Search Results

Search found 94094 results on 3764 pages for 'wpf user'.

Page 127/3764 | < Previous Page | 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134  | Next Page >

  • database design help for game / user levels / progress

    - by sprugman
    Sorry this got long and all prose-y. I'm creating my first truly gamified web app and could use some help thinking about how to structure the data. The Set-up Users need to accomplish tasks in each of several categories before they can move up a level. I've got my Users, Tasks, and Categories tables, and a UserTasks table which joins the three. ("User 3 has added Task 42 in Category 8. Now they've completed it.") That's all fine and working wonderfully. The Challenge I'm not sure of the best way to track the progress in the individual categories toward each level. The "business" rules are: You have to achieve a certain number of points in each category to move up. If you get the number of points needed in Cat 8, but still have other work to do to complete the level, any new Cat 8 points count toward your overall score, but don't "roll over" into the next level. The number of Categories is small (five currently) and unlikely to change often, but by no means absolutely fixed. The number of points needed to level-up will vary per level, probably by a formula, or perhaps a lookup table. So the challenge is to track each user's progress toward the next level in each category. I've thought of a few potential approaches: Possible Solutions Add a column to the users table for each category and reset them all to zero each time a user levels-up. Have a separate UserProgress table with a row for each category for each user and the number of points they have. (Basically a Many-to-Many version of #1.) Add a userLevel column to the UserTasks table and use that to derive their progress with some kind of SUM statement. Their current level will be a simple int in the User table. Pros & Cons (1) seems like by far the most straightforward, but it's also the least flexible. Perhaps I could use a naming convention based on the category ids to help overcome some of that. (With code like "select cats; for each cat, get the value from Users.progress_{cat.id}.") It's also the one where I lose the most data -- I won't know which points counted toward leveling up. I don't have a need in mind for that, so maybe I don't care about that. (2) seems complicated: every time I add or subtract a user or a category, I have to maintain the other table. I foresee synchronization challenges. (3) Is somewhere in between -- cleaner than #2, but less intuitive than #1. In order to find out where a user is, I'd have mildly complex SQL like: SELECT categoryId, SUM(points) from UserTasks WHERE userId={user.id} & countsTowardLevel={user.level} groupBy categoryId Hmm... that doesn't seem so bad. I think I'm talking myself into #3 here, but would love any input, advice or other ideas. P.S. Sorry for the cross-post. I wrote this up on SO and then remembered that there was a game dev-focused one. Curious to see if I get different answers one place than the other....

    Read the article

  • MVVM - how to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painfull

    - by Mr Happy
    I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painfull. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genious since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use an DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an indepth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

    Read the article

  • How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painfull

    - by Mr Happy
    I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painfull. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genious since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use an DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an indepth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

    Read the article

  • Dynamically creating an ImageMap (clickable area on image) in WPF using codebehind.

    - by Thomas Stock
    Hi, I'm trying to create "imagemaps" on an image in wpf using codebehind. See the following XML: <Button Type="Area"> <Point X="100" Y="100"></Point> <Point X="100" Y="200"></Point> <Point X="200" Y="200"></Point> <Point X="200" Y="100"></Point> <Point X="150" Y="150"></Point> </Button> I'm trying to translate this to a button on a certain image in my WPF app. I've already did a part of this, but I'm stuck at setting the Polygon as the button's "template": private Button GetAreaButton(XElement buttonNode) { // get points PointCollection buttonPointCollection = new PointCollection(); foreach (var pointNode in buttonNode.Elements("Point")) { buttonPointCollection.Add(new Point((int)pointNode.Attribute("X"), (int)pointNode.Attribute("Y"))); } // create polygon Polygon myPolygon = new Polygon(); myPolygon.Points = buttonPointCollection; myPolygon.Stroke = Brushes.Yellow; myPolygon.StrokeThickness = 2; // create button based on polygon Button button = new Button(); ????? } I'm also unsure on how to add/remove this button to/from my image, but I'm looking into that. Any help is appreciated.

    Read the article

  • How to keep track of TextPointer in WPF RichTextBox?

