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• Animations in FBX exported from Maya are anchored in the wrong place

  - by Simon P Stevens

  We are trying to export a model and animation from Maya into Unity3d. In Maya, the model is anchored (pivot point) at the feet (and the body moves up and down). However after we have performed the FBX export, and imported the file into Unity the model is now appears to be anchored by the waist/head and the feet move. These example videos probably help explain the problem more clearly: Example video - Maya - Correct Example video - Unity - Wrong We have also noticed that if we take the FBX file and import it back into Maya we have exactly the same problem. It seems to be that the constraints no longer work after the FBX is reimported back to Maya, which just kills the connection between the joints and the control objects. When we exported the FBX we have tried checking the 'bake animations' check box. The fact that the same problem exist when importing the FBX back into both Maya and Unity suggests that the source of the problem is most likely with the Maya FBX export. Has anyone encountered this problem before and have any ideas how to fix it?

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• Big Data – Evolution of Big Data – Day 3 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we answered what is the Big Data. Today we will understand why and how the evolution of Big Data has happened. Though the answer is very simple, I would like to tell it in the form of a history lesson. Data in Flat File In earlier days data was stored in the flat file and there was no structure in the flat file.  If any data has to be retrieved from the flat file it was a project by itself. There was no possibility of retrieving the data efficiently and data integrity has been just a term discussed without any modeling or structure around. Database residing in the flat file had more issues than we would like to discuss in today’s world. It was more like a nightmare when there was any data processing involved in the application. Though, applications developed at that time were also not that advanced the need of the data was always there and there was always need of proper data management. Edgar F Codd and 12 Rules Edgar Frank Codd was a British computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He presented 12 rules for the Relational Database and suddenly the chaotic world of the database seems to see discipline in the rules. Relational Database was a promising land for all the unstructured database users. Relational Database brought into the relationship between data as well improved the performance of the data retrieval. Database world had immediately seen a major transformation and every single vendors and database users suddenly started to adopt the relational database models. Relational Database Management Systems Since Edgar F Codd proposed 12 rules for the RBDMS there were many different vendors who started them to build applications and tools to support the relationship between database. This was indeed a learning curve for many of the developer who had never worked before with the modeling of the database. However, as time passed by pretty much everybody accepted the relationship of the database and started to evolve product which performs its best with the boundaries of the RDBMS concepts. This was the best era for the databases and it gave the world extreme experts as well as some of the best products. The Entity Relationship model was also evolved at the same time. In software engineering, an Entity–relationship model (ER model) is a data model for describing a database in an abstract way. Enormous Data Growth Well, everything was going fine with the RDBMS in the database world. As there were no major challenges the adoption of the RDBMS applications and tools was pretty much universal. There was a race at times to make the developer’s life much easier with the RDBMS management tools. Due to the extreme popularity and easy to use system pretty much every data was stored in the RDBMS system. New age applications were built and social media took the world by the storm. Every organizations was feeling pressure to provide the best experience for their users based the data they had with them. While this was all going on at the same time data was growing pretty much every organization and application. Data Warehousing The enormous data growth now presented a big challenge for the organizations who wanted to build intelligent systems based on the data and provide near real time superior user experience to their customers. Various organizations immediately start building data warehousing solutions where the data was stored and processed. The trend of the business intelligence becomes the need of everyday. Data was received from the transaction system and overnight was processed to build intelligent reports from it. Though this is a great solution it has its own set of challenges. The relational database model and data warehousing concepts are all built with keeping traditional relational database modeling in the mind and it still has many challenges when unstructured data was present. Interesting Challenge Every organization had expertise to manage structured data but the world had already changed to unstructured data. There was intelligence in the videos, photos, SMS, text, social media messages and various other data sources. All of these needed to now bring to a single platform and build a uniform system which does what businesses need. The way we do business has also been changed. There was a time when user only got the features what technology supported, however, now users ask for the feature and technology is built to support the same. The need of the real time intelligence from the fast paced data flow is now becoming a necessity. Large amount (Volume) of difference (Variety) of high speed data (Velocity) is the properties of the data. The traditional database system has limits to resolve the challenges this new kind of the data presents. Hence the need of the Big Data Science. We need innovation in how we handle and manage data. We need creative ways to capture data and present to users. Big Data is Reality! Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer discuss Basics of Big Data Architecture. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Best practices when creating/modeling databases?

