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  • For an ORM supporting data validation, should constraints be enforced in the database as well?

    - by Ramnique Singh
    I have always applied constraints at the database level in addition to my (ActiveRecord) models. But I've been wondering if this is really required? A little background I recently had to unit test a basic automated timestamp generation method for a model. Normally, the test would create an instance of the model and save it without validation. But there are other required fields that aren't nullable at the in the table definition, meaning I cant save the instance even if I skip the ActiveRecord validation. So I'm thinking if I should remove such constraints from the db itself, and let the ORM handle them? Possible advantages if I skip constraints in db, imo - Can modify a validation rule in the model, without having to migrate the database. Can skip validation in testing. Possible disadvantage? If its possible that ORM validation fails or is bypassed, howsoever, the database does not check for constraints. What do you think? EDIT In this case, I'm using the Yii Framework, which generates the model from the database, hence database rules are generated also (though I could always write them post-generation myself too).

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  • Did I Inadvertently Create a Mediator in my MVC?

    - by SoulBeaver
    I'm currently working on my first biggish project. It's a frontend facebook application that has, since last Tuesday, spanned some 6000-8000 LOC. I say this because I'm using the MVC, an architecture I have never rigidly enforced in any of my hobby projects. I read part of the PureMVC book, but I didn't quite grasp the concept of the Mediator. Since I didn't understand and didn't see the need for it, my project has yet to use a single mediator. Yesterday I went back to the design board because of some requirement changes and noticed that I could move all UI elements out of the View and into its own class. The View essentially only managed the lifetime of the UI and all events from the UI or Model. Technically, the View has now become a 'Mediator' between the Model and UI. Therefore, I realized today, I could just move all my UI stuff back into the View and create a mediator class that handles all events from the view and model. Is my understanding correct in thinking that I have devolved my View as it currently is (handling events from the Model and UI) into a Mediator and that the UI class is what should be the View?

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  • Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