    - by Alan Spark
    I'm trying to get my head around the TextPointer class in a WPF RichTextBox. I would like to be able to keep track of them so that I can associate information with areas in the text. I am currently working with a very simple example to try and figure out what is going on. In the PreviewKeyDown event I am storing the caret position and then in the PreviewKeyUp event I am creating a TextRange based on the before and after caret positions. Here is a code sample that illustrates what I am trying to do: // The caret position before typing private TextPointer caretBefore = null; private void rtbTest_PreviewKeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) { // Store caret position caretBefore = rtbTest.CaretPosition; } private void rtbTest_PreviewKeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e) { // Get text between before and after caret positions TextRange tr = new TextRange(caretBefore, rtbTest.CaretPosition); MessageBox.Show(tr.Text); } The problem is that the text that I get is blank. For example, if I type the character 'a' then I would expect to find the text "a" in the TextRange. Does anyone know what is going wrong? It could be something very simple but I've spent an afternoon getting nowhere. I am trying to embrace the new WPF technology but find that the RichTextBox in particular is so complicated that it makes even doing simple things like this difficult. If anyone has any links that do a good job of explaining the TextPointer, I would appreciate it if you can let me know.

    Read the article

  • Why do I get completely different results when saving a BitmapSource to bmp, jpeg, and png in WPF

    - by DanM
    I wrote a little utility class that saves BitmapSource objects to image files. The image files can be either bmp, jpeg, or png. Here is the code: public class BitmapProcessor { public void SaveAsBmp(BitmapSource bitmapSource, string path) { Save(bitmapSource, path, new BmpBitmapEncoder()); } public void SaveAsJpg(BitmapSource bitmapSource, string path) { Save(bitmapSource, path, new JpegBitmapEncoder()); } public void SaveAsPng(BitmapSource bitmapSource, string path) { Save(bitmapSource, path, new PngBitmapEncoder()); } private void Save(BitmapSource bitmapSource, string path, BitmapEncoder encoder) { using (var stream = new FileStream(path, FileMode.Create)) { encoder.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(bitmapSource)); encoder.Save(stream); } } } Each of the three Save methods work, but I get unexpected results with bmp and jpeg. Png is the only format that produces an exact reproduction of what I see if I show the BitmapSource on screen using a WPF Image control. Here are the results: BMP - too dark JPEG - too saturated PNG - correct Why am I getting completely different results for different file types? I should note that the BitmapSource in my example uses an alpha value of 0.1 (which is why it appears very desaturated), but it should be possible to show the resulting colors in any image format. I know if I take a screen capture using something like HyperSnap, it will look correct regardless of what file type I save to. Here's a HyperSnap screen capture saved as a bmp: As you can see, this isn't a problem, so there's definitely something strange about WPF's image encoders. Do I have a setting wrong? Am I missing something?

    Read the article

  • When does a WPF adorner layer first become available?

    - by aoven
    I'm trying to add an overlay effect to my UserControl and I know that's what adorners are used for in WPF. But I'm a bit confused about how they supposedly work. I figured that adorner layer is implicitly handled by WPF runtime, and as such, should always be available. But when I create an instance of my UserControl in code, there is no adorner layer there. The following code fails with exception: var view = new MyUserControl(); var target = view.GetAdornerTarget(); // This returns a specific UI control. var layer = AdornerLayer.GetAdornerLayer(target); if (layer == null) { throw new Exception("No adorner layer at the moment."); } Can someone please explain to me, how this is supposed to work? Do I need to place the UserControl instance into a top-level Window first? Or do I need to define the layer myself somehow? Digging through documentation got me nowhere. Thank you!

    Read the article

  • Is it OK to use WPF assemblies in a web app?

