return static_cast<bool>(rootObject_); } inline static weak_ptr<GameTree> root(){ return rootObject_; } //delta is in ms, this is used for velocity, collision and such void tick(unsigned int delta); //Interaction with the tree inline weak_ptr<GameTree> parent() const { return parent_; } inline unsigned int numChildren() const{ return static_cast<unsigned int>(children_.size()); } weak_ptr<GameTree> getChild(unsigned int index) const; template<typename GOType> weak_ptr<GameTree> addChild(seed_type seed, unsigned int depth = 9001){ GOType object{ new GOType(seed) }; return addChildObject(unique_ptr<GameTree>(new GameTree(std::move(object), depth))); } WResult moveTo(weak_ptr<GameTree> newParent); WResult erase(); //Iterators for for( : ) loop GTIterator& begin(){ return *(beginIter_ = std::move(make_unique<GTIterator>(children_.begin()))); } GTIterator& end(){ return *(endIter_ = std::move(make_unique<GTIterator>(children_.end()))); } //unloading should be used when objects are far away WResult unloadChildren(unsigned int newDepth = 0); WResult loadChildren(unsigned int newDepth = 1); inline const RenderObject& renderObject() const{ return gameObject_->renderObject(); } //Getter for the underlying GameObject (I have not tested the template version) weak_ptr<GameObject> gameObject(){ return gameObject_; } template<typename GOType> weak_ptr<GOType> gameObject(){ return dynamic_cast<weak_ptr<GOType>>(gameObject_); } weak_ptr<PhysicsObject> physicsObject() { return gameObject_->physicsObject(); } private: GameTree(const GameTree&); //copying is only allowed internally GameTree(shared_ptr<GameObject> object, unsigned int depth = 9001); //pointer to root static shared_ptr<GameTree> rootObject_; //internal management of a child weak_ptr<GameTree> addChildObject(shared_ptr<GameTree>); WResult removeChild(unsigned int index); //private members shared_ptr<GameObject> gameObject_; shared_ptr<GTIterator> beginIter_; shared_ptr<GTIterator> endIter_; //tree stuff vector<shared_ptr<GameTree>> children_; weak_ptr<GameTree> parent_; unsigned int selfIndex_; //used for deletion, this isn't necessary void initChildren(unsigned int depth); //constructs children }; 2. GameObject.h This is a bit hard to grasp, but GameObject basically works like this: When constructing a GameObject, you construct its basic attributes and a CResult-instance, which contains a vector<unique_ptr<Construction>>. The Construction-struct contains all information that is needed to construct a GameObject, which is a seed and a function-object that is applied at construction by a factory. This enables dynamic loading and unloading of GameObjects as done by GameTree. It also means that you have to define that factory if you inherit GameObject. This inheritance is also the reason why GameTree has a template-function gameObject<GOType>. GameObject can contain a RenderObject and a PhysicsObject, which we'll later get to. Anyway, here's the code. class GameObject; typedef unsigned long seed_type; //this declaration magic means that all GameObjectFactorys inherit from GameObjectFactory<GameObject> template<typename GOType> struct GameObjectFactory; template<> struct GameObjectFactory<GameObject>{ virtual unique_ptr<GameObject> construct(seed_type seed) const = 0; }; template<typename GOType> struct GameObjectFactory : GameObjectFactory<GameObject>{ GameObjectFactory() : GameObjectFactory<GameObject>(){} unique_ptr<GameObject> construct(seed_type seed) const{ return unique_ptr<GOType>(new GOType(seed)); } }; //same as with the factories. this is important for storing them in vectors template<typename GOType> struct Construction; template<> struct Construction<GameObject>{ virtual unique_ptr<GameObject> construct() const = 0; }; template<typename GOType> struct Construction : Construction<GameObject>{ Construction(seed_type seed, function<void(GOType*)> func = [](GOType* null){}) : Construction<GameObject>(), seed_(seed), func_(func) {} unique_ptr<GameObject> construct() const{ unique_ptr<GameObject> gameObject{ GOType::factory.construct(seed_) }; func_(dynamic_cast<GOType*>(gameObject.get())); return std::move(gameObject); } seed_type seed_; function<void(GOType*)> func_; }; typedef struct CResult { CResult() : constructions{} {} CResult(CResult && o) : constructions(std::move(o.constructions)) {} CResult& operator= (CResult& other){ if (this != &other){ for (unique_ptr<Construction<GameObject>>& child : other.constructions){ constructions.push_back(std::move(child)); } } return *this; } template<typename GOType> void push_back(seed_type seed, function<void(GOType*)> func = [](GOType* null){}){ constructions.push_back(make_unique<Construction<GOType>>(seed, func)); } vector<unique_ptr<Construction<GameObject>>> constructions; } CResult; //finally, the GameObject class GameObject { public: GameObject(seed_type seed); GameObject(const GameObject&); virtual void tick(unsigned int delta); inline Matrix4f trafoMatrix(){ return physicsObject_->transformationMatrix(); } //getter inline seed_type seed() const{ return seed_; } inline CResult& properties(){ return properties_; } inline const RenderObject& renderObject() const{ return *renderObject_; } inline weak_ptr<PhysicsObject> physicsObject() { return physicsObject_; } protected: virtual CResult construct_(seed_type seed) = 0; CResult properties_; shared_ptr<RenderObject> renderObject_; shared_ptr<PhysicsObject> physicsObject_; seed_type seed_; }; 3. PhysicsObject That's a bit easier. It is responsible for position, velocity and acceleration. It will also handle collisions in the future. It contains three Transformation objects, two of which are optional. I'm not going to include the accessors on the PhysicsObject class because I tried my first approach on it and it's just pure madness (way over 30 functions). Also missing: the named constructors that construct PhysicsObjects with different behaviour. class Transformation{ Vector3f translation_; Vector3f rotation_; Vector3f scaling_; public: Transformation() : translation_{ 0, 0, 0 }, rotation_{ 0, 0, 0 }, scaling_{ 1, 1, 1 } {}; Transformation(Vector3f translation, Vector3f rotation, Vector3f scaling); inline Vector3f translation(){ return translation_; } inline void translation(float x, float y, float z){ translation(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } inline void translation(Vector3f newTranslation){ translation_ = newTranslation; } inline void translate(float x, float y, float z){ translate(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } inline void translate(Vector3f summand){ translation_ += summand; } inline Vector3f rotation(){ return rotation_; } inline void rotation(float pitch, float yaw, float roll){ rotation(Vector3f(pitch, yaw, roll)); } inline void rotation(Vector3f newRotation){ rotation_ = newRotation; } inline void rotate(float pitch, float yaw, float roll){ rotate(Vector3f(pitch, yaw, roll)); } inline void rotate(Vector3f summand){ rotation_ += summand; } inline Vector3f scaling(){ return scaling_; } inline void scaling(float x, float y, float z){ scaling(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } inline void scaling(Vector3f newScaling){ scaling_ = newScaling; } inline void scale(float x, float y, float z){ scale(Vector3f(x, y, z)); } void scale(Vector3f factor){ scaling_(0) *= factor(0); scaling_(1) *= factor(1); scaling_(2) *= factor(2); } Matrix4f matrix(){ return WMatrix::Translation(translation_) * WMatrix::Rotation(rotation_) * WMatrix::Scale(scaling_); } }; class PhysicsObject; typedef void tickFunction(PhysicsObject& self, unsigned int delta); class PhysicsObject{ PhysicsObject(const Transformation& trafo) : transformation_(trafo), transformationVelocity_(nullptr), transformationAcceleration_(nullptr), tick_(nullptr) {} PhysicsObject(PhysicsObject&& other) : transformation_(other.transformation_), transformationVelocity_(std::move(other.transformationVelocity_)), transformationAcceleration_(std::move(other.transformationAcceleration_)), tick_(other.tick_) {} Transformation transformation_; unique_ptr<Transformation> transformationVelocity_; unique_ptr<Transformation> transformationAcceleration_; tickFunction* tick_; public: void tick(unsigned int delta){ tick_ ? tick_(*this, delta) : 0; } inline Matrix4f transformationMatrix(){ return transformation_.matrix(); } } 4. RenderObject RenderObject is a base class for different types of things that could be rendered, i.e. Meshes, Light Sources or Sprites. DISCLAIMER: I did not write this code, I'm working on this project with someone else. class RenderObject { public: RenderObject(float renderDistance); virtual ~RenderObject(); float renderDistance() const { return renderDistance_; } void setRenderDistance(float rD) { renderDistance_ = rD; } protected: float renderDistance_; }; struct NullRenderObject : public RenderObject{ NullRenderObject() : RenderObject(0.f){}; }; class Light : public RenderObject{ public: Light() : RenderObject(30.f){}; }; class Mesh : public RenderObject{ public: Mesh(unsigned int seed) : RenderObject(20.f) { meshID_ = 0; textureID_ = 0; if (seed == 1) meshID_ = Model::getMeshID("EM-208_heavy"); else meshID_ = Model::getMeshID("cube"); }; unsigned int getMeshID() const { return meshID_; } unsigned int getTextureID() const { return textureID_; } private: unsigned int meshID_; unsigned int textureID_; }; I guess this shows my issue quite nicely: You see a few accessors in GameObject which return weak_ptrs to access members of members, but that is not really what I want. Also please keep in mind that this is NOT, by any means, finished or production code! It is merely a prototype and there may be inconsistencies, unnecessary public parts of classes and such.