    The last post ended with us just getting started on stumbling into text template file customization, a task that required a Visual Studio extension (Tangible T4 Editor) to even have a chance at completing.  Despite the benefits of the Tangible T4 Editor, I still had a hard time putting together a solid text template that would be easy to explain.  This is mostly due to the way the files allow you to mix code (encapsulated in <# #>) with straight-up text to generate.  It is effective to be sure, but not very readable.  Nevertheless, I will try and explain what was accomplished in my custom tt file, though the details of which are not really the point of this article (my way of saying dont criticize my crappy code, and certainly dont use it in any somewhat real application.  You may become dumber just by looking at this code.  You have been warned really the footnote I should put at the end of all of my blog posts). To begin with, there were two basic requirements that I needed the code generator to satisfy:  Reading one to many entity framework files, and using the entities that were found to write one to many class files.  Thankfully, using the Entity Object Generator as a starting point gave us an example on how to do exactly that by using the MetadataLoader and EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager you include references to these items and use them like so: // Instantiate an entity framework file reader and file writer MetadataLoader loader = new MetadataLoader(this); EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager fileManager = EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager.Create(this); // Load the entity model metadata workspace MetadataWorkspace metadataWorkspace = null; bool allMetadataLoaded =loader.TryLoadAllMetadata("MFL.tt", out metadataWorkspace); EdmItemCollection ItemCollection = (EdmItemCollection)metadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace); // Create an IO class to contain the 'get' methods for all entities in the model fileManager.StartNewFile("MFL.IO.gen.cs"); Next, we want to be able to loop through all of the entities found in the model, and then each property for each entity so we can generate classes and methods for each.  The code for that is blissfully simple: // Iterate through each entity in the model foreach (EntityType entity in ItemCollection.GetItems<EntityType>().OrderBy(e => e.Name)) {     // Iterate through each primitive property of the entity     foreach (EdmProperty edmProperty in entity.Properties.Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType is PrimitiveType && p.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create properties     }     // Iterate through each relationship of the entity     foreach (NavigationProperty navProperty in entity.NavigationProperties.Where(np => np.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create associations     } } There really isnt anything more advanced than that going on in the text template the only thing I had to blunder through was realizing that if you want the generator to interpret a line of code (such as our iterations above), you need to enclose the code in <# and #> while if you want the generator to interpret the VALUE of code, such as putting the entity name into the class name, you need to enclose the code in <#= and #> like so: public partial class <#=entity.Name#> To make a long story short, I did a lot of repetition of the above to come up with a text template that generates a class for each entity based on its properties, and a set of IO methods for each entity based on its relationships.  The two work together to provide lazy-loading for hierarchical data (such getting Team.Players) so it should be pretty intuitive to use on a front-end.  This text template is available here you can tweak the inputFiles array to load one or many different edmx models and generate the basic xml IO and class files, though it will probably only work correctly in the simplest of cases, like our MFL model described in the previous post.  Additionally, there is no validation, logging or error handling which is something I want to handle later by stumbling through the enterprise library 5.0. The code that gets generated isnt anything special, though using the LINQ to XML feature was something very new and exciting for me I had only worked with XML in the past using the DOM or XML Reader objects along with XPath, and the LINQ to XML model is just so much more elegant and supposedly efficient (something to test later).  For example, the following code was generated to create a Player object for each Player node in the XML:         return from element in GetXmlData(_PlayerDataFile).Descendants("Player")             select new Player             {                 Id = int.Parse(element.