  - by Oscar Mederos

  Hello, I learned at the University some steps to model a database: Model the problem using the Extended Entity-Relationship Model. Extract the functional dependencies Apply some algorithms to normalize the database (3NF or Boyce-Codd) Create the database I'm studying Computer Science and since I received that course I'm wondering if I always need to do those steps when creating a complex database for an specified problem. For example, do PHP / .NET / .. programmers always do that? or there are some tools to simplify that process, maybe using another way of represent the problem instead of the EERM?

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• Do Not Optimize Without Measuring

  - by Alois Kraus

  Recently I had to do some performance work which included reading a lot of code. It is fascinating with what ideas people come up to solve a problem. Especially when there is no problem. When you look at other peoples code you will not be able to tell if it is well performing or not by reading it. You need to execute it with some sort of tracing or even better under a profiler. The first rule of the performance club is not to think and then to optimize but to measure, think and then optimize. The second rule is to do this do this in a loop to prevent slipping in bad things for too long into your code base. If you skip for some reason the measure step and optimize directly it is like changing the wave function in quantum mechanics. This has no observable effect in our world since it does represent only a probability distribution of all possible values. In quantum mechanics you need to let the wave function collapse to a single value. A collapsed wave function has therefore not many but one distinct value. This is what we physicists call a measurement. If you optimize your application without measuring it you are just changing the probability distribution of your potential performance values. Which performance your application actually has is still unknown. You only know that it will be within a specific range with a certain probability. As usual there are unlikely values within your distribution like a startup time of 20 minutes which should only happen once in 100 000 years. 100 000 years are a very short time when the first customer tries your heavily distributed networking application to run over a slow WIFI network… What is the point of this? Every programmer/architect has a mental performance model in his head. A model has always a set of explicit preconditions and a lot more implicit assumptions baked into it. When the model is good it will help you to think of good designs but it can also be the source of problems. In real world systems not all assumptions of your performance model (implicit or explicit) hold true any longer. The only way to connect your performance model and the real world is to measure it. In the WIFI example the model did assume a low latency high bandwidth LAN connection. If this assumption becomes wrong the system did have a drastic change in startup time. Lets look at a example. Lets assume we want to cache some expensive UI resource like fonts objects. For this undertaking we do create a Cache class with the UI themes we want to support. Since Fonts are expensive objects we do create it on demand the first time the theme is requested. A simple example of a Theme cache might look like this: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Drawing; struct Theme { public Color Color; public Font Font; } static class ThemeCache { static Dictionary<string, Theme> _Cache = new Dictionary<string, Theme> { {"Default", new Theme { Color = Color.AliceBlue }}, {"Theme12", new Theme { Color = Color.Aqua }}, }; public static Theme Get(string theme) { Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } return cached; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Theme item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); item = ThemeCache.Get("Theme12"); } } This cache does create font objects only once since on first retrieve of the Theme object the font is added to the Theme object. When we let the application run it should print “Creating new font” only once. Right? Wrong! The vigilant readers have spotted the issue already. The creator of this cache class wanted to get maximum performance. So he decided that the Theme object should be a value type (struct) to not put too much pressure on the garbage collector. The code Theme cached = _Cache[theme]; if (cached.Font == null) { Console.WriteLine("Creating new font"); cached.Font = new Font("Arial", 8); } does work with a copy of the value stored in the dictionary. This means we do mutate a copy of the Theme object and return it to our caller. But the original Theme object in the dictionary will have always null for the Font field! The solution is to change the declaration of struct Theme to class Theme or to update the theme object in the dictionary. Our cache as it is currently is actually a non caching cache. The funny thing was that I found out with a profiler by looking at which objects where finalized. I found way too many font objects to be finalized. After a bit debugging I found the allocation source for Font objects was this cache. Since this cache was there for years it means that the cache was never needed since I found no perf issue due to the creation of font objects. the cache was never profiled if it did bring any performance gain. to make the cache beneficial it needs to be accessed much more often. That was the story of the non caching cache. Next time I will write something something about measuring.