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• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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• An Introduction to Meteor

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog post is to give you a brief introduction to Meteor which is a framework for building Single Page Apps. In this blog entry, I provide a walkthrough of building a simple Movie database app. What is special about Meteor? Meteor has two jaw-dropping features: Live HTML – If you make any changes to the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or data on the server then every client shows the changes automatically without a browser refresh. For example, if you change the background color of a page to yellow then every open browser will show the new yellow background color without a refresh. Or, if you add a new movie to a collection of movies, then every open browser will display the new movie automatically. With Live HTML, users no longer need a refresh button. Changes to an application happen everywhere automatically without any effort. The Meteor framework handles all of the messy details of keeping all of the clients in sync with the server for you. Latency Compensation – When you modify data on the client, these modifications appear as if they happened on the server without any delay. For example, if you create a new movie then the movie appears instantly. However, that is all an illusion. In the background, Meteor updates the database with the new movie. If, for whatever reason, the movie cannot be added to the database then Meteor removes the movie from the client automatically. Latency compensation is extremely important for creating a responsive web application. You want the user to be able to make instant modifications in the browser and the framework to handle the details of updating the database without slowing down the user. Installing Meteor Meteor is licensed under the open-source MIT license and you can start building production apps with the framework right now. Be warned that Meteor is still in the “early preview” stage. It has not reached a 1.0 release. According to the Meteor FAQ, Meteor will reach version 1.0 in “More than a month, less than a year.” Don’t be scared away by that. You should be aware that, unlike most open source projects, Meteor has financial backing. The Meteor project received an $11.2 million round of financing from Andreessen Horowitz. So, it would be a good bet that this project will reach the 1.0 mark. And, if it doesn’t, the framework as it exists right now is still very powerful. Meteor runs on top of Node.js. You write Meteor apps by writing JavaScript which runs both on the client and on the server. You can build Meteor apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux (Although the support for Windows is still officially unofficial). If you want to install Meteor on Windows then download the MSI from the following URL: http://win.meteor.com/ If you want to install Meteor on Mac/Linux then run the following CURL command from your terminal: curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh Meteor will install all of its dependencies automatically including Node.js. However, I recommend that you install Node.js before installing Meteor by installing Node.js from the following address: http://nodejs.org/ If you let Meteor install Node.js then Meteor won’t install NPM which is the standard package manager for Node.js. If you install Node.js and then you install Meteor then you get NPM automatically. Creating a New Meteor App To get a sense of how Meteor works, I am going to walk through the steps required to create a simple Movie database app. Our app will display a list of movies and contain a form for creating a new movie. The first thing that we need to do is create our new Meteor app. Open a command prompt/terminal window and execute the following command: Meteor create MovieApp After you execute this command, you should see something like the following: Follow the instructions: execute cd MovieApp to change to your MovieApp directory, and run the meteor command. Executing the meteor command starts Meteor on port 3000. Open up your favorite web browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the default Meteor Hello World page: Open up your favorite development environment to see what the Meteor app looks like. Open the MovieApp folder which we just created. Here’s what the MovieApp looks like in Visual Studio 2012: Notice that our MovieApp contains three files named MovieApp.css, MovieApp.html, and MovieApp.js. In other words, it contains a Cascading Style Sheet file, an HTML file, and a JavaScript file. Just for fun, let’s see how the Live HTML feature works. Open up multiple browsers and point each browser at http://localhost:3000. Now, open the MovieApp.html page and modify the text “Hello World!” to “Hello Cruel World!” and save the change. The text in all of the browsers should update automatically without a browser refresh. Pretty amazing, right? Controlling Where JavaScript Executes You write a Meteor app using JavaScript. Some of the JavaScript executes on the client (the browser) and some of the JavaScript executes on the server and some of the JavaScript executes in both places. For a super simple app, you can use the Meteor.isServer and Meteor.isClient properties to control where your JavaScript code executes. For example, the following JavaScript contains a section of code which executes on the server and a section of code which executes in the browser: if (Meteor.isClient) { console.log("Hello Browser!"); } if (Meteor.isServer) { console.log("Hello Server!"); } console.log("Hello Browser and Server!"); When you run the app, the message “Hello Browser!” is written to the browser JavaScript console. The message “Hello Server!” is written to the command/terminal window where you ran Meteor. Finally, the message “Hello Browser and Server!” is execute on both the browser and server and the message appears in both places. For simple apps, using Meteor.isClient and Meteor.isServer to control where JavaScript executes is fine. For more complex apps, you should create separate folders for your server and client code. Here are the folders which you can use in a Meteor app: · client – This folder contains any JavaScript which executes only on the client. · server – This folder contains any JavaScript which executes only on the server. · common – This folder contains any JavaScript code which executes on both the client and server. · lib – This folder contains any JavaScript files which you want to execute before any other JavaScript files. · public – This folder contains static application assets such as images. For the Movie App, we need the client, server, and common folders. Delete the existing MovieApp.js, MovieApp.html, and MovieApp.css files. We will create new files in the right locations later in this walkthrough. Combining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Files Meteor combines all of your JavaScript files, and all of your Cascading Style Sheet files, and all of your HTML files automatically. If you want to create one humongous JavaScript file which contains all of the code for your app then that is your business. However, if you want to build a more maintainable application, then you should break your JavaScript files into many separate JavaScript files and let Meteor combine them for you. Meteor also combines all of your HTML files into a single file. HTML files are allowed to have the following top-level elements: <head> — All <head> files are combined into a single <head> and served with the initial page load. <body> — All <body> files are combined into a single <body> and served with the initial page load. <template> — All <template> files are compiled into JavaScript templates. Because you are creating a single page app, a Meteor app typically will contain a single HTML file for the <head> and <body> content. However, a Meteor app typically will contain several template files. In other words, all of the interesting stuff happens within the <template> files. Displaying a List of Movies Let me start building the Movie App by displaying a list of movies. In order to display a list of movies, we need to create the following four files: · client\movies.html – Contains the HTML for the <head> and <body> of the page for the Movie app. · client\moviesTemplate.html – Contains the HTML template for displaying the list of movies. · client\movies.js – Contains the JavaScript for supplying data to the moviesTemplate. · server\movies.js – Contains the JavaScript for seeding the database with movies. After you create these files, your folder structure should looks like this: Here’s what the client\movies.html file looks like: <head> <title>My Movie App</title> </head> <body> <h1>Movies</h1> {{> moviesTemplate }} </body>   Notice that it contains <head> and <body> top-level elements. The <body> element includes the moviesTemplate with the syntax {{> moviesTemplate }}. The moviesTemplate is defined in the client/moviesTemplate.html file: <template name="moviesTemplate"> <ul> {{#each movies}} <li> {{title}} </li> {{/each}} </ul> </template> By default, Meteor uses the Handlebars templating library. In the moviesTemplate above, Handlebars is used to loop through each of the movies using {{#each}}…{{/each}} and display the title for each movie using {{title}}. The client\movies.js JavaScript