    - by Chris
    I have an ASP.NET MVC 2 app targeting .NET 4 that needs to be able to resize images on the fly and write them to the response. I have code that does this and it works. I am using System.Drawing.dll. However, I want to enhance my code so that not only am I resizing the image, but I am dropping it from 24bpp down to 4bit grayscale. I could not, for the life of me, find code on how to do this with System.Drawing.dll. But I did find a bunch of WPF stuff. This is my working/sample code (runs in LinqPad). // Load the original 24 bit image var bitmapImage = new BitmapImage(); bitmapImage.BeginInit(); bitmapImage.UriSource = new Uri(@"C:\Temp\Resized\18_appa2_015.png", UriKind.Absolute); //bitmapImage.DecodePixelWidth = 600; bitmapImage.EndInit(); // Create the destination image var formatConvertedBitmap = new FormatConvertedBitmap(); formatConvertedBitmap.BeginInit(); formatConvertedBitmap.Source = bitmapImage; formatConvertedBitmap.DestinationFormat = PixelFormats.Gray4; formatConvertedBitmap.EndInit(); // Encode and dump the image to disk var encoder = new PngBitmapEncoder(); encoder.Frames.Add(BitmapFrame.Create(formatConvertedBitmap)); using (var fileStream = File.Create(@"C:\Temp\Resized\18_appa2_015_s2.png")) { encoder.Save(fileStream); } It uses System.Xaml.dll, WindowsBase.dll, PresentationCore.dll, and PresentationFramework.dll. The namespaces used are: System.Windows.Controls, System.Windows.Media, and System.Windows.Media.Imaging. Is there any problem using these namespaces in my web application? It doesn't seem right. If anyone knows how to drop the bit depth without all this WPF stuff (which I barely understand, BTW) I would be thrilled to see that too.

    Read the article

  • Presenting collection of structures of strings in grid or similar in WPF - Example? Ideas?

    - by Andrew
    Hi, I have a collection of structures. The structure is just some strings. Example public struct ReportLine { public string Name; public string Address; public string Phone; ...// about 10 other strings } I can't change this part. What I want to do is display it in a simple grid or simlar in WPF. My only requirements are: a) need column headers b) rows must alternate in color c) columns big enough to hold largest datum (which is not know until run time) Can someone point me to an example to get me started? Is the GridView the way to go? Or DataGrid? Or perhaps just the grid? I have the book Pro WPF in C# 2008 and it covers binding ListBox's to collections, but the collections always seem to be collections of one field (ex. a collection of 40 names). Here I have a collection (an array in fact) of a structure. How do I setup the databinding? As you can see, I'm new to this and probably would most benefit from a reference to an article. I've found articles covering collections of 1 field, but no examples covering binding to an array of structures. Also, my intitial research indicates c) can't be easily done, if you demand that the column is big enough for all the data in that column, not just the visible data. Thanks, dave

    Read the article

  • How can I show grouping in a WPF Data Grid with multiple levels?

    - by Keith
    I am relatively new to WPF, so I understand about Styles and setters, but I am having trouble on this one. I am using a WPF Data Grid and need to show multiple levels of grouping. I would like the 2nd and 3rd group levels to be more indented than the top level. The following code will show group levels, but it shows them one right on top of the other and makes the fact that they are nested group levels impossible to tell. <Style x:Key="GroupHeaderStyle" TargetType="{x:Type GroupItem}"> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type GroupItem}"> <Expander IsExpanded="True"> <Expander.Header> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Name}"/> </Expander.Header> <ItemsPresenter /> </Expander> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> How can I get the group header to indent based on level?

    Read the article

  • What's the best approach for getting into VS2010, C# 4, and WPF if my background is in C++/MFC

    - by Canacourse
    All my past programming experience has been in C++ on VS2003/8, Mostly service based and completely self taught. 2 Years ago I had to create my first real GUI app and (Foolishly) choose MFC. I got the app working but it took a long time & was a bit of a nightmare to learn MCF (and its many shortcomings) but I ended up with a reliable workable app which was difficult to change or extend. Again I have to create another GUI app more complex than the first and again this will be created from scratch and will only ever be used on windows. I had put off learning C# for a long time but not wishing to re-visit MFC have decided that the new application with be birthed in VS2010 and WPF 4 will be the midwife. Trying to avoid the several expensive (Time wise) mistakes I made previously. Im looking for for good books/tutorials on the current versions of C# 4 & WPF 4 and also general advice on the best approach. The application will do several things one of them would persisting info in a SQL DB. So Im thinking LINQ for that? Please chip in...

    Read the article

  • Who writes the words? A rant with graphs.