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• XNA Skinning Sample - exporting from Blender recognize only first animation clip

  - by Taylor

  (and sorry for my English) I'm using animation components from XNA Skinning Sample. It works great but when I export a model from Blender, it does not recognize any other animation clips than the first one. So I have three animation clips, but XNA recognize only one. Also, when I looked up on Xml file of the model in Debug\Content\obj directory, there is only one animation clip, but when I check code directly from .fbx file, it seems to be alright. Link to my model files: https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=8480AF53198F0CF3!139 BIG Thanks in forward!

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• DirectX9 dynamic rendering

  - by gardian06

  What I am planning to do is have the models (or maybe just an identifier for the model to be used) stored outside of the directX9 framework, and so in nature have completely dynamic rendering. All of the information that I have found contains static rendering (rendering models that are stored in memory at specific positions) I would like information on how to take a model (or identifier for a model type) that is stored outside of the framework, and render it to the screen. I am expected to take a container that holds all the relevant data to be rendered. The information outside would hold the position, orientation (quaternion, though I am told that I can also get a rotation matrix if I prefer), and dimensions (scale)

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• assigning values to shader parameters in the XNA content pipeline

  - by Nick

  I have tried creating a simple content processor that assigns the custom effect I created to models instead of the default BasicEffect. [ContentProcessor(DisplayName = "Shadow Mapping Model")] public class ShadowMappingModelProcessor : ModelProcessor { protected override MaterialContent ConvertMaterial(MaterialContent material, ContentProcessorContext context) { EffectMaterialContent shadowMappingMaterial = new EffectMaterialContent(); shadowMappingMaterial.Effect = new ExternalReference<EffectContent>("Effects/MultipassShadowMapping.fx"); return context.Convert<MaterialContent, MaterialContent>(shadowMappingMaterial, typeof(MaterialProcessor).Name); } } This works, but when I go to draw a model in a game, the effect has no material properties assigned. How would I go about assigning, say, my DiffuseColor or SpecularColor shader parameter to white or (better) can I assign it to some value specified by the artist in the model? (I think this may have something to do with the OpaqueDataDictionary but I am confused on how to use it--the content pipeline has always been a black box to me.)

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• Sharing the effect

  - by Mohammad Ahmed

  my problem is : If I load 2 models ( the same model zombie ) and give them the same effect I got the following error : for(int i =0 ; i<2 ; i++) { dwarfModel[i].model = Content.Load<Model>("Models//dwarf//dwarfmodel"); dwarfModel[i].effect = Content.Load<Effect>("Models//dwarf//skinFX"); dwarfModel[i].setEffect(camera , game); dwarfModel[i].setModelAnimationStatus(game); dwarfModel[i].intializeChrachterController(new Vector3(0, 0, 0), 20, 10, 2000, 2000, 80, 40); space.Add(dwarfModel[i].chrachterController); dwarfModels.Add(dwarfModel); } enter code here

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• Cooperator Framework

  - by csharp-source.net

  Cooperator Framework is a base class library for high performance Object Relational Mapping (ORM), and a code generation tool that aids agile application development for Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0/3.0. The main features are: * Use business entities. * Full typed Model (Data Layer and Entities) * Maintain persistence across the layers by passing specific types( .net 2.0/3.0 generics) * Business objects can bind to controls in Windows Forms and Web Forms taking advantage of data binding of Visual Studio 2005. * Supports any Primary Key defined on tables, with no need to modify it or to create a unique field. * Uses stored procedures for data access. * Supports concurrency. * Generates code both for stored procedures and projects in C# or Visual Basic. * Maintains the model in a repository, which can be modified in any stage of the development cycle, regenerating the model on demand.

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• Scrum: How to work on one story at a time

  - by Juergen

  I was nominated as scrum master in a new formed scrum team. We have already done some sprints. In the beginning I tried to make my team to work on one story at a time. But it didn't work. My team had difficulties to distribute the tasks in a way that they can work simultaneously on one story. Maybe we are doing something wrong? For example: we have a story to create a new dialog. We create the following tasks: Create Model classes Read model data from database Connect model classes with view Implement dialog handling Save data on close Test Documentation Solution Description Can theses tasks be done by more than one person at a time? The tasks - more or less - build upon each other. Or do we design the tasks in a wrong way?