file is used to bind the moviesTemplate to the Movies collection on the client. Here’s what this JavaScript file looks like: // Declare client Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Bind moviesTemplate to Movies collection Template.moviesTemplate.movies = function () { return Movies.find(); }; The Movies collection is a client-side proxy for the server-side Movies database collection. Whenever you want to interact with the collection of Movies stored in the database, you use the Movies collection instead of communicating back to the server. The moviesTemplate is bound to the Movies collection by assigning a function to the Template.moviesTemplate.movies property. The function simply returns all of the movies from the Movies collection. The final file which we need is the server-side server\movies.js file: // Declare server Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Seed the movie database with a few movies Meteor.startup(function () { if (Movies.find().count() == 0) { Movies.insert({ title: "Star Wars", director: "Lucas" }); Movies.insert({ title: "Memento", director: "Nolan" }); Movies.insert({ title: "King Kong", director: "Jackson" }); } }); The server\movies.js file does two things. First, it declares the server-side Meteor Movies collection. When you declare a server-side Meteor collection, a collection is created in the MongoDB database associated with your Meteor app automatically (Meteor uses MongoDB as its database automatically). Second, the server\movies.js file seeds the Movies collection (MongoDB collection) with three movies. Seeding the database gives us some movies to look at when we open the Movies app in a browser. Creating New Movies Let me modify the Movies Database App so that we can add new movies to the database of movies. First, I need to create a new template file – named client\movieForm.html – which contains an HTML form for creating a new movie: <template name="movieForm"> <fieldset> <legend>Add New Movie</legend> <form> <div> <label> Title: <input id="title" /> </label> </div> <div> <label> Director: <input id="director" /> </label> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Add Movie" /> </div> </form> </fieldset> </template> In order for the new form to show up, I need to modify the client\movies.html file to include the movieForm.html template. Notice that I added {{> movieForm }} to the client\movies.html file: <head> <title>My Movie App</title> </head> <body> <h1>Movies</h1> {{> moviesTemplate }} {{> movieForm }} </body> After I make these modifications, our Movie app will display the form: The next step is to handle the submit event for the movie form. Below, I’ve modified the client\movies.js file so that it contains a handler for the submit event raised when you submit the form contained in the movieForm.html template: // Declare client Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Bind moviesTemplate to Movies collection Template.moviesTemplate.movies = function () { return Movies.find(); }; // Handle movieForm events Template.movieForm.events = { 'submit': function (e, tmpl) { // Don't postback e.preventDefault(); // create the new movie var newMovie = { title: tmpl.find("#title").value, director: tmpl.find("#director").value }; // add the movie to the db Movies.insert(newMovie); } }; The Template.movieForm.events property contains an event map which maps event names to handlers. In this case, I am mapping the form submit event to an anonymous function which handles the event. In the event handler, I am first preventing a postback by calling e.preventDefault(). This is a single page app, no postbacks are allowed! Next, I am grabbing the new movie from the HTML form. I’m taking advantage of the template find() method to retrieve the form field values. Finally, I am calling Movies.insert() to insert the new movie into the Movies collection. Here, I am explicitly inserting the new movie into the client-side Movies collection. Meteor inserts the new movie into the server-side Movies collection behind the scenes. When Meteor inserts the movie into the server-side collection, the new movie is added to the MongoDB database associated with the Movies app automatically. If server-side insertion fails for whatever reasons – for example, your internet connection is lost – then Meteor will remove the movie from the client-side Movies collection automatically. In other words, Meteor takes care of keeping the client Movies collection and the server Movies collection in sync. If you open multiple browsers, and add movies, then you should notice that all of the movies appear on all of the open browser automatically. You don’t need to refresh individual browsers to update the client-side Movies collection. Meteor keeps everything synchronized between the browsers and server for you. Removing the Insecure Module To make it easier to develop and debug a new Meteor app, by default, you can modify the database directly from the client. For example, you can delete all of the data in the database by opening up your browser console window and executing multiple Movies.remove() commands. Obviously, enabling anyone to modify your database from the browser is not a good idea in a production application. Before you make a Meteor app public, you should first run the meteor remove insecure command from a command/terminal window: Running meteor remove insecure removes the insecure package from the Movie app. Unfortunately, it also breaks our Movie app. We’ll get an “Access denied” error in our browser console whenever we try to insert a new movie. No worries. I’ll fix this issue in the next section. Creating Meteor Methods By taking advantage of Meteor Methods, you can create methods which can be invoked on both the client and the server. By taking advantage of Meteor Methods you can: 1. Perform form validation on both the client and the server. For example, even if an evil hacker bypasses your client code, you can still prevent the hacker from submitting an invalid value for a form field by enforcing validation on the server. 2. Simulate database operations on the client but actually perform the operations on the server. Let me show you how we can modify our Movie app so it uses Meteor Methods to insert a new movie. First, we need to create a new file named common\methods.js which contains the definition of our Meteor Methods: Meteor.methods({ addMovie: function (newMovie) { // Perform form validation if (newMovie.title == "") { throw new Meteor.Error(413, "Missing title!"); } if (newMovie.director == "") { throw new Meteor.Error(413, "Missing director!"); } // Insert movie (simulate on client, do it on server) return Movies.insert(newMovie); } }); The addMovie() method is called from both the client and the server. This method does two things. First, it performs some basic validation. If you don’t enter a title or you don’t enter a director then an error is thrown. Second, the addMovie() method inserts the new movie into the Movies collection. When called on the client, inserting the new movie into the Movies collection just updates the collection. When called on the server, inserting the new movie into the Movies collection causes the database (MongoDB) to be updated with the new movie. You must add the common\methods.js file to the common folder so it will get executed on both the client and the server. Our folder structure now looks like this: We actually call the addMovie() method within our client code in the client\movies.js file. Here’s what the updated file looks like: // Declare client Movies collection Movies = new Meteor.Collection("movies"); // Bind moviesTemplate to Movies collection Template.moviesTemplate.movies = function () { return Movies.find(); }; // Handle movieForm events Template.movieForm.events = { 'submit': function (e, tmpl) { // Don't postback e.preventDefault(); // create the new movie var newMovie = { title: tmpl.find("#title").value, director: tmpl.find("#director").value }; // add the movie to the db Meteor.call( "addMovie", newMovie, function (err, result) { if (err) { alert("Could not add movie " + err.reason); } } ); } }; The addMovie() method is called – on both the client and the server – by calling the Meteor.call() method. This method accepts the following parameters: · The string name of the method to call. · The data to pass to the method (You can actually pass multiple params for the data if you like). · A callback function to invoke after the method completes. In the JavaScript code above, the addMovie() method is called with the new movie retrieved from the HTML form. The callback checks for an error. If there is an error then the error reason is displayed in an alert (please don’t use alerts for validation errors in a production app because they are ugly!). Summary The goal of this blog post was to provide you with a brief walk through of a simple Meteor app. I showed you how you can create a simple Movie Database app which enables you to display a list of movies and create new movies. I also explained why it is important to remove the Meteor insecure package from a production app. I showed you how to use Meteor Methods to insert data into the database instead of doing it directly from the client. I’m very impressed with the Meteor framework. The support for Live HTML and Latency Compensation are required features for many real world Single Page Apps but implementing these features by hand is not easy. Meteor makes it easy.