    - by Roger Hart
    If you read my rant, you'll know that I'm getting a bit of a bee in my bonnet about user interface text. But rather than just yelling about the way the world should be (short version: no UI text would suck), it seemed prudent to actually gather some data. Rachel Potts has made an excellent first foray, by conducting a series of interviews across organizations about how they write user interface text. You can read Rachel's write up here. She presents the facts as she found them, and doesn't editorialise. The result is insightful, but impartial isn't really my style. So here's a rant with graphs. My method, and how it sucked I sent out a short survey. Survey design is one of my hobby-horses, and since some smartarse in the comments will mention it if I don't, I'll step up and confess: I did not design this one well. It was potentially ambiguous, implicitly excluded people, and since I only really advertised it on Twitter and a couple of mailing lists the sample will be chock full of biases. Regardless, these were the questions: What do you do? Select the option that best describes your role What kind of software does your organization make? (optional) In your organization, who writes the text on your software user interfaces? (for example: button names, static text, tooltips, and so on) Tick all that apply. In your organization who is responsible for user interface text? Who "owns" it? The most glaring issue (apart from question 3 being a bit broken) was that I didn't make it clear that I was asking about applications. Desktop, mobile, or web, I wouldn't have minded. In fact, it might have been interesting to categorize and compare. But a few respondents commented on the seeming lack of relevance, since they didn't really make software. There were some other issues too. It wasn't the best survey. So, you know, pinch of salt time with what follows. Despite this, there were 100 or so respondents. This post covers the overview, and you can look at the raw data in this spreadsheet What did people do? Boring graph number one: I wasn't expecting that. Given I pimped the survey on twitter and a couple of Tech Comms discussion lists, I was more banking on and even Content Strategy/Tech Comms split. What the "Others" specified: Three people chipped in with Technical Writer. Author, apparently, doesn't cut it. There's a "nobody reads the instructions" joke in there somewhere, I'm sure. There were a couple of hybrid roles, including Tech Comms and Testing, which sounds gruelling and thankless. There was also, an Intranet Manager, a Creative Director, a Consultant, a CTO, an Information Architect, and a Translator. That's a pretty healthy slice through the industry. Who wrote UI text? Boring graph number two: Annoyingly, I made this a "tick all that apply" question, so I can't make crude and inflammatory generalizations about percentages. This is more about who gets involved in user interface wording. So don't panic about the number of developers writing UI text. First off, it just means they're involved. Second, they might be good at it. What? It could happen. Ours are involved - they write a placeholder and flag it to me for changes. Sometimes I don't make any. It's also not surprising that there's so much UX in the mix. Some of that will be people taking care, and crafting an understandable interface. Some of it will be whatever text goes on the wireframe making it into production. I'm going to assume that's what happened at eBay, when their iPhone app purportedly shipped with the placeholder text "Some crappy content goes here". Ahem. Listing all 17 "other" responses would make this post lengthy indeed, but you can read them in the raw data spreadsheet. The award for the approach that sounds the most like a good idea yet carries the highest risk of ending badly goes to whoever offered up "External agencies using focus groups". If you're reading this, and that actually works, leave a comment. I'm fascinated. Who owned UI text Stop. Bar chart time: Wow. Let's cut to the chase, and by "chase", I mean those inflammatory generalizations I was talking about: In around 60% of cases the person responsible for user interface text probably lacks the relevant expertise. Even in the categories I count as being likely to have relevant skills (Marketing Copywriters, Content Strategists, Technical Authors, and User Experience Designers) there's a case for each role being unsuited, as you'll see in Rachel's blog post So it's not as simple as my headline. Does that mean that you personally, Mr Developer reading this, write bad button names? Of course not. I know nothing about you. It rather implies that as a category, the majority of people looking after UI text have neither communication nor user experience as their primary skill set, and as such will probably only be good at this by happy accident. I don't have a way of measuring those frequency of those accidents. What the Others specified: I don't know who owns it. I assume the project manager is responsible. "copywriters" when they wish to annoy me. the client's web maintenance person, often PR or MarComm That last one chills me to the bone. Still, at least nobody said "the work experience kid". You can see the rest in the spreadsheet. My overwhelming impression here is of user interface text as an unloved afterthought. There were fewer "nobody" responses than I expected, and a much broader split. But the relative predominance of developers owning and writing UI text suggests to me that organizations don't see it as something worth dedicating attention to. If true, that's bothersome. Because the words on the screen, particularly the names of things, are fundamental to the ability to understand an use software. It's also fascinating that Technical Authors and Content Strategists are neck and neck. For such a nascent discipline, Content Strategy appears to have made a mark on software development. Or my sample is skewed. But it feels like a bit of validation for my rant: Content Strategy is eating Tech Comms' lunch. That's not a bad thing. Well, not if the UI text is getting done well. And that's the caveat to this whole post. I couldn't care less who writes UI text, provided they consider the user and don't suck at it. I care that it may be falling by default to people poorly disposed to doing it right. And I care about that because so much user interface text sucks. The most interesting question Was one I forgot to ask. It's this: Does your organization have technical authors/writers? Like a lot of survey data, that doesn't tell you much on its own. But once we get a bit dimensional, it become more interesting. So taken with the other questions, this would have let me find out what I really want to know: What proportion of organizations have Tech Comms professionals but don't use them for UI text? Who writes UI text in their place? Why this happens? It's possible (feasible is another matter) that hundreds of companies have tech authors who don't work on user interfaces because they've empirically discovered that someone else, say the Marketing Copywriter, is better at it. And once we've all finished laughing, I'll point out that I've met plenty of tech authors who just aren't used to thinking about users at the point of need in the way UI text and embedded user assistance require. If you've got what I regard, perhaps unfairly, as the bad kind of tech author - the old-school kind with the thousand-page pdf and the grammar obsession - if you've got one of those then you probably are better off getting the UX folk or the copywriters to do your UI text. At the very least, they'll derive terminology from user research.