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,ParentName = element.Parent.Name.LocalName                 ,ParentId = long.Parse(element.Parent.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,Name = element.Attribute("Name").Value                 ,PositionId = int.Parse(element.Attribute("PositionId").Value)             }; It is all done in one line of code, no looping needed.  Even though GetXmlData loads the entire xml file just like the old XML DOM approach would have, it is supposed to be much less resource intensive.  I will definitely put that to the test after we develop a user interface for getting at this data.  Speaking of the data where IS the data?  Weve put together a pretty model and a bunch of code around it, but we dont have any data to speak of.  We can certainly drop to our favorite XML editor and crank out some data, but if it doesnt totally match our model, it will not load correctly.  To help with this, Ive built in a method to generate xml at any given layer in the hierarchy.  So for us to get the closest possible thing to real data, wed need to invoke MFL.IO.GenerateTeamXML and save the results to file.  Doing so should get us something that looks like this: <Team Id="0" Name="0">   <Player Id="0" Name="0" PositionId="0">     <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="0" RushYards="0" Year="0" />   </Player> </Team> Sadly, it is missing the Positions node (havent thought of a way to generate lookup xml yet) and the data itself isnt quite realistic (well, as realistic as MFL data can be anyway).  Lets manually remedy that for now to give us a decent starter set of data.  Note that this is TWO xml files Lookups.xml and Teams.xml: <Lookups Id=0>   <Position Id="0" Name="Quarterback"/>   <Position Id="1" Name="Runningback"/> </Lookups> <Teams Id=0>   <Team Id="0" Name="Chicago">     <Player Id="0" Name="QB Bears" PositionId="0">       <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="4000" RushYards="120" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="1" PassYards="4200" RushYards="180" Year="2009" />     </Player>     <Player Id="1" Name="RB Bears" PositionId="1">       <Statistic Id="2" PassYards="0" RushYards="800" Year="2007" />       <Statistic Id="3" PassYards="0" RushYards="1200" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="4" PassYards="3" RushYards="1450" Year="2009" />     </Player>   </Team> </Teams> Ok, so we have some data, we have a way to read/write that data and we have a friendly way of representing that data.  Now, what remains is the part that I have been looking forward to the most: present the data to the user and give them the ability to add/update/delete, and doing so in a way that is very intuitive (easy) from a development standpoint.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • How to do integrated testing?

    - by Enthusiastic Programmer
    So I have been reading up on a lot of books surrounding testing. But all the books I've read have the same flaws. They will all tell you the definitions of testing. But I have not found a single book that will guide you into integration testing (or pretty much anything higher then unit testing). Is integration testing that elusive or am I reading the wrong books? I'm a hands on person, so I would appreciate it if someone could help me with a simple program: Let's say you need to make some sort of calculation program that calculates something (doesn't matter what) and exports it to *.txt file. Let's assume we use the Model View Controller design principle. And one class for the actual calculating which you'll use in the model and one for writing the textfile. So: View = Controller = Model = CalculationClass, FileClass So for unittesting: You'd test the calculationClass, I'd personally focus most of my unit tests there. And less time on unit testing the view/controller/FileClass. I personally wouldn't see the use of unittesting those unless you want a really robust program. Integration testing: Now this is where I run into a wall. What would I have to test to call it an integration test? I could stub the view and feed the controller data which it would pass on to the model and so forth. And then check what the view gets back in the end. But ... Couldn't I just run the (in this case small) program then and test it manually? Would this be considered a integration test too, or does it have to be automated? Also, can I check multiple items to see if they are correct? I cannot seem to find any book that offers a hands on approach to methods of integration testing.