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

  - by Michael Williamson

  Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• Use Extension method to write cleaner code

  - by Fredrik N

  This blog post will show you step by step to refactoring some code to be more readable (at least what I think). Patrik Löwnedahl gave me some of the ideas when we where talking about making code much cleaner. The following is an simple application that will have a list of movies (Normal and Transfer). The task of the application is to calculate the total sum of each movie and also display the price of each movie. class Program { enum MovieType { Normal, Transfer } static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } else if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } } private static IEnumerable<MovieType> GetMovies() { return new List<MovieType>() { MovieType.Normal, MovieType.Transfer, MovieType.Normal }; } } .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; } In the code above I’m using an enum, a good way to add types (isn’t it ;)). I also use one foreach loop to calculate the price, the loop has a condition statement to check what kind of movie is added to the list of movies. I want to reuse the foreach only to increase performance and let it do two things (isn’t that smart of me?! ;)). First of all I can admit, I’m not a big fan of enum. Enum often results in ugly condition statements and can be hard to maintain (if a new type is added we need to check all the code in our app to see if we use the enum somewhere else). I don’t often care about pre-optimizations when it comes to write code (of course I have performance in mind). I rather prefer to use two foreach to let them do one things instead of two. So based on what I don’t like and Martin Fowler’s Refactoring catalog, I’m going to refactoring this code to what I will call a more elegant and cleaner code. First of all I’m going to use Split Loop to make sure the foreach will do one thing not two, it will results in two foreach (Don’t care about performance here, if the results will results in bad performance, you can refactoring later, but computers are so fast to day, so iterating through a list is not often so time consuming.) Note: The foreach actually do four things, will come to is later. var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Normal) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } } foreach (var movie in movies) { if (movie == MovieType.Transfer) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } } .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; } To remove the condition statement we can use the Where extension method added to the IEnumerable<T> and is located in the System.Linq namespace: foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Normal)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += 2; Console.WriteLine("$2"); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m == MovieType.Transfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += 3; Console.WriteLine("$3"); } .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; } The above code will still do two things, calculate the total price, and display the price of the movie. I will not take care of it at the moment, instead I will focus on the enum and try to remove them. One way to remove enum is by using the Replace Conditional with Polymorphism. So I will create two classes, one base class called Movie, and one called MovieTransfer. The Movie class will have a property called Price, the Movie will now hold the price:   public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } .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; } The following code has no enum and will use the new Movie classes instead: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = 0; int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = 0; foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) { totalPriceOfNormalMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) { totalPriceOfTransferMovie += movie.Price; Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } .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; }   If you take a look at the foreach now, you can see it still actually do two things, calculate the price and display the price. We can do some more refactoring here by using the Sum extension method to calculate the total price of the movies:   static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfNormalMovie = movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is Movie)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); foreach (var movie in movies.Where( m => m is MovieTransfer)) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .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; } Now when the Movie object will hold the price, there is no need to use two separate foreach to display the price of the movies in the list, so we can use only one instead: foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); .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; } If we want to increase the Maintainability index we can use the Extract Method to move the Sum of the prices into two separate methods. The name of the method will explain what we are doing: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); foreach (var movie in movies) Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } .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; } Now to the last thing, I love the ForEach method of the List<T>, but the IEnumerable<T> doesn’t have it, so I created my own ForEach extension, here is the code of the ForEach extension method: public static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .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; } I will now replace the foreach by using this ForEach method: static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(m => Console.WriteLine(m.Price)); } .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; } The ForEach on the movies will now display the price of the movie, but maybe we want to display the name of the movie etc, so we can use Extract Method by moving the lamdba expression into a method instead, and let the method explains what we are displaying: movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } .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; } Now the refactoring is done! Here is the complete code:   class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var movies = GetMovies(); int totalPriceOfMovie = TotalPriceOfMovie(movies); int totalPriceOfTransferMovie = TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(movies); movies.ForEach(DisplayMovieInfo); } private static void DisplayMovieInfo(Movie movie) { Console.WriteLine(movie.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovieTransfer(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is MovieTransfer) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static int TotalPriceOfMovie(IEnumerable<Movie> movies) { return movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .Sum(m => m.Price); } private static IEnumerable<Movie> GetMovies() { return new List<Movie>() { new Movie(), new MovieTransfer(), new Movie() }; } } public class Movie { public virtual int Price { get { return 2; } } } public class MovieTransfer : Movie { public override int Price { get { return 3; } } } pulbic static class LoopExtensions { public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, Action<T> action) { Contract.Requires(values != null); Contract.Requires(action != null); foreach (var v in values) action(v); } } .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; } I think the new code is much cleaner than the first one, and I love the ForEach extension on the IEnumerable<T>, I can use it for different kind of things, for example: movies.Where(m => m is Movie) .ForEach(DoSomething); .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; } By using the Where and ForEach extension method, some if statements can be removed and will make the code much cleaner. But the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What would you have done different, what do you think will make the first example in the blog post look much cleaner than my results, comments are welcome! If you want to know when I will publish a new blog post, you can follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fredrikn

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin &ndash; #3 &ndash; Make Evolvability inevitable