    Read the article

  • 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

    - by MarkPearl
    For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

    Read the article

  • What's the best way to do user profile/folder redirect/home directory archiving?

    - by tpederson
    My company is in dire need of a redesign around how we handle user account administration. I've been tasked with automating the process. The end goal is to have the whole works triggered by the business, and IT only looking in when there's an error reported. The interim phase is going to be semi-manual. That is a level 2 tech inputs the user's info and supervises the process. The current hurdle I'm facing is user profile archiving. Our security team requires us to archive the profile directories for any terminated user for 60 days in case the legal team requires access to their files. Our AD is as much a mess as everything else, so there are some users with home directories and some with profiles. Anyone who has a profile dir in AD also has a good deal of their profile redirected to our file servers over DFS. In order to complete the process manually you find the user in AD, disable them, find their home/profile dir, go there and take ownership, create an archive folder, move all their files over, then delete the old dir. Some users have many many gigs of nonsense and this can take quite some time. Even automated the process would not be a quick one. I'm thinking that I need to have a client side C# GUI for the quick stuff and some server side batch script or console app to offload this long running process. I have a batch script that works decently using takeown and robocopy, but I wonder if a C# console app would do a better job. So, my question at long last is, what do you think is the best way to handle this? I can't imagine this is a unique problem, how do other admins get this done? The last place I worked was easily 10x larger than the place I'm in now. If we would have been doing this manual crap there, they'd have needed a team of at least 30 full time workers to keep up. I have decent skills in C#.net and batch scripting, but am a quick study and I have used most every language once or twice. Thank you for reading this and I look forward to seeing what imaginative solutions you all can come up with.