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  • Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

    The last post ended with us just getting started on stumbling into text template file customization, a task that required a Visual Studio extension (Tangible T4 Editor) to even have a chance at completing.  Despite the benefits of the Tangible T4 Editor, I still had a hard time putting together a solid text template that would be easy to explain.  This is mostly due to the way the files allow you to mix code (encapsulated in <# #>) with straight-up text to generate.  It is effective to be sure, but not very readable.  Nevertheless, I will try and explain what was accomplished in my custom tt file, though the details of which are not really the point of this article (my way of saying dont criticize my crappy code, and certainly dont use it in any somewhat real application.  You may become dumber just by looking at this code.  You have been warned really the footnote I should put at the end of all of my blog posts). To begin with, there were two basic requirements that I needed the code generator to satisfy:  Reading one to many entity framework files, and using the entities that were found to write one to many class files.  Thankfully, using the Entity Object Generator as a starting point gave us an example on how to do exactly that by using the MetadataLoader and EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager you include references to these items and use them like so: // Instantiate an entity framework file reader and file writer MetadataLoader loader = new MetadataLoader(this); EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager fileManager = EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager.Create(this); // Load the entity model metadata workspace MetadataWorkspace metadataWorkspace = null; bool allMetadataLoaded =loader.TryLoadAllMetadata("MFL.tt", out metadataWorkspace); EdmItemCollection ItemCollection = (EdmItemCollection)metadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace); // Create an IO class to contain the 'get' methods for all entities in the model fileManager.StartNewFile("MFL.IO.gen.cs"); Next, we want to be able to loop through all of the entities found in the model, and then each property for each entity so we can generate classes and methods for each.  The code for that is blissfully simple: // Iterate through each entity in the model foreach (EntityType entity in ItemCollection.GetItems<EntityType>().OrderBy(e => e.Name)) {     // Iterate through each primitive property of the entity     foreach (EdmProperty edmProperty in entity.Properties.Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType is PrimitiveType && p.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create properties     }     // Iterate through each relationship of the entity     foreach (NavigationProperty navProperty in entity.NavigationProperties.Where(np => np.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create associations     } } There really isnt anything more advanced than that going on in the text template the only thing I had to blunder through was realizing that if you want the generator to interpret a line of code (such as our iterations above), you need to enclose the code in <# and #> while if you want the generator to interpret the VALUE of code, such as putting the entity name into the class name, you need to enclose the code in <#= and #> like so: public partial class <#=entity.Name#> To make a long story short, I did a lot of repetition of the above to come up with a text template that generates a class for each entity based on its properties, and a set of IO methods for each entity based on its relationships.  The two work together to provide lazy-loading for hierarchical data (such getting Team.Players) so it should be pretty intuitive to use on a front-end.  This text template is available here you can tweak the inputFiles array to load one or many different edmx models and generate the basic xml IO and class files, though it will probably only work correctly in the simplest of cases, like our MFL model described in the previous post.  Additionally, there is no validation, logging or error handling which is something I want to handle later by stumbling through the enterprise library 5.0. The code that gets generated isnt anything special, though using the LINQ to XML feature was something very new and exciting for me I had only worked with XML in the past using the DOM or XML Reader objects along with XPath, and the LINQ to XML model is just so much more elegant and supposedly efficient (something to test later).  For example, the following code was generated to create a Player object for each Player node in the XML:         return from element in GetXmlData(_PlayerDataFile).Descendants("Player")             select new Player             {                 Id = int.Parse(element.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,ParentName = element.Parent.Name.LocalName                 ,ParentId = long.Parse(element.Parent.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,Name = element.Attribute("Name").Value                 ,PositionId = int.Parse(element.Attribute("PositionId").Value)             }; It is all done in one line of code, no looping needed.  Even though GetXmlData loads the entire xml file just like the old XML DOM approach would have, it is supposed to be much less resource intensive.  I will definitely put that to the test after we develop a user interface for getting at this data.  Speaking of the data where IS the data?  Weve put together a pretty model and a bunch of code around it, but we dont have any data to speak of.  We can certainly drop to our favorite XML editor and crank out some data, but if it doesnt totally match our model, it will not load correctly.  To help with this, Ive built in a method to generate xml at any given layer in the hierarchy.  So for us to get the closest possible thing to real data, wed need to invoke MFL.IO.GenerateTeamXML and save the results to file.  Doing so should get us something that looks like this: <Team Id="0" Name="0">   <Player Id="0" Name="0" PositionId="0">     <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="0" RushYards="0" Year="0" />   </Player> </Team> Sadly, it is missing the Positions node (havent thought of a way to generate lookup xml yet) and the data itself isnt quite realistic (well, as realistic as MFL data can be anyway).  Lets manually remedy that for now to give us a decent starter set of data.  Note that this is TWO xml files Lookups.xml and Teams.xml: <Lookups Id=0>   <Position Id="0" Name="Quarterback"/>   <Position Id="1" Name="Runningback"/> </Lookups> <Teams Id=0>   <Team Id="0" Name="Chicago">     <Player Id="0" Name="QB Bears" PositionId="0">       <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="4000" RushYards="120" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="1" PassYards="4200" RushYards="180" Year="2009" />     </Player>     <Player Id="1" Name="RB Bears" PositionId="1">       <Statistic Id="2" PassYards="0" RushYards="800" Year="2007" />       <Statistic Id="3" PassYards="0" RushYards="1200" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="4" PassYards="3" RushYards="1450" Year="2009" />     </Player>   </Team> </Teams> Ok, so we have some data, we have a way to read/write that data and we have a friendly way of representing that data.  Now, what remains is the part that I have been looking forward to the most: present the data to the user and give them the ability to add/update/delete, and doing so in a way that is very intuitive (easy) from a development standpoint.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • XMI format error loading project on argouml