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/06/04/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin-ndash-3-ndash-make-evolvability-inevitable.aspxThe easier something to measure the more likely it will be produced. Deviations between what is and what should be can be readily detected. That´s what automated acceptance tests are for. That´s what sprint reviews in Scrum are for. It´s no small wonder our software looks like it looks. It has all the traits whose conformance with requirements can easily be measured. And it´s lacking traits which cannot easily be measured. Evolvability (or Changeability) is such a trait. If an operation is correct, if an operation if fast enough, that can be checked very easily. But whether Evolvability is high or low, that cannot be checked by taking a measure or two. Evolvability might correlate with certain traits, e.g. number of lines of code (LOC) per function or Cyclomatic Complexity or test coverage. But there is no threshold value signalling “evolvability too low”; also Evolvability is hardly tangible for the customer. Nevertheless Evolvability is of great importance - at least in the long run. You can get away without much of it for a short time. Eventually, though, it´s needed like any other requirement. Or even more. Because without Evolvability no other requirement can be implemented. Evolvability is the foundation on which all else is build. Such fundamental importance is in stark contrast with its immeasurability. To compensate this, Evolvability must be put at the very center of software development. It must become the hub around everything else revolves. Since we cannot measure Evolvability, though, we cannot start watching it more. Instead we need to establish practices to keep it high (enough) at all times. Chefs have known that for long. That´s why everybody in a restaurant kitchen is constantly seeing after cleanliness. Hygiene is important as is to have clean tools at standardized locations. Only then the health of the patrons can be guaranteed and production efficiency is constantly high. Still a kitchen´s level of cleanliness is easier to measure than software Evolvability. That´s why important practices like reviews, pair programming, or TDD are not enough, I guess. What we need to keep Evolvability in focus and high is… to continually evolve. Change must not be something to avoid but too embrace. To me that means the whole change cycle from requirement analysis to delivery needs to be gone through more often. Scrum´s sprints of 4, 2 even 1 week are too long. Kanban´s flow of user stories across is too unreliable; it takes as long as it takes. Instead we should fix the cycle time at 2 days max. I call that Spinning. No increment must take longer than from this morning until tomorrow evening to finish. Then it should be acceptance checked by the customer (or his/her representative, e.g. a Product Owner). For me there are several resasons for such a fixed and short cycle time for each increment: Clear expectations Absolute estimates (“This will take X days to complete.”) are near impossible in software development as explained previously. Too much unplanned research and engineering work lurk in every feature. And then pervasive interruptions of work by peers and management. However, the smaller the scope the better our absolute estimates become. That´s because we understand better what really are the requirements and what the solution should look like. But maybe more importantly the shorter the timespan the more we can control how we use our time. So much can happen over the course of a week and longer timespans. But if push comes to shove I can block out all distractions and interruptions for a day or possibly two. That´s why I believe we can give rough absolute estimates on 3 levels: Noon Tonight Tomorrow Think of a meeting with a Product Owner at 8:30 in the morning. If she asks you, how long it will take you to implement a user story or bug fix, you can say, “It´ll be fixed by noon.”, or you can say, “I can manage to implement it until tonight before I leave.”, or you can say, “You´ll get it by tomorrow night at latest.” Yes, I believe all else would be naive. If you´re not confident to get something done by tomorrow night (some 34h from now) you just cannot reliably commit to any timeframe. That means you should not promise anything, you should not even start working on the issue. So when estimating use these four categories: Noon, Tonight, Tomorrow, NoClue - with NoClue meaning the requirement needs to be broken down further so each aspect can be assigned to one of the first three categories. If you like absolute estimates, here you go. But don´t do deep estimates. Don´t estimate dozens of issues; don´t think ahead (“Issue A is a Tonight, then B will be a Tomorrow, after that it´s C as a Noon, finally D is a Tonight - that´s what I´ll do this week.”). Just estimate so Work-in-Progress (WIP) is 1 for everybody - plus a small number of buffer issues. To be blunt: Yes, this makes promises impossible as to what a team will deliver in terms of scope at a certain date in the future. But it will give a Product Owner a clear picture of what to pull for acceptance feedback tonight and tomorrow. Trust through reliability Our trade is lacking trust. Customers don´t trust software companies/departments much. Managers don´t trust developers much. I find that perfectly understandable in the light of what we´re trying to accomplish: delivering software in the face of uncertainty by means of material good production. Customers as well as managers still expect software development to be close to production of houses or cars. But that´s a fundamental misunderstanding. Software development ist development. It´s basically research. As software developers we´re constantly executing experiments to find out what really provides value to users. We don´t know what they need, we just have mediated hypothesises. That´s why we cannot reliably deliver on preposterous demands. So trust is out of the window in no time. If we switch to delivering in short cycles, though, we can regain trust. Because estimates - explicit or implicit - up to 32 hours at most can be satisfied. I´d say: reliability over scope. It´s more important to reliably deliver what was promised then to cover a lot of requirement area. So when in doubt promise less - but deliver without delay. Deliver on scope (Functionality and Quality); but also deliver on Evolvability, i.e. on inner quality according to accepted principles. Always. Trust will be the reward. Less complexity of communication will follow. More goodwill buffer will follow. So don´t wait for some Kanban board to show you, that flow can be improved by scheduling smaller stories. You don´t need to learn that the hard way. Just start with small batch sizes of three different sizes. Fast feedback What has been finished can be checked for acceptance. Why wait for a sprint of several weeks to end? Why let the mental model of the issue and its solution dissipate? If you get final feedback after one or two weeks, you hardly remember what you did and why you did it. Resoning becomes hard. But more importantly youo probably are not in the mood anymore to go back to something you deemed done a long time ago. It´s boring, it´s frustrating to open up that mental box again. Learning is harder the longer it takes from event to feedback. Effort can be wasted between event (finishing an issue) and feedback, because other work might go in the wrong direction based on false premises. Checking finished issues for acceptance is the most important task of a Product Owner. It´s even more important than planning new issues. Because as long as work started is not released (accepted) it´s potential waste. So before starting new work better make sure work already done has value. By putting the emphasis on acceptance rather than planning true pull is established. As long as planning and starting work is more important, it´s a push process. Accept a Noon issue on the same day before leaving. Accept a Tonight issue before leaving today or first thing tomorrow morning. Accept a Tomorrow issue tomorrow night before leaving or early the day after tomorrow. After acceptance the developer(s) can start working on the next issue. Flexibility As if reliability/trust and fast feedback for less waste weren´t enough economic incentive, there is flexibility. After each issue the Product Owner can change course. If on Monday morning feature slices A, B, C, D, E were important and A, B, C were scheduled for acceptance by Monday evening and Tuesday evening, the Product Owner can change her mind at any time. Maybe after A got accepted she asks for continuation with D. But maybe, just maybe, she has gotten a completely different idea by then. Maybe she wants work to continue on F. And after B it´s neither D nor E, but G. And after G it´s D. With Spinning every 32 hours at latest priorities can be changed. And nothing is lost. Because what got accepted is of value. It provides an incremental value to the customer/user. Or it provides internal value to the Product Owner as increased knowledge/decreased uncertainty. I find such reactivity over commitment economically very benefical. Why commit a team to some workload for several weeks? It´s unnecessary at beast, and inflexible and wasteful at worst. If we cannot promise delivery of a certain scope on a certain date - which is what customers/management usually want -, we can at least provide them with unpredecented flexibility in the face of high uncertainty. Where the path is not clear, cannot be clear, make small steps so you´re able to change your course at any time. Premature completion Customers/management are used to premeditating budgets. They want to know exactly how much to pay for a certain amount of requirements. That´s understandable. But it does not match with the nature of software development. We should know that by now. Maybe there´s somewhere in the world some team who can consistently deliver on scope, quality, and time, and budget. Great! Congratulations! I, however, haven´t seen such a team yet. Which does not mean it´s impossible, but I think it´s nothing I can recommend to strive for. Rather I´d say: Don´t try this at home. It might hurt you one way or the other. However, what we can do, is allow customers/management stop work on features at any moment. With spinning every 32 hours a feature can be declared as finished - even though it might not be completed according to initial definition. I think, progress over completion is an important offer software development can make. Why think in terms of completion beyond a promise for the next 32 hours? Isn´t it more important to constantly move forward? Step by step. We´re not running sprints, we´re not running marathons, not even ultra-marathons. We´re in the sport of running forever. That makes it futile to stare at the finishing line. The very concept of a burn-down chart is misleading (in most cases). Whoever can only think in terms of completed requirements shuts out the chance for saving money. The requirements for a features mostly are uncertain. So how does a Product Owner know in the first place, how much is needed. Maybe more than specified is needed - which gets uncovered step by step with each finished increment. Maybe less than specified is needed. After each 4–32 hour increment the Product Owner can do an experient (or invite users to an experiment) if a particular trait of the software system is already good enough. And if so, she can switch the attention to a different aspect. In the end, requirements A, B, C then could be finished just 70%, 80%, and 50%. What the heck? It´s good enough - for now. 33% money saved. Wouldn´t that be splendid? Isn´t that a stunning argument for any budget-sensitive customer? You can save money and still get what you need? Pull on practices So far, in addition to more trust, more flexibility, less money spent, Spinning led to “doing less” which also means less code which of course means higher Evolvability per se. Last but not least, though, I think Spinning´s short acceptance cycles have one more effect. They excert pull-power on all sorts of practices known for increasing Evolvability. If, for example, you believe high automated test coverage helps Evolvability by lowering the fear of inadverted damage to a code base, why isn´t 90% of the developer community practicing automated tests consistently? I think, the answer is simple: Because they can do without. Somehow they manage to do enough manual checks before their rare releases/acceptance checks to ensure good enough correctness - at least in the short term. The same goes for other practices like component orientation, continuous build/integration, code reviews etc. None of that is compelling, urgent, imperative. Something else always seems more important. So Evolvability principles and practices fall through the cracks most of the time - until a project hits a wall. Then everybody becomes desperate; but by then (re)gaining Evolvability has become as very, very difficult and tedious undertaking. Sometimes up to the point where the existence of a project/company is in danger. With Spinning that´s different. If you´re practicing Spinning you cannot avoid all those practices. With Spinning you very quickly realize you cannot deliver reliably even on your 32 hour promises. Spinning thus is pulling on developers to adopt principles and practices for Evolvability. They will start actively looking for ways to keep their delivery rate high. And if not, management will soon tell them to do that. Because first the Product Owner then management will notice an increasing difficulty to deliver value within 32 hours. There, finally there emerges a way to measure Evolvability: The more frequent developers tell the Product Owner there is no way to deliver anything worth of feedback until tomorrow night, the poorer Evolvability is. Don´t count the “WTF!”, count the “No way!” utterances. In closing For sustainable software development we need to put Evolvability first. Functionality and Quality must not rule software development but be implemented within a framework ensuring (enough) Evolvability. Since Evolvability cannot be measured easily, I think we need to put software development “under pressure”. Software needs to be changed more often, in smaller increments. Each increment being relevant to the customer/user in some way. That does not mean each increment is worthy of shipment. It´s sufficient to gain further insight from it. Increments primarily serve the reduction of uncertainty, not sales. Sales even needs to be decoupled from this incremental progress. No more promises to sales. No more delivery au point. Rather sales should look at a stream of accepted increments (or incremental releases) and scoup from that whatever they find valuable. Sales and marketing need to realize they should work on what´s there, not what might be possible in the future. But I digress… In my view a Spinning cycle - which is not easy to reach, which requires practice - is the core practice to compensate the immeasurability of Evolvability. From start to finish of each issue in 32 hours max - that´s the challenge we need to accept if we´re serious increasing Evolvability. Fortunately higher Evolvability is not the only outcome of Spinning. Customer/management will like the increased flexibility and “getting more bang for the buck”.