    Read the article

  • Change the User Interface Language in Ubuntu

    - by Matthew Guay
    Would you like to use your Ubuntu computer in another language?  Here’s how you can easily change your interface language in Ubuntu. Ubuntu’s default install only includes a couple languages, but it makes it easy to find and add a new interface language to your computer.  To get started, open the System menu, select Administration, and then click Language Support. Ubuntu may ask if you want to update or add components to your current default language when you first open the dialog.  Click Install to go ahead and install the additional components, or you can click Remind Me Later to wait as these will be installed automatically when you add a new language. Now we’re ready to find and add an interface language to Ubuntu.  Click Install / Remove Languages to add the language you want. Find the language you want in the list, and click the check box to install it.  Ubuntu will show you all the components it will install for the language; this often includes spellchecking files for OpenOffice as well.  Once you’ve made your selection, click Apply Changes to install your new language.  Make sure you’re connected to the internet, as Ubuntu will have to download the additional components you’ve selected. Enter your system password when prompted, and then Ubuntu will download the needed languages files and install them.   Back in the main Language & Text dialog, we’re now ready to set our new language as default.  Find your new language in the list, and then click and drag it to the top of the list. Notice that Thai is the first language listed, and English is the second.  This will make Thai the default language for menus and windows in this account.  The tooltip reminds us that this setting does not effect system settings like currency or date formats. To change these, select the Text Tab and pick your new language from the drop-down menu.  You can preview the changes in the bottom Example box. The changes we just made will only affect this user account; the login screen and startup will not be affected.  If you wish to change the language in the startup and login screens also, click Apply System-Wide in both dialogs.  Other user accounts will still retain their original language settings; if you wish to change them, you must do it from those accounts. Once you have your new language settings all set, you’ll need to log out of your account and log back in to see your new interface language.  When you re-login, Ubuntu may ask you if you want to update your user folders’ names to your new language.  For example, here Ubuntu is asking if we want to change our folders to their Thai equivalents.  If you wish to do so, click Update or its equivalents in your language. Now your interface will be almost completely translated into your new language.  As you can see here, applications with generic names are translated to Thai but ones with specific names like Shutter keep their original name. Even the help dialogs are translated, which makes it easy for users around to world to get started with Ubuntu.  Once again, you may notice some things that are still in English, but almost everything is translated. Adding a new interface language doesn’t add the new language to your keyboard, so you’ll still need to set that up.  Check out our article on adding languages to your keyboard to get this setup. If you wish to revert to your original language or switch to another new language, simply repeat the above steps, this time dragging your original or new language to the top instead of the one you chose previously. Conclusion Ubuntu has a large number of supported interface languages to make it user-friendly to people around the globe.  And since you can set the language for each user account, it’s easy for multi-lingual individuals to share the same computer. Or, if you’re using Windows, check out our article on how you can Change the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7, too! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restart the Ubuntu Gnome User Interface QuicklyChange the User Interface Language in Vista or Windows 7Create a Samba User on UbuntuInstall Samba Server on UbuntuSee Which Groups Your Linux User Belongs To TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3 Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED

    Read the article

  • User Lockout & WLST

    - by Bala Kothandaraman
    WebLogic server provides an option to lockout users to protect accounts password guessing attack. It is implemented with a realm-wide Lockout Manager. This feature can be used with custom authentication provider also. But if you implement your own authentication provider and wish to implement your own lockout manager that is possible too. If your domain is configured to use the user lockout manager the following WLST script will help you to: - check whether a user is locked using a WLST script - find out the number of locked users in the realm #Define constants url='t3://localhost:7001' username='weblogic' password='weblogic' checkuser='test-deployer' #Connect connect(username,password,url) #Get Lockout Manager Runtime serverRuntime() dr = cmo.getServerSecurityRuntime().getDefaultRealmRuntime() ulmr = dr.getUserLockoutManagerRuntime() print '-------------------------------------------' #Check whether a user is locked if (ulmr.isLockedOut(checkuser) == 0): islocked = 'NOT locked' else: islocked = 'locked' print 'User ' + checkuser + ' is ' + islocked #Print number of locked users print 'No. of locked user - ', Integer(ulmr.getUserLockoutTotalCount()) print '-------------------------------------------' print '' #Disconnect & Exit disconnect() exit()

    Read the article

  • Google I/O 2010 - Creating positive user experiences

    Google I/O 2010 - Creating positive user experiences Google I/O 2010 - Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences Tech Talks John Zeratsky, Matt Shobe Good user experience isn't just about good design. Learn how to create a positive user experience by being fast, open, engaged, surprising, polite, and, well... being yourself. Chock full of examples from the web and beyond, this talk is a practical introduction for developers who are passionate about user experience but may not have a background in design. For all I/O 2010 sessions, please go to code.google.com From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 185 6 ratings Time: 52:11 More in Science & Technology

    Read the article

  • HTG Explains: What’s a Browser User Agent?