    - by Tom Brito
    Have anyone experienced this (org.argouml.model.)XmiException opening a project lastest version of argouml? XMI format error : org.argouml.model.XmiException: XMI parsing error at line: 18: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace If this file was produced by a tool other than ArgoUML, please check to make sure that the file is in a supported format, including both UML and XMI versions. If you believe that the file is legal UML/XMI and should have loaded or if it was produced by any version of ArgoUML, please report the problem as a bug by going to http://argouml.tigris.org/project_bugs.html. System Info: ArgoUML version : 0.30 Java Version : 1.6.0_15 Java Vendor : Sun Microsystems Inc. Java Vendor URL : http://java.sun.com/ Java Home Directory : /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre Java Classpath : /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/deploy.jar Operation System : Linux, Version 2.6.31-20-generic Architecture : i386 User Name : wellington User Home Directory : /home/wellington Current Directory : /home/wellington JVM Total Memory : 34271232 JVM Free Memory : 10512336 Error occurred at : Thu Apr 01 11:21:10 BRT 2010 Cause : org.argouml.model.XmiException: XMI parsing error at line: 18: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.argouml.model.mdr.XmiReaderImpl.parse(XmiReaderImpl.java:307) at org.argouml.persistence.ModelMemberFilePersister.readModels(ModelMemberFilePersister.java:273) at org.argouml.persistence.XmiFilePersister.doLoad(XmiFilePersister.java:261) at org.argouml.ui.ProjectBrowser.loadProject(ProjectBrowser.java:1597) at org.argouml.ui.LoadSwingWorker.construct(LoadSwingWorker.java:89) at org.argouml.ui.SwingWorker.doConstruct(SwingWorker.java:153) at org.argouml.ui.SwingWorker$2.run(SwingWorker.java:281) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Caused by: org.netbeans.lib.jmi.util.DebugException: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.startElement(XmiSAXReader.java:232) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.startElement(AbstractSAXParser.java:501) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanStartElement(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:1359) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDriver.next(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:2747) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl.next(XMLDocumentScannerImpl.java:648) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:510) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:807) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:737) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:107) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1205) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:522) at javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser.parse(SAXParser.java:395) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.read(XmiSAXReader.java:136) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.read(XmiSAXReader.java:98) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:56) at org.argouml.model.mdr.XmiReaderImpl.parse(XmiReaderImpl.java:233) ... 7 more Caused by: org.netbeans.lib.jmi.util.DebugException: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$Instance.setReferenceValues(XmiElement.java:699) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$Instance.resolveAttributeValue(XmiElement.java:772) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$Instance. (XmiElement.java:496) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiContext.resolveInstanceOrReference(XmiContext.java:688) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$ObjectValues.startSubElement(XmiElement.java:1460) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.startElement(XmiSAXReader.java:219) ... 22 more ------- Full exception : org.argouml.persistence.XmiFormatException: org.argouml.model.XmiException: XMI parsing error at line: 18: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.argouml.persistence.ModelMemberFilePersister.readModels(ModelMemberFilePersister.java:298) at org.argouml.persistence.XmiFilePersister.doLoad(XmiFilePersister.java:261) at org.argouml.ui.ProjectBrowser.loadProject(ProjectBrowser.java:1597) at org.argouml.ui.LoadSwingWorker.construct(LoadSwingWorker.java:89) at org.argouml.ui.SwingWorker.doConstruct(SwingWorker.java:153) at org.argouml.ui.SwingWorker$2.run(SwingWorker.java:281) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Caused by: org.argouml.model.XmiException: XMI parsing error at line: 18: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.argouml.model.mdr.XmiReaderImpl.parse(XmiReaderImpl.java:307) at org.argouml.persistence.ModelMemberFilePersister.readModels(ModelMemberFilePersister.java:273) ... 6 more Caused by: org.netbeans.lib.jmi.util.DebugException: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.startElement(XmiSAXReader.java:232) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.startElement(AbstractSAXParser.java:501) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanStartElement(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:1359) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDriver.next(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:2747) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentScannerImpl.next(XMLDocumentScannerImpl.java:648) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:510) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:807) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(XML11Configuration.java:737) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:107) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1205) at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:522) at javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser.parse(SAXParser.java:395) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.read(XmiSAXReader.java:136) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.read(XmiSAXReader.java:98) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.SAXReader.read(SAXReader.java:56) at org.argouml.model.mdr.XmiReaderImpl.parse(XmiReaderImpl.java:233) ... 7 more Caused by: org.netbeans.lib.jmi.util.DebugException: Cannot set a multi-value to a non-multivalued reference:namespace at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$Instance.setReferenceValues(XmiElement.java:699) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$Instance.resolveAttributeValue(XmiElement.java:772) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$Instance. (XmiElement.java:496) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiContext.resolveInstanceOrReference(XmiContext.java:688) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiElement$ObjectValues.startSubElement(XmiElement.java:1460) at org.netbeans.lib.jmi.xmi.XmiSAXReader.startElement(XmiSAXReader.java:219) ... 22 more the original project was created on argo v0.28.1, and (as I remember) have only use case diagrams. and yes, I'll report at the specified argo website either.. :) But anyone know anything about this exception?