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• Scaling-out Your Services by Message Bus based WCF Transport Extension &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Background

  - by Shaun

  Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode.   Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces a role which takes the responsible to find the best service instance to process the request. The image below describes the sharp of this mode. There are four clients communicate with the service through the underlying transportation. For example, if we are using HTTP the clients might be connecting to the same service URL. On the server side there’s a dispatcher listening on this URL and try to retrieve all messages. When a message came in, the dispatcher will find a proper service instance to process it. There are three mechanism to find the instance: Round-robin: Dispatcher will always send the message to the next instance. For example, if the dispatcher sent the message to instance 2, then the next message will be sent to instance 3, regardless if instance 3 is busy or not at that moment. Random: Dispatcher will find a service instance randomly, and same as the round-robin mode it regardless if the instance is busy or not. Sticky: Dispatcher will send all related messages to the same service instance. This approach always being used if the service methods are state-ful or session-ful. But as you can see, all of these approaches are not really load balanced. The clients will send messages at any time, and each message might take different process duration on the server side. This means in some cases, some of the service instances are very busy while others are almost idle. For example, if we were using round-robin mode, it could be happened that most of the simple task messages were passed to instance 1 while the complex ones were sent to instance 3, even though instance 1 should be idle. This brings some problem in our architecture. The first one is that, the response to the clients might be longer than it should be. As it’s shown in the figure above, message 6 and 9 can be processed by instance 1 or instance 2, but in reality they were dispatched to the busy instance 3 since the dispatcher and round-robin mode. Secondly, if there are many requests came from the clients in a very short period, service instances might be filled by tons of pending tasks and some instances might be crashed. Third, if we are using some cloud platform to host our service instances, for example the Windows Azure, the computing resource is billed by service deployment period instead of the actual CPU usage. This means if any service instance is idle it is wasting our money! Last one, the dispatcher would be the bottleneck of our system since all incoming messages must be routed by the dispatcher. If we are using HTTP or TCP as the transport, the dispatcher would be a network load balance. If we wants more capacity, we have to scale-up, or buy a hardware load balance which is very expensive, as well as scaling-out the service instances. Pulling Mode Pulling mode doesn’t need a dispatcher to route the messages. All service instances are listening to the same transport and try to retrieve the next proper message to process if they are idle. Since there is no dispatcher in pulling mode, it requires some features on the transportation. The transportation must support multiple client connection and server listening. HTTP and TCP doesn’t allow multiple clients are listening on the same address and port, so it cannot be used in pulling mode directly. All messages in the transportation must be FIFO, which means the old message must be received before the new one. Message selection would be a plus on the transportation. This means both service and client can specify some selection criteria and just receive some specified kinds of messages. This feature is not mandatory but would be very useful when implementing the request reply and duplex WCF channel modes. Otherwise we must have a memory dictionary to store the reply messages. I will explain more about this in the following articles. Message bus, or the message queue would be best candidate as the transportation when using the pulling mode. First, it allows multiple application to listen on the same queue, and it’s FIFO. Some of the message bus also support the message selection, such as TIBCO EMS, RabbitMQ. Some others provide in memory dictionary which can store the reply messages, for example the Redis. The principle of pulling mode is to let the service instances self-managed. This means each instance will try to retrieve the next pending incoming message if they finished the current task. This gives us more benefit and can solve the problems we met with in the dispatcher mode. The incoming message will be received to the best instance to process, which means this will be very balanced. And it will not happen that some instances are busy while other are idle, since the idle one will retrieve more tasks to make them busy. Since all instances are try their best to be busy we can use less instances than dispatcher mode, which more cost effective. Since there’s no dispatcher in the system, there is no bottleneck. When we introduced more service instances, in dispatcher mode we have to change something to let the dispatcher know the new instances. But in pulling mode since all service instance are self-managed, there no extra change at all. If there are many incoming messages, since the message bus can queue them in the transportation, service instances would not be crashed. All above are the benefits using the pulling mode, but it will introduce some problem as well. The process tracking and debugging become more difficult. Since the service instances are self-managed, we cannot know which instance will process the message. So we need more information to support debug and track. Real-time response may not be supported. All service instances will process the next message after the current one has done, if we have some real-time request this may not be a good solution. Compare with the Pros and Cons above, the pulling mode would a better solution for the distributed system architecture. Because what we need more is the scalability, cost-effect and the self-management.   WCF and WCF Transport Extensibility Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. In the .NET world WCF is the best way to implement the service. In this series I’m going to demonstrate how to implement the pulling mode on top of a message bus by extending the WCF. I don’t want to deep into every related field in WCF but will highlight its transport extensibility. When we implemented an RPC foundation there are many aspects we need to deal with, for example the message encoding, encryption, authentication and message sending and receiving. In WCF, each aspect is represented by a channel. A message will be passed through all necessary channels and finally send to the underlying transportation. And on the other side the message will be received from the transport and though the same channels until the business logic. This mode is called “Channel Stack” in WCF, and the last channel in the channel stack must always be a transport channel, which takes the responsible for sending and receiving the messages. As we are going to implement the WCF over message bus and implement the pulling mode scaling-out solution, we need to create our own transport channel so that the client and service can exchange messages over our bus. Before we deep into the transport channel, let’s have a look on the message exchange patterns that WCF defines. Message exchange pattern (MEP) defines how client and service exchange the messages over the transportation. WCF defines 3 basic MEPs which are datagram, Request-Reply and Duplex. Datagram: Also known as one-way, or fire-forgot mode. The message sent from the client to the service, and no need any reply from the service. The client doesn’t care about the message result at all. Request-Reply: Very common used pattern. The client send the request message to the service and wait until the reply message comes from the service. Duplex: The client sent message to the service, when the service processing the message it can callback to the client. When callback the service would be like a client while the client would be like a service. In WCF, each MEP represent some channels associated. MEP Channels Datagram IInputChannel, IOutputChannel Request-Reply IRequestChannel, IReplyChannel Duplex IDuplexChannel And the channels are created by ChannelListener on the server side, and ChannelFactory on the client side. The ChannelListener and ChannelFactory are created by the TransportBindingElement. The TransportBindingElement is created by the Binding, which can be defined as a new binding or from a custom binding. For more information about the transport channel mode, please refer to the MSDN document. The figure below shows the transport channel objects when using the request-reply MEP. And this is the datagram MEP. And this is the duplex MEP. After investigated the WCF transport architecture, channel mode and MEP, we finally identified what we should do to extend our message bus based transport layer. They are: Binding: (Optional) Defines the channel elements in the channel stack and added our transport binding element at the bottom of the stack. But we can use the build-in CustomBinding as well. TransportBindingElement: Defines which MEP is supported in our transport and create the related ChannelListener and ChannelFactory. This also defines the scheme of the endpoint if using this transport. ChannelListener: Create the server side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelListener to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelListener for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. ChannelFactory: Create the client side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelFactory to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelFactory for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. Channels: Based on the MEPs we want to support, we need to implement the channels accordingly. For example, if we want our transport support Request-Reply mode we should implement IRequestChannel and IReplyChannel. In this series I will implement all 3 MEPs listed above one by one. Scaffold: In order to make our transport extension works we also need to implement some scaffold stuff. For example we need some classes to send and receive message though out message bus. We also need some codes to read and write the WCF message, etc.. These are not necessary but would be very useful in our example.   Message Bus There is only one thing remained before we can begin to implement our scaling-out support WCF transport, which is the message bus. As I mentioned above, the message bus must have some features to fulfill all the WCF MEPs. In my company we will be using TIBCO EMS, which is an enterprise message bus product. And I have said before we can use any message bus production if it’s satisfied with our requests. Here I would like to introduce an interface to separate the message bus from the WCF. This allows us to implement the bus operations by any kinds bus we are going to use. The interface would be like this. 1: public interface IBus : IDisposable 2: { 3: string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null); 4:  5: void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo); 6:  7: BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo); 8: } There are only three methods for the bus interface. Let me explain one by one. The SendRequest method takes the responsible for sending the request message into the bus. The parameters description are: message: The WCF message content. fromClient: Indicates if this message was came from the client. from: The channel ID that this message was sent from. The channel ID will be generated when any kinds of channel was created, which will be explained in the following articles. to: The channel ID that this message should be received. In Request-Reply and Duplex MEP this is necessary since the reply message must be received by the channel which sent the related request message. The SendReply method takes the responsible for sending the reply message. It’s very similar as the previous one but no “from” parameter. This is because it’s no need to reply a reply message again in any MEPs. The Receive method takes the responsible for waiting for a incoming message, includes the request message and specified reply message. It returned a BusMessage object, which contains some information about the channel information. The code of the BusMessage class is 1: public class BusMessage 2: { 3: public string MessageID { get; private set; } 4: public string From { get; private set; } 5: public string ReplyTo { get; private set; } 6: public string Content { get; private set; } 7:  8: public BusMessage(string messageId, string fromChannelId, string replyToChannelId, string content) 9: { 10: MessageID = messageId; 11: From = fromChannelId; 12: ReplyTo = replyToChannelId; 13: Content = content; 14: } 15: } Now let’s implement a message bus based on the IBus interface. Since I don’t want you to buy and install the TIBCO EMS or any other message bus products, I will implement an in process memory bus. This bus is only for test and sample purpose. It can only be used if the service and client are in the same process. Very straightforward. 1: public class InProcMessageBus : IBus 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity> _queue; 4: private readonly object _lock; 5:  6: public InProcMessageBus() 7: { 8: _queue = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity>(); 9: _lock = new object(); 10: } 11:  12: public string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null) 13: { 14: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, from, to); 15: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 16: return entity.ID.ToString(); 17: } 18:  19: public void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo) 20: { 21: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, null, replyTo); 22: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 23: } 24:  25: public BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo) 26: { 27: InProcMessageEntity e = null; 28: while (true) 29: { 30: lock (_lock) 31: { 32: var entity = _queue 33: .Where(kvp => kvp.Value.FromClient == fromClient && (kvp.Value.To == replyTo || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(kvp.Value.To))) 34: .FirstOrDefault(); 35: if (entity.Key != Guid.Empty && entity.Value != null) 36: { 37: _queue.TryRemove(entity.Key, out e); 38: } 39: } 40: if (e == null) 41: { 42: Thread.Sleep(100); 43: } 44: else 45: { 46: return new BusMessage(e.ID.ToString(), e.From, e.To, e.Content); 47: } 48: } 49: } 50:  51: public void Dispose() 52: { 53: } 54: } The InProcMessageBus stores the messages in the objects of InProcMessageEntity, which can take some extra information beside the WCF message itself. 1: public class InProcMessageEntity 2: { 3: public Guid ID { get; set; } 4: public string Content { get; set; } 5: public bool FromClient { get; set; } 6: public string From { get; set; } 7: public string To { get; set; } 8:  9: public InProcMessageEntity() 10: : this(string.Empty, false, string.Empty, string.Empty) 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public InProcMessageEntity(string content, bool fromClient, string from, string to) 15: { 16: ID = Guid.NewGuid(); 17: Content = content; 18: FromClient = fromClient; 19: From = from; 20: To = to; 21: } 22: }   Summary OK, now I have all necessary stuff ready. The next step would be implementing our WCF message bus transport extension. In this post I described two scaling-out approaches on the service side especially if we are using the cloud platform: dispatcher mode and pulling mode. And I compared the Pros and Cons of them. Then I introduced the WCF channel stack, channel mode and the transport extension part, and identified what we should do to create our own WCF transport extension, to let our WCF services using pulling mode based on a message bus. And finally I provided some classes that need to be used in the future posts that working against an in process memory message bus, for the demonstration purpose only. In the next post I will begin to implement the transport extension step by step.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