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• Limit the amount a camera can pitch

  - by ChocoMan

  I'm having problems trying to limit the range my camera can pitch. Currently my camera can pitch around a model without restriction, but having a hard time trying to find the value of the degree/radian the camera is currently at after pitching. Here is what I got so far: // Moves camera with thumbstick Pitch = pController.ThumbSticks.Right.Y * MathHelper.ToRadians(speedAngleMAX); // Pitch Camera around model public void cameraPitch(float pitch) { pitchAngle = ModelLoad.camTarget - ModelLoad.CameraPos; axisPitch = Vector3.Cross(Vector3.Up, pitchAngle); // pitch constrained to model's orientation axisPitch.Normalize(); ModelLoad.CameraPos = Vector3.Transform(ModelLoad.CameraPos - ModelLoad.camTarget, Matrix.CreateFromAxisAngle(axisPitch, pitch)) + ModelLoad.camTarget; } I've tried restraining the Y-camera position of ModelLoad.CameraPos.Y, but doing so gave me some unwanted results.

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• Making XNA Play Nice With 3DS Max, Boundiing Spheres

  - by Jason R. Mick

  I'm using 3DS Max 2010 with the KW x-porter plugin, which outputs a .X file (just downloaded the very latest version). Been getting some odd results: http://www.picvalley.net/u/2930/2265240220441812321333990933PAStFeSONWQslOrMQC5q.PNG Looks like the culling is screwed up. Note, that models I make in Milkshape don't seem to be having these problems. I've also tried to export an FBX file from 3DS Max 2010 and have been getting similar results. What are your suggestions in terms of exporting *.3DS models to a workable XNA form? What tools do you use?. To be clear, the model in question has none of these defects when viewed from similar angles in 3DS Max 2010. http://www.picvalley.net/u/2563/151728957814855401111333991302mSvEJ03Zv22GwHFgIhiV.PNG Any ideas on this oddity would also be appreciated! Edit 1 -- Add'l issue Forgot to mention, that the model otherwise seems alright, but that rotation seems to double -- in other words, when I scroll my camera view left to right, the model (whose draw I give the camera for the view and perspective matrices w/ BasicEffect seems to rotate twice as much as models I draw natively in XNA

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• Business Logic Layer in MVC Application

  - by Subin Jacob

  In my ASP MVC application I decided to add another Business Layer and made the model only to have properties. All other functionality like save to db, get from db is done on this new Business layer. So now the controller will be calling this business layer and model for various operations. Is it a good approach to design like this? I decided not to use model for this purpose because I would need a number of models for different actions. (for eg, one for edit and other for create)

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• Deferred Open Source licensing

  - by Thomas W.

  Are there established models for releasing an initially proprietary piece of software under FLOSS conditions after a defined period or a certain point of time? The main problem here is that all parties involved must be able to trust that the Open Source licensing will actually take place at the defined time and no party can further defer or cancel this process. Clearly such a model has its problems, for example it's problematic to deal with contributions from "outside", legally and technically. Ghostscript is a prominent example where a deferred model has been used and abandoned. However, if certain parties involved will insist on keeping the software proprietary, at least for a certain period of time, then the only options are a deferred Open Source licensing model or no Open Source licensing at all. I think I read about services that serve as trusted parties who take care of Open Sourcing the software. However, I was not successful in spotting any of those.

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• Is is common to use the command pattern for property get/sets?

  - by k rey

  Suppose I have a controller class with a bunch of properties. Each time a property is changed, I would like to update the model. Now also suppose that I use the command pattern to perform model updates. Is it common to use command classes within property get and sets of the controller class or is there a better way? Here is an example of what I am currently using: class MyController { private int _myInt; public int MyInt { get { return _myInt; } set { MyCommand cmd = new MyCommand(); cmd.Argument = _myInt; cmd.Execute(); // Command object updates the model } } }

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• Consistency of DirectX models

  - by marc wellman

  Is there a way to check the consistency of a DirectX model (.x) ? Whilst compiling .x files with XNA GameStudio 3.1 compilation is aborted with the following error message: Error 2 Could not read the X file. The file is corrupt or invalid. Error code: D3DXFERR_PARSEERROR. C:\WFP\Browser\Content\m.x KiviBrowser Some models compile correctly without any error/warning and some abort as described. The files of each model have several thousand lines. I am creating the files in Googles SketchUp 8 where they all look fine and don't show any sign of corruption. Suppose I have such a model my XNA compiler won't compile because their is an inconsistency somewhere in the file - how could I identify this in order to correct it ?