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  • What is the best way to provide an AutoMappingOverride for an interface in fluentnhibernate automapp

    - by Tom
    In my quest for a version-wide database filter for an application, I have written the following code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using FluentNHibernate.Automapping; using FluentNHibernate.Automapping.Alterations; using FluentNHibernate.Mapping; using MvcExtensions.Model; using NHibernate; namespace MvcExtensions.Services.Impl.FluentNHibernate { public interface IVersionAware { string Version { get; set; } } public class VersionFilter : FilterDefinition { const string FILTERNAME = "MyVersionFilter"; const string COLUMNNAME = "Version"; public VersionFilter() { this.WithName(FILTERNAME) .WithCondition("Version = :"+COLUMNNAME) .AddParameter(COLUMNNAME, NHibernateUtil.String ); } public static void EnableVersionFilter(ISession session,string version) { session.EnableFilter(FILTERNAME).SetParameter(COLUMNNAME, version); } public static void DisableVersionFilter(ISession session) { session.DisableFilter(FILTERNAME); } } public class VersionAwareOverride : IAutoMappingOverride<IVersionAware> { #region IAutoMappingOverride<IVersionAware> Members public void Override(AutoMapping<IVersionAware> mapping) { mapping.ApplyFilter<VersionFilter>(); } #endregion } } But, since overrides do not work on interfaces, I am looking for a way to implement this. Currently I'm using this (rather cumbersome) way for each class that implements the interface : public class SomeVersionedEntity : IModelId, IVersionAware { public virtual int Id { get; set; } public virtual string Version { get; set; } } public class SomeVersionedEntityOverride : IAutoMappingOverride<SomeVersionedEntity> { #region IAutoMappingOverride<SomeVersionedEntity> Members public void Override(AutoMapping<SomeVersionedEntity> mapping) { mapping.ApplyFilter<VersionFilter>(); } #endregion } I have been looking at IClassmap interfaces etc, but they do not seem to provide a way to access the ApplyFilter method, so I have not got a clue here... Since I am probably not the first one who has this problem, I am quite sure that it should be possible; I am just not quite sure how this works.. EDIT : I have gotten a bit closer to a generic solution: This is the way I tried to solve it : Using a generic class to implement alterations to classes implementing an interface : public abstract class AutomappingInterfaceAlteration<I> : IAutoMappingAlteration { public void Alter(AutoPersistenceModel model) { model.OverrideAll(map => { var recordType = map.GetType().GetGenericArguments().Single(); if (typeof(I).IsAssignableFrom(recordType)) { this.GetType().GetMethod("overrideStuff").MakeGenericMethod(recordType).Invoke(this, new object[] { model }); } }); } public void overrideStuff<T>(AutoPersistenceModel pm) where T : I { pm.Override<T>( a => Override(a)); } public abstract void Override<T>(AutoMapping<T> am) where T:I; } And a specific implementation : public class VersionAwareAlteration : AutomappingInterfaceAlteration<IVersionAware> { public override void Override<T>(AutoMapping<T> am) { am.Map(x => x.Version).Column("VersionTest"); am.ApplyFilter<VersionFilter>(); } } Unfortunately I get the following error now : [InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.] System.ThrowHelper.ThrowInvalidOperationException(ExceptionResource resource) +51 System.Collections.Generic.Enumerator.MoveNextRare() +7661017 System.Collections.Generic.Enumerator.MoveNext() +61 System.Linq.WhereListIterator`1.MoveNext() +156 FluentNHibernate.Utils.CollectionExtensions.Each(IEnumerable`1 enumerable, Action`1 each) +239 FluentNHibernate.Automapping.AutoMapper.ApplyOverrides(Type classType, IList`1 mappedProperties, ClassMappingBase mapping) +345 FluentNHibernate.Automapping.AutoMapper.MergeMap(Type classType, ClassMappingBase mapping, IList`1 mappedProperties) +43 FluentNHibernate.Automapping.AutoMapper.Map(Type classType, List`1 types) +566 FluentNHibernate.Automapping.AutoPersistenceModel.AddMapping(Type type) +85 FluentNHibernate.Automapping.AutoPersistenceModel.CompileMappings() +746 EDIT 2 : I managed to get a bit further; I now invoke "Override" using reflection for each class that implements the interface : public abstract class PersistenceOverride<I> { public void DoOverrides(AutoPersistenceModel model,IEnumerable<Type> Mytypes) { foreach(var t in Mytypes.Where(x=>typeof(I).IsAssignableFrom(x))) ManualOverride(t,model); } private void ManualOverride(Type recordType,AutoPersistenceModel model) { var t_amt = typeof(AutoMapping<>).MakeGenericType(recordType); var t_act = typeof(Action<>).MakeGenericType(t_amt); var m = typeof(PersistenceOverride<I>) .GetMethod("MyOverride") .MakeGenericMethod(recordType) .Invoke(this, null); model.GetType().GetMethod("Override").MakeGenericMethod(recordType).Invoke(model, new object[] { m }); } public abstract Action<AutoMapping<T>> MyOverride<T>() where T:I; } public class VersionAwareOverride : PersistenceOverride<IVersionAware> { public override Action<AutoMapping<T>> MyOverride<T>() { return am => { am.Map(x => x.Version).Column(VersionFilter.COLUMNNAME); am.ApplyFilter<VersionFilter>(); }; } } However, for one reason or another my generated hbm files do not contain any "filter" fields.... Maybe somebody could help me a bit further now ??

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  • Django app that can provide user friendly, multiple / mass file upload functionality to other apps