  - by Rick Strahl

  originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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• Dynamically loading Assemblies to reduce Runtime Depencies

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working on a request to the West Wind Application Configuration library to add JSON support. The config library is a very easy to use code-first approach to configuration: You create a class that holds the configuration data that inherits from a base configuration class, and then assign a persistence provider at runtime that determines where and how the configuration data is store. Currently the library supports .NET Configuration stores (web.config/app.config), XML files, SQL records and string storage.About once a week somebody asks me about JSON support and I've deflected this question for the longest time because frankly I think that JSON as a configuration store doesn't really buy a heck of a lot over XML. Both formats require the user to perform some fixup of the plain configuration data - in XML into XML tags, with JSON using JSON delimiters for properties and property formatting rules. Sure JSON is a little less verbose and maybe a little easier to read if you have hierarchical data, but overall the differences are pretty minor in my opinion. And yet - the requests keep rolling in.Hard Link Issues in a Component LibraryAnother reason I've been hesitant is that I really didn't want to pull in a dependency on an external JSON library - in this case JSON.NET - into the core library. If you're not using JSON.NET elsewhere I don't want a user to have to require a hard dependency on JSON.NET unless they want to use the JSON feature. JSON.NET is also sensitive to versions and doesn't play nice with multiple versions when hard linked. For example, when you have a reference to V4.4 in your project but the host application has a reference to version 4.5 you can run into assembly load problems. NuGet's Update-Package can solve some of this *if* you can recompile, but that's not ideal for a component that's supposed to be just plug and play. This is no criticism of JSON.NET - this really applies to any dependency that might change.  So hard linking the DLL can be problematic for a number reasons, but the primary reason is to not force loading of JSON.NET unless you actually need it when you use the JSON configuration features of the library.Enter Dynamic LoadingSo rather than adding an assembly reference to the project, I decided that it would be better to dynamically load the DLL at runtime and then use dynamic typing to access various classes. This allows me to run without a hard assembly reference and allows more flexibility with version number differences now and in the future.But there are also a couple of downsides:No assembly reference means only dynamic access - no compiler type checking or IntellisenseRequirement for the host application to have reference to JSON.NET or else get runtime errorsThe former is minor, but the latter can be problematic. Runtime errors are always painful, but in this case I'm willing to live with this. If you want to use JSON configuration settings JSON.NET needs to be loaded in the project. If this is a Web project, it'll likely be there already.So there are a few things that are needed to make this work:Dynamically create an instance and optionally attempt to load an Assembly (if not loaded)Load types into dynamic variablesUse Reflection for a few tasks like statics/enumsThe dynamic keyword in C# makes the formerly most difficult Reflection part - method calls and property assignments - fairly painless. But as cool as dynamic is it doesn't handle all aspects of Reflection. Specifically it doesn't deal with object activation, truly dynamic (string based) member activation or accessing of non instance members, so there's still a little bit of work left to do with Reflection.Dynamic Object InstantiationThe first step in getting the process rolling is to instantiate the type you need to work with. This might be a two step process - loading the instance from a string value, since we don't have a hard type reference and potentially having to load the assembly. Although the host project might have a reference to JSON.NET, that instance might have not been loaded yet since it hasn't been accessed yet. In ASP.NET this won't be a problem, since ASP.NET preloads all referenced assemblies on AppDomain startup, but in other executable project, assemblies are just in time loaded only when they are accessed.Instantiating a type is a two step process: Finding the type reference and then activating it. Here's the generic code out of my ReflectionUtils library I use for this:/// <summary> /// Creates an instance of a type based on a string. Assumes that the type's /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName">Common name of the type</param> /// <param name="args">Any constructor parameters</param> /// <returns></returns> public static object CreateInstanceFromString(string typeName, params object[] args) { object instance = null; Type type = null; try { type = GetTypeFromName(typeName); if (type == null) return null; instance = Activator.CreateInstance(type, args); } catch { return null; } return instance; } /// <summary> /// Helper routine that looks up a type name and tries to retrieve the /// full type reference in the actively executing assemblies. /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Type GetTypeFromName(string typeName) { Type type = null; // Let default name binding find it type = Type.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) return type; // look through assembly list var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); // try to find manually foreach (Assembly asm in assemblies) { type = asm.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) break; } return type; } To use this for loading JSON.NET I have a small factory function that instantiates JSON.NET and sets a bunch of configuration settings on the generated object. The startup code also looks for failure and tries loading up the assembly when it fails since that's the main reason the load would fail. Finally it also caches the loaded instance for reuse (according to James the JSON.NET instance is thread safe and quite a bit faster when cached). Here's what the factory function looks like in JsonSerializationUtils:/// <summary> /// Dynamically creates an instance of JSON.NET /// </summary> /// <param name="throwExceptions">If true throws exceptions otherwise returns null</param> /// <returns>Dynamic JsonSerializer instance</returns> public static dynamic CreateJsonNet(bool throwExceptions = true) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; lock (SyncLock) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; // Try to create instance dynamic json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); if (json == null) { try { var ass = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load("Newtonsoft.Json"); json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); } catch (Exception ex) { if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } } if (json == null) return null; json.ReferenceLoopHandling = (dynamic) ReflectionUtils.GetStaticProperty("Newtonsoft.Json.ReferenceLoopHandling", "Ignore"); // Enums as strings in JSON dynamic enumConverter = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.Converters.StringEnumConverter"); json.Converters.Add(enumConverter); JsonNet = json; } return JsonNet; }This code's purpose is to return a fully configured JsonSerializer instance. As you can see the code tries to create an instance and when it fails tries to load the assembly, and then re-tries loading.Once the instance is loaded some configuration occurs on it. Specifically I set the ReferenceLoopHandling option to not blow up immediately when circular references are encountered. There are a host of other small config setting that might be useful to set, but the default seem to be good enough in recent versions. Note that I'm setting ReferenceLoopHandling which requires an Enum value to be set. There's no real easy way (short of using the cardinal numeric value) to set a property or pass parameters from static values or enums. This means I still need to use Reflection to make this work. I'm using the same ReflectionUtils class I previously used to handle this for me. The function looks up the type and then uses Type.InvokeMember() to read the static property.Another feature I need is have Enum values serialized as strings rather than numeric values which is the default. To do this I can use the StringEnumConverter to convert enums to strings by adding it to the Converters collection.As you can see there's still a bit of Reflection to be done even in C# 4+ with dynamic, but with a few helpers this process is relatively painless.Doing the actual JSON ConversionFinally I need to actually do my JSON conversions. For the Utility class I need serialization that works for both strings and files so I created four methods that handle these tasks two each for serialization and deserialization for string and file.Here's what the File Serialization looks like:/// <summary> /// Serializes an object instance to a JSON file. /// </summary> /// <param name="value">the value to serialize</param> /// <param name="fileName">Full path to the file to write out with JSON.