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Your browser sends its user agent to every website you connect to. We’ve written about changing your browser’s user agent before – but what exactly is a user agent, anyway? A user agent is a “string” – that is, a line of text – identifying the browser and operating system to the web server. This sounds simple, but user agents have become a mess over time. How To Customize Your Wallpaper with Google Image Searches, RSS Feeds, and More 47 Keyboard Shortcuts That Work in All Web Browsers How To Hide Passwords in an Encrypted Drive Even the FBI Can’t Get Into

    Read the article

  • Pgagent startup script (under the postgres user)

    - by Dominique Guardiola
    Hello, I'm trying to make a clean startup script for pgagent I found one here but I don't see how I can change this : if start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/pgagent.pid \ --exec /usr/bin/pgagent "hostaddr=127.0.0.1 dbname=postgres user=postgres \ password=XXXXXXX";then to launch something like this : su - postgres -c /usr/bin/pgagent "hostaddr=127.0.0.1 dbname=postgres user=postgres" in order to avoid to hard-code the PG password in the script. This is possible using the .pgpass file feature. It works when I'm logged under the postgres user. So my only problem left is how to launch this command under the postgres user tried to add --user=postgres in the call, like mentioned here but it does not work.

    Read the article

  • Adding user to chroot environment

    - by Neo
    I've created a chroot system in my Ubuntu using schroot and debrootstrap, based on minimal ubuntu. However whenever I can't seem to add a new user into this chroot environment. Here is what happens. I enter schroot as root and add a new user 'Bob'.(Tried both adduser and useradd commands) The username 'Bob' lists up in /etc/passwd file and I can 'su' into the user 'Bob'. So far so good. When I log out of schroot, and re-enter schroot, the user 'Bob' has vanished!! There is no mention of Bob in /etc/passwd either. How do I make the new user permanent?

    Read the article

  • Best practices for upgrading user data when updating versions of software

    - by Javy
    In my code I check the current version of the software on launch and compare it to the version stored in the user's data file(s). If the version is newer, then I call different methods to update the old data to the newer data version, if necessary. I usually have to make a new method to convert the data with each update that changes user data in some way, and cannot remove the old ones in case there was someone who missed an update. So the app must be able to go through each method call and update their data until they get their data current. With larger data sets, this could be a problem. In addition, I recently had a brief discussion with another StackOverflow user this and he indicated he always appended a date stamp to the filename to manage data versions, although his reasoning as to why this was better than storing the version data in the file itself was unclear. Since I've rarely seen management of user data versions in books I've read, I'm curious what are the best practices for naming user data files and procedures for updating older data to newer versions.

    Read the article

  • User script at logout

    - by GUI Junkie
    The problem: I'm sharing a directory with my wife. I've placed us both in a 'shared' group and the directory belongs to the 'shared' group as well. Whenever one of us creates a file, this file belongs to user:user, instead of user:shared... The solution: I can do sudo chown, but my wife can't. So, I want to run a script when I logout of the session. If I understand correctly, the startup scripts go in /etc/init.d/ and the runlevel scripts go /etc/rc0.d/ where 0 is the runlevel (0-6). Do the runlevel scripts execute only on exit/logout? Do these depend on the user, that is, I'd like to run it only for my user (not so important in this case, mind)? Should I place the script somewhere else? Also, I imagine that the script will be run by root, so there's no need for sudo within the script, is that correct?

    Read the article

  • Samba user does not have folder read permission

    - by user289455
    I have set up a special user for read only samba shares. I set him up in Samba and as a system user. I shared a couple of folders but that user cannot access them. I know samba is working because I also shared them with the main user of the system which is an admin account and it works fine. How can I allow this user to have read permissions on all the directories I want to share without changing anything for any other users of the system? For example, I don't want to give him ownership of any of the files/directories. Just ongoing recursive read access. ongoing recursive is important. If someone adds a file or directory, I still want him to automatically be able to read it.

    Read the article

  • After Upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10 missing user in login screen

    - by Mark
    I have upgraded to 13.10 from 13.04 now after booting (even after updates and rebooting) my user id is not listed. It has a uid higher than the minimum in lightdm.conf. I have the user light display manager , guest , and remote login options in the login screen but not my ususal user id that I have been using from ubuntu 9 something. It is a normal user and an administrator so that I could authorize drivers, updates, etc... I do not have any custom display manager setup. It has been standard unity since unity was available. I can login to my account by logging in as guest opening a termial and using su - user Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134  | Next Page >