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• How to make a great functional specification

  - by sfrj

  I am going to start a little side project very soon, but this time i want to do not just the little UML domain model and case diagrams i often do before programming, i thought about making a full functional specification. Is there anybody that has experience writing functional specifications that could recommend me what i need to add to it? How would be the best way to start preparing it? Here i will write down the topics that i think are more relevant: Purpose Functional Overview Context Diagram Critical Project Success Factors Scope (In & Out) Assumptions Actors (Data Sources, System Actors) Use Case Diagram Process Flow Diagram Activity Diagram Security Requirements Performance Requirements Special Requirements Business Rules Domain Model (Data model) Flow Scenarios (Success, alternate…) Time Schedule (Task Management) Goals System Requirements Expected Expenses What do you think about those topics? Shall i add something else? or maybe remove something?

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• Maya Animated Character export for XNA 4.0 problem

  - by FahidK

  To begin with, I'm trying to export an animated character in .fbx format from Maya 2013 to XNA 4.0 In Maya, The Model has a basic rig and the animations are in clips made in the Trax editor. so the issue i'm having is after selecting the model and the root joint and then hitting export in .fbx format, for some reason when i open the exported .fbx file the joint system is detached from the model with no animation. Btw, i have the animations in clips so that they can be called in code, for example "run","walk","attack". So, what can i do to solve this problem? Thank you.

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• How to Implement a Parallel Workflow

  - by Paul

  I'm trying to implement a parallel split task using a workflow system. I'm using .NET but my process is very simple and I don't want to use WF or anything heavy like that. I've tried using Stateless. So far is was easy to set up and run, but I may be using the wrong tool for the job because I'm not sure how you're supposed to model parallel split workflows, where you have multiple sub-tasks required before you can advance to the next state, but the steps don't require being performed in any particular order. I can easily use the dynamic configuration options to check my data model manually to see if the model is in the correct state (all sub-tasks completed) and can transition to the next state, but this seems to completely break the workflow paradigm. What is the proper, orthodox way to implement a parallel split process? Thanks

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• Upgrading to Code Based Migrations EF 4.3.1 with Connector/Net 6.6

  - by GABMARTINEZ

  Entity Framework 4.3.1 includes a new feature called code first migrations.  We are adding support for this feature in our upcoming 6.6 release of Connector/Net.  In this walk-through we'll see the workflow of code-based migrations when you have an existing application and you would like to upgrade to this EF 4.3.1 version and use this approach, so you can keep track of the changes that you do to your database.   The first thing we need to do is add the new Entity Framework 4.3.1 package to our application. This should via the NuGet package manager.  You can read more about why EF is not part of the .NET framework here. Adding EF 4.3.1 to our existing application  Inside VS 2010 go to Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Console, this will open the Power Shell Host Window where we can work with all the EF commands. In order to install this library to your existing application you should type Install-Package EntityFramework This will make some changes to your application. So Let's check them. In your .config file you'll see a  <configSections> which contains the version you have from EntityFramework and also was added the <entityFramework> section as shown below. This section is by default configured to use SQL Express which won't be necesary for this case. So you can comment it out or leave it empty. Also please make sure you're using the Connector/Net 6.6.x version which is the one that has this support as is shown in the previous image. At this point we face one issue; in order to be able to work with Migrations we need the __MigrationHistory table that we don't have yet since our Database was created with an older version. This table is used to keep track of the changes in our model. So we need to get it in our existing Database. Getting a Migration-History table into an existing database First thing we need to do to enable migrations in our existing application is to create our configuration class which will set up the MySqlClient Provider as our SQL Generator. So we have to add it with the following code: using System.Data.Entity.Migrations;     //add this at the top of your cs file public class Configuration : DbMigrationsConfiguration<NameOfYourDbContext>  //Make sure to use the name of your existing DBContext { public Configuration() { this.AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = false; //Set Automatic migrations to false since we'll be applying the migrations manually for this case. SetSqlGenerator("MySql.Data.MySqlClient", new MySql.Data.Entity.MySqlMigrationSqlGenerator());     }   }  This code will set up our configuration that we'll be using when executing all the migrations for our application. Once we have done this we can Build our application so we can check that everything is fine. Creating our Initial Migration Now let's add our Initial Migration. In Package Manager Console, execute "add-migration InitialCreate", you can use any other name but I like to set this as our initial create for future reference. After we run this command, some changes were done in our application: A new Migrations Folder was created. A new class migration call InitialCreate which in most of the cases should have empty Up and Down methods as long as your database is up to date with your Model. Since all your entities already exists, delete all duplicated code to create any entity which exists already in your Database if there is any. I found this easier when you don't have any pending updates to do to your database. Now we have our empty migration that will make no changes in our database and represents how are all the things at the begining of our migrations.  Finally, let's create our MigrationsHistory table. Optionally you can add SQL code to delete the edmdata table which is not needed anymore. public override void Up() { // Just make sure that you used 4.1 or later version         Sql("DROP TABLE EdmMetadata"); } From our Package Manager Console let's type: Update-database; If you like to see the operations made on each Update-database command you can use the flag -verbose after the Update-database. This will make two important changes.  It will execute the Up method in the initial migration which has no changes in the database. And second, and very important,  it will create the __MigrationHistory table necessary to keep track of your changes. And next time you make a change to your database it will compare the current model to the one stored in the Model Column of this table. Conclusion The important thing of this walk through is that we must create our initial migration before we start doing any changes to our model. This way we'll be adding the necessary __MigrationsHistory table to our existing database, so we can keep our database up to date with all the changes we do in our context model using migrations. Hope you have found this information useful. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments, also please check our forums here where we keep answering questions in general for the community.  Happy MySQL/Net Coding!