</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">Determines whether exceptions are thrown or false is returned</param> /// <param name="formatJsonOutput">if true pretty-formats the JSON with line breaks</param> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public static bool SerializeToFile(object value, string fileName, bool throwExceptions = false, bool formatJsonOutput = false) { dynamic writer = null; FileStream fs = null; try { Type type = value.GetType(); var json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return false; fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create); var sw = new StreamWriter(fs, Encoding.UTF8); writer = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextWriterType, sw); if (formatJsonOutput) writer.Formatting = (dynamic)Enum.Parse(FormattingType, "Indented"); writer.QuoteChar = '"'; json.Serialize(writer, value); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonSerializer Serialize error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return false; } finally { if (writer != null) writer.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return true; }You can see more of the dynamic invocation in this code. First I grab the dynamic JsonSerializer instance using the CreateJsonNet() method shown earlier which returns a dynamic. I then create a JsonTextWriter and configure a couple of enum settings on it, and then call Serialize() on the serializer instance with the JsonTextWriter that writes the output to disk. Although this code is dynamic it's still fairly short and readable.For full circle operation here's the DeserializeFromFile() version:/// <summary> /// Deserializes an object from file and returns a reference. /// </summary> /// <param name="fileName">name of the file to serialize to</param> /// <param name="objectType">The Type of the object. Use typeof(yourobject class)</param> /// <param name="binarySerialization">determines whether we use Xml or Binary serialization</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">determines whether failure will throw rather than return null on failure</param> /// <returns>Instance of the deserialized object or null. Must be cast to your object type</returns> public static object DeserializeFromFile(string fileName, Type objectType, bool throwExceptions = false) { dynamic json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return null; object result = null; dynamic reader = null; FileStream fs = null; try { fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); var sr = new StreamReader(fs, Encoding.UTF8); reader = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextReaderType, sr); result = json.Deserialize(reader, objectType); reader.Close(); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonNetSerialization Deserialization Error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } finally { if (reader != null) reader.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return result; }This code is a little more compact since there are no prettifying options to set. Here JsonTextReader is created dynamically and it receives the output from the Deserialize() operation on the serializer.You can take a look at the full JsonSerializationUtils.cs file on GitHub to see the rest of the operations, but the string operations are very similar - the code is fairly repetitive.These generic serialization utilities isolate the dynamic serialization logic that has to deal with the dynamic nature of JSON.NET, and any code that uses these functions is none the wiser that JSON.NET is dynamically loaded.Using the JsonSerializationUtils WrapperThe final consumer of the SerializationUtils wrapper is an actual ConfigurationProvider, that is responsible for handling reading and writing JSON values to and from files. The provider is simple a small wrapper around the SerializationUtils component and there's very little code to make this work now:The whole provider looks like this:/// <summary> /// Reads and Writes configuration settings in .NET config files and /// sections. Allows reading and writing to default or external files /// and specification of the configuration section that settings are /// applied to. /// </summary> public class JsonFileConfigurationProvider<TAppConfiguration> : ConfigurationProviderBase<TAppConfiguration> where TAppConfiguration: AppConfiguration, new() { /// <summary> /// Optional - the Configuration file where configuration settings are /// stored in. If not specified uses the default Configuration Manager /// and its default store. /// </summary> public string JsonConfigurationFile { get { return _JsonConfigurationFile; } set { _JsonConfigurationFile = value; } } private string _JsonConfigurationFile = string.Empty; public override bool Read(AppConfiguration config) { var newConfig = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfiguration)) as TAppConfiguration; if (newConfig == null) { if(Write(config)) return true; return false; } DecryptFields(newConfig); DataUtils.CopyObjectData(newConfig, config, "Provider,ErrorMessage"); return true; } /// <summary> /// Return /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TAppConfig"></typeparam> /// <returns></returns> public override TAppConfig Read<TAppConfig>() { var result = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfig)) as TAppConfig; if (result != null) DecryptFields(result); return result; } /// <summary> /// Write configuration to XmlConfigurationFile location /// </summary> /// <param name="config"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool Write(AppConfiguration config) { EncryptFields(config); bool result = JsonSerializationUtils.SerializeToFile(config, JsonConfigurationFile,false,true); // Have to decrypt again to make sure the properties are readable afterwards DecryptFields(config); return result; } }This incidentally demonstrates how easy it is to create a new provider for the West Wind Application Configuration component. Simply implementing 3 methods will do in most cases.Note this code doesn't have any dynamic dependencies - all that's abstracted away in the JsonSerializationUtils(). From here on, serializing JSON is just a matter of calling the static methods on the SerializationUtils class.Already, there are several other places in some other tools where I use JSON serialization this is coming in very handy. With a couple of lines of code I was able to add JSON.NET support to an older AJAX library that I use replacing quite a bit of code that was previously in use. And for any other manual JSON operations (in a couple of apps I use JSON Serialization for 'blob' like document storage) this is also going to be handy.Performance?Some of you might be thinking that using dynamic and Reflection can't be good for performance. And you'd be right… In performing some informal testing it looks like the performance of the native code is nearly twice as fast as the dynamic code. Most of the slowness is attributable to type lookups. To test I created a native class that uses an actual reference to JSON.NET and performance was consistently around 85-90% faster with the referenced code. That being said though - I serialized 10,000 objects in 80ms vs. 45ms so this isn't hardly slouchy. For the configuration component speed is not that important because both read and write operations typically happen once on first access and then every once in a while. But for other operations - say a serializer trying to handle AJAX requests on a Web Server one would be well served to create a hard dependency.Dynamic Loading - Worth it?On occasion dynamic loading makes sense. But there's a price to be paid in added code complexity and a performance hit. But for some operations that are not pivotal to a component or application and only used under certain circumstances dynamic loading can be beneficial to avoid having to ship extra files and loading down distributions. These days when you create new projects in Visual Studio with 30 assemblies before you even add your own code, trying to keep file counts under control seems a good idea. It's not the kind of thing you do on a regular basis, but when needed it can be a useful tool. Hopefully some of you find this information useful…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in .NET  C#   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

  - by rituchhibber

       PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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