    - by hopla
    Hi, I'm going to be honest: this is a question I asked on the Django-Users mailinglist last week. Since I didn't get any replies there yet, I'm reposting it on Stack Overflow in the hope that it gets more attention here. I want to create an app that makes it easy to do user friendly, multiple / mass file upload in your own apps. With user friendly I mean upload like Gmail, Flickr, ... where the user can select multiple files at once in the browse file dialog. The files are then uploaded sequentially or in parallel and a nice overview of the selected files is shown on the page with a progress bar next to them. A 'Cancel' upload button is also a possible option. All that niceness is usually solved by using a Flash object. Complete solutions are out there for the client side, like: SWFUpload http://swfupload.org/ , FancyUpload http://digitarald.de/project/fancyupload/ , YUI 2 Uploader http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/uploader/ and probably many more. Ofcourse the trick is getting those solutions integrated in your project. Especially in a framework like Django, double so if you want it to be reusable. So, I have a few ideas, but I'm neither an expert on Django nor on Flash based upload solutions. I'll share my ideas here in the hope of getting some feedback from more knowledgeable and experienced people. (Or even just some 'I want this too!' replies :) ) You will notice that I make a few assumptions: this is to keep the (initial) scope of the application under control. These assumptions are of course debatable: All right, my idea's so far: If you want to mass upload multiple files, you are going to have a model to contain each file in. I.e. the model will contain one FileField or one ImageField. Models with multiple (but ofcourse finite) amount of FileFields/ ImageFields are not in need of easy mass uploading imho: if you have a model with 100 FileFields you are doing something wrong :) Examples where you would want my envisioned kind of mass upload: An app that has just one model 'Brochure' with a file field, a title field (dynamically created from the filename) and a date_added field. A photo gallery app with models 'Gallery' and 'Photo'. You pick a Gallery to add pictures to, upload the pictures and new Photo objects are created and foreign keys set to the chosen Gallery. It would be nice to be able to configure or extend the app for your favorite Flash upload solution. We can pick one of the three above as a default, but implement the app so that people can easily add additional implementations (kinda like Django can use multiple databases). Let it be agnostic to any particular client side solution. If we need to pick one to start with, maybe pick the one with the smallest footprint? (smallest download of client side stuff) The Flash based solutions asynchronously (and either sequentially or in parallel) POST the files to a url. I suggest that url to be local to our generic app (so it's the same for every app where you use our app in). That url will go to a view provided by our generic app. The view will do the following: create a new model instance, add the file, OPTIONALLY DO EXTRA STUFF and save the instance. DO EXTRA STUFF is code that the app that uses our app wants to run. It doesn't have to provide any extra code, if the model has just a FileField/ImageField the standard view code will do the job. But most app will want to do extra stuff I think, like filling in the other fields: title, date_added, foreignkeys, manytomany, ... I have not yet thought about a mechanism for DO EXTRA STUFF. Just wrapping the generic app view came to mind, but that is not developer friendly, since you would have to write your own url pattern and your own view. Then you have to tell the Flash solutions to use a new url etc... I think something like signals could be used here? Forms/Admin: I'm still very sketchy on how all this could best be integrated in the Admin or generic Django forms/widgets/... (and this is were my lack of Django experience shows): In the case of the Gallery/Photo app: You could provide a mass Photo upload widget on the Gallery detail form. But what if the Gallery instance is not saved yet? The file upload view won't be able to set the foreignkeys on the Photo instances. I see that the auth app, when you create a user, first asks for username and password and only then provides you with a bigger form to fill in emailadres, pick roles etc. We could do something like that. In the case of an app with just one model: How do you provide a form in the Django admin to do your mass upload? You can't do it with the detail form of your model, that's just for one model instance. There's probably dozens more questions that need to be answered before I can even start on this app. So please tell me what you think! Give me input! What do you like? What not? What would you do different? Is this idea solid? Where is it not? Thank you!

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  • MVC ASP.Net how do I add a second model to a view? i.e. Add a dropdown list to a page with a html grid?

    - by John S
    I have been able to find lots of examples of adding a Dropdown list to a view but I need to add a dropdown list to a view that also has a Webgrid on it. This entails two different models and from what I see I can only have one per view. The DDL will be filled from one model and the grid from the other. I'm just trying to filter the displayed data in the grid with the data selected in the ddl. Any examples or articles would be greatly appreciated. TIA

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  • Written a resharper plugin that modifies the TextControl?