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• Multiple textures on a mesh created in blender and imported in xna

  - by alecnash

  I created a cube in blender which has multiple images applied to its faces. I am trying to import the model into xna and get the same results as shown when rendering the model in blender. I go through every mesh (for the cube its only one) and through every part but only the first image used in blender is displayed in every face. The code I am using to fetch the texture looks like that: foreach (ModelMesh m in model.Meshes) { foreach (Effect e in m.Effects) { foreach (var part in m.MeshParts) { e.CurrentTechnique = e.Techniques["Lambert"]; e.Parameters["view"].SetValue(camera.viewMatrix); e.Parameters["projection"].SetValue(camera.projectionMatrix); e.Parameters["colorMap"].SetValue(modelTextures[part.GetHashCode()]); } } m.Draw(); } Am I missing something?

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• My Feelings About Microsoft Surface

  - by Valter Minute

  Advice: read the title carefully, I’m talking about “feelings” and not about advanced technical points proved in a scientific and objective way I still haven’t had a chance to play with a MS Surface tablet (I would love to, of course) and so my ideas just came from reading different articles on the net and MS official statements. Remember also that the MVP motto begins with “Independent” (“Independent Experts. Real World Answers.”) and this is just my humble opinion about a product and a technology. I know that, being an MS MVP you can be called an “MS-fanboy”, I don’t care, I hope that people can appreciate my opinion, even if it doesn’t match theirs. The “Surface” brand can be confusing for techies that knew the “original” surface concept but I think that will be a fresh new brand name for most of the people out there. But marketing department are here to confuse people… so I can understand this “recycle” of an existing name. So Microsoft is entering the hardware arena… for me this is good news. Microsoft developed some nice hardware in the past: the xbox, zune (even if the commercial success was quite limited) and, last but not least, the two arc mices (old and new model) that I use and appreciate. In the past Microsoft worked with OEMs and that model lead to good and bad things. Good thing (for microsoft, at least) is market domination by windows-based PCs that only in the last years has been reduced by the return of the Mac and tablets. Google is also moving in the hardware business with its acquisition of Motorola, and Apple leveraged his control of both the hardware and software sides to develop innovative products. Microsoft can scare OEMs and make them fly away from windows (but where?) or just lead the pack, showing how devices should be designed to compete in the market and bring back some of the innovation that disappeared from recent PC products (look at the shelves of your favorite electronics store and try to distinguish a laptop between the huge mass of anonymous PCs on displays… only Macs shine out there…). Having to compete with MS “official” hardware will force OEMs to develop better product and bring back some real competition in a market that was ruled only by prices (the lower the better even when that means low quality) and no innovative features at all (when it was the last time that a new PC surprised you?). Moving into a new market is a big and risky move, but with Windows 8 Microsoft is playing a crucial move for its future, trying to be back in the innovation run against apple and google. MS can’t afford to fail this time. I saw the new devices (the WinRT and Pro) and the specifications are scarce, misleading and confusing. The first impression is that the device looks like an iPad with a nice keyboard cover… Using “HD” and “full HD” to define display resolution instead of using the real figures and reviving the “ClearType” brand (now dead on Win8 as reported here and missed by people who hate to read text on displays, like myself) without providing clear figures (couldn’t you count those damned pixels?) seems to imply that MS was caught by surprise by apple recent “retina” displays that brought very high definition screens on tablets.Also there are no specifications about the processors used (even if some sources report NVidia Tegra for the ARM tablet and i5 for the x86 one) and expected battery life (a critical point for tablets and the point that killed Windows7 x86 based tablets). Also nothing about the price, and this will be another critical point because other platform out there already provide lots of applications and have a good user base, if MS want to enter this market tablets pricing must be competitive. There are some expansion ports (SD and USB), so no fixed storage model (even if the specs talks about 32-64GB for RT and 128-256GB for pro). I like this and don’t like the apple model where flash memory (that it’s dirt cheap used in thumdrives or SD cards) is as expensive as gold (or cocaine to have a more accurate per gram measurement) when mounted inside a tablet/phone. For big files you’ll be able to use external media and an SD card could be used to store files that don’t require super-fast SSD-like access times, I hope. To be honest I really don’t like the marketplace model and the limitation of Windows RT APIs (no local database? from a company that based a good share of its success on VB6+Access!) and lack of desktop support on the ARM (even if the support is here and has been used to port office). It’s a step toward the consumer market (where competitors are making big money), but may impact enterprise (and embedded) users that may not appreciate Windows 8 new UI or the limitations of the new app model (if you aren’t connected you are dead ). Not having compatibility with the desktop will require brand new applications and honestly made all the CPU cycles spent to convert .NET IL into real machine code in the past like a huge waste of time… as soon as a new processor architecture is supported by Windows you still have to rewrite part of your application (and MS is pushing HTML5+JS and native code more than .NET in my perception). On the other side I believe that the development experience provided by Visual Studio is still miles (or kilometres) ahead of the competition and even the all-uppercase menu of VS2012 hasn’t changed this situation. The new metro UI got mixed reviews. On my side I should say that is very pleasant to use on a touch screen, I like the minimalist design (even if sometimes is too minimal and hides stuff that, in my opinion, should be visible) but I should also say that using it with mouse and keyboard is like trying to pick your nose with boxing gloves… Metro is also very interesting for embedded devices where touch screen usage is quite common and where having an application taking all the screen is the norm. For devices like kiosks, vending machines etc. this kind of UI can be a great selling point. I don’t need a new tablet (to be honest I’m pretty happy with my wife’s iPad and with my PC), but I may change my opinion after having a chance to play a little bit with those new devices and understand what’s hidden under all this mysterious and generic announcements and specifications!

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• User prompts (MessageBox) with MVVM

  - by mukapu

  The problem statement: I am tired of thinking how to show a simple message box or user prompt and act based on the response in Model-View-View-Model (MVVM). Common approaches: - It's ok, let's just do this one thing from ViewModel and mock this out for unit testing - Design my own dialog, then what to do from there - Can I write something in view code behind, ah yes, that seems to be the only way out, as anyway MVVM is still not matured...  - and what not?   I am pretty much one among the few frustrated out in this world looking for some convincing answers. I think we can do it a little neater without having the feeling of violating any of our self defined rules! Solution: The Control - Implement a simple control with no designer visibility. - Allow a property to be bound to tell when to show the MessageBox - Provide command binding for possible user actions, Yes, No, Cancel... How do I Use? - Just place the necessary XAML tags in the view - Implement the command for all user actions in the View Model - Run unit tests on the commands

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• How do we know to favour composition over generalisation is always the right choice?

  - by Carnotaurus

  Whether an object physically exists or not, we can choose to model it in different ways. We could arbitarily use generalisation or composition in many cases. However, the GoF principle of "favour composition over generalisation [sic]" guides us to use composition. So, when we model, for example, a line then we create a class that contains two members PointA and PointB of the type Point (composition) instead of extending Point (generalisation). This is just a simplified example of how we can arbitarily choose composition or inheritance to model, despite that objects are usually much more complex. How do we know that this is the right choice? It matters at least because there could be a ton of refactoring to do if it is wrong?