    - by Ajaxx
    Resharper claims to eat it's own dogfood, specifically, they claim that many of the features of Resharper are written ontop of R# (OpenAPI). I'm writing a simple plugin to fix up comments of the current document of a selection. When this plugin is run, it throws an exception as follows: Document can be modified inside a command scope only I've researched the error and can't find anything to help with this, so I'm hoping that possibly, you've written a plugin to accomplish this. If not, I hope the snippet is enough to help others get their own plugins underway. using System; using System.IO; using System.Windows.Forms; using JetBrains.ActionManagement; using JetBrains.DocumentModel; using JetBrains.IDE; using JetBrains.TextControl; using JetBrains.Util; namespace TinkerToys.Actions { [ActionHandler("TinkerToys.RewriteComment")] public class RewriteCommentAction : IActionHandler { #region Implementation of IActionHandler /// <summary> /// Updates action visual presentation. If presentation.Enabled is set to false, Execute /// will not be called. /// </summary> /// <param name="context">DataContext</param> /// <param name="presentation">presentation to update</param> /// <param name="nextUpdate">delegate to call</param> public bool Update(IDataContext context, ActionPresentation presentation, DelegateUpdate nextUpdate) { ITextControl textControl = context.GetData(DataConstants.TEXT_CONTROL); return textControl != null; } /// <summary> /// Executes action. Called after Update, that set ActionPresentation.Enabled to true. /// </summary> /// <param name="context">DataContext</param> /// <param name="nextExecute">delegate to call</param> public void Execute(IDataContext context, DelegateExecute nextExecute) { ITextControl textControl = context.GetData(DataConstants.TEXT_CONTROL); if (textControl != null) { TextRange textSelectRange; ISelectionModel textSelectionModel = textControl.SelectionModel; if ((textSelectionModel != null) && textSelectionModel.HasSelection()) { textSelectRange = textSelectionModel.Range; } else { textSelectRange = new TextRange(0, textControl.Document.GetTextLength()); } IDocument textDocument = textControl.Document; String textSelection = textDocument.GetText(textSelectRange); if (textSelection != null) { StringReader sReader = new StringReader(textSelection); StringWriter sWriter = new StringWriter(); Converter.Convert(sReader, sWriter); textSelection = sWriter.ToString(); textDocument.ReplaceText(textSelectRange, textSelection); } } } #endregion } } So what is this command scope it wants so badly? I had some additional logging in this prior to posting it so I'm absolutely certain that both the range and text are valid. In addition, the error seems to indicate that I'm missing some scope that I've been, as yet, unable to find.

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3

    - by mbridge
    Razor View Engine The Razor view engine is a new view engine option for ASP.NET MVC that supports the Razor templating syntax. The Razor syntax is a streamlined approach to HTML templating designed with the goal of being a code driven minimalist templating approach that builds on existing C#, VB.NET and HTML knowledge. The result of this approach is that Razor views are very lean and do not contain unnecessary constructs that get in the way of you and your code. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 only supports C# Razor views which use the .cshtml file extension. VB.NET support will be enabled in later releases of ASP.NET MVC 3. For more information and examples, see Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET on Scott Guthrie’s blog. Dynamic View and ViewModel Properties A new dynamic View property is available in views, which provides access to the ViewData object using a simpler syntax. For example, imagine two items are added to the ViewData dictionary in the Index controller action using code like the following: public ActionResult Index() {          ViewData["Title"] = "The Title";          ViewData["Message"] = "Hello World!"; } Those properties can be accessed in the Index view using code like this: <h2>View.Title</h2> <p>View.Message</p> There is also a new dynamic ViewModel property in the Controller class that lets you add items to the ViewData dictionary using a simpler syntax. Using the previous controller example, the two values added to the ViewData dictionary can be rewritten using the following code: public ActionResult Index() {     ViewModel.Title = "The Title";     ViewModel.Message = "Hello World!"; } “Add View” Dialog Box Supports Multiple View Engines The Add View dialog box in Visual Studio includes extensibility hooks that allow it to support multiple view engines, as shown in the following figure: Service Location and Dependency Injection Support ASP.NET MVC 3 introduces improved support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) via Inversion of Control (IoC) containers. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 provides the following hooks for locating services and injecting dependencies: - Creating controller factories. - Creating controllers and setting dependencies. - Setting dependencies on view pages for both the Web Form view engine and the Razor view engine (for types that derive from ViewPage, ViewUserControl, ViewMasterPage, WebViewPage). - Setting dependencies on action filters. Using a Dependency Injection container is not required in order for ASP.NET MVC 3 to function properly. Global Filters ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to register filters that apply globally to all controller action methods. Adding a filter to the global filters collection ensures that the filter runs for all controller requests. To register an action filter globally, you can make the following call in the Application_Start method in the Global.asax file: GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new MyActionFilter()); The source of global action filters is abstracted by the new IFilterProvider interface, which can be registered manually or by using Dependency Injection. This allows you to provide your own source of action filters and choose at run time whether to apply a filter to an action in a particular request. New JsonValueProviderFactory Class The new JsonValueProviderFactory