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• Web Services Example - Part 2: Programmatic

  - by Denis T

  In this edition of the ADF Mobile blog we'll tackle part 2 of our Web Service examples.  In this posting we'll take a look at using a SOAP Web Service but calling it programmatically in code and parsing the return into a bean. Getting the sample code: Just click here to download a zip of the entire project.  You can unzip it and load it into JDeveloper and deploy it either to iOS or Android.  Please follow the previous blog posts if you need help getting JDeveloper or ADF Mobile installed.  Note: This is a different workspace than WS-Part1 Defining our Web Service: Just like our first installment, we are using the same public weather forecast web service provided free by CDYNE Corporation.  Sometimes this service goes down so please ensure you know it's up before reporting this example isn't working. We're going to concentrate on the same two web service methods, GetCityForecastByZIP and GetWeatherInformation. Defing the Application: The application setup is identical to the Weather1 version.  There are some improvements to the data that is displayed as part of this example though.  Now we are able to show the associated image along with each forecast line when using the Forecast By Zip feature.  We've also added the temperature Hi/Low values into the UI. Summary of Fundamental Changes In This Application The most fundamental change is that we're binding the UI to the Bean Data Controls instead of directly to the Web Service Data Controls.  This gives us much more flexibility to control the shape of the data and allows us to do caching of the data outside of the Web Service.  This way if your application is, say offline, your bean could still populate with data from a local cache and still show you some UI as opposed to completely failing because you don't have any connectivity. In general we promote this type of programming technique with ADF Mobile to insulate your application from any issues with network connectivity. What's different with this example? We have setup the Web Service DC the same way but now we have managed beans to process the data.  The following classes define the "Model" of our application:  CityInformation-CityForecast-Forecast, WeatherInformation-WeatherDescription.  We use WeatherBean for UI interaction to the model layer.  If you look through this example, we don't really do that much with the java code except use it to grab the image URL from the weather description.  In a more realistic example, you might be using some JDBC classes to persist the data to a local database. To have a good architecture it is always good to keep your model and UI layers separate.  This gets muddied if you start to use bindings on a page invoked from Java code and this java code starts to become your "model" layer.  Since bindings are page specific, your model layer starts to become entwined with your UI.  Not good!  To help with this, we've added some utility functions that let you invoke DC methods without having a binding and thus execute methods from your "model" layer without requiring a binding in your page definition.  We do this with the invokeDataControlMethod of the AdfmfJavaUtilities class.  An example of this method call is available in line 95 of WeatherInformation.java and line 93 of CityInformation.Java. What's a GenericType? Because Web Service Data Controls (and also URL Data Controls AKA REST) use generic name/value pairs to define their structure and don't have strongly typed objects, these are actually stored internally as GenericType objects.  The GenericType class is simply a property map of name/value pairs that can be hierarchical.  There are methods like getAttribute where you supply the index of the attribute or it's string property name.  Why is this important to know?  Because invokeDataControlMethod returns GenericType objects and developers either need to parse these GenericType objects themselves or use one of our helper functions. GenericTypeBeanSerializationHelper This class does exactly what it's name implies.  It's a helper class for developers to aid in serialization of GenericTypes to/from java objects.  This is extremely handy if you have a large GenericType object with many attributes (or you're just lazy like me!) and you just want to parse it out into a real java object you can use more easily.  Here you would use the fromGenericType method.  This method takes the class of the Java object you wish to return and the GenericType as parameters.  The method then parses through each attribute in the GenericType and uses reflection to set that same attribute in the Java class.  Then the method returns that new object of the class you specified.  This is obviously very handy to avoid a lot of shuffling code between GenericType and your own Java classes.  The reverse method, toGenericType is also available when you want to go the other way.  In this case you supply the string that represents the package location in the DataControl definition (Example: "MyDC.myParams.MyCollection") and then pass in the Java object you have that holds the data and a GenericType is returned to you.  Again, it will use reflection to calculate the attributes that match between the java class and the GenericType and call the getters/setters on those. Issues and Possible Improvements: In the next installment we'll show you how to make your web service calls asynchronously so your UI will fill dynamically when the service call returns but in the meantime you show the data you have locally in your bean fed from some local cache.  This gives your users instant delivery of some data while you fetch other data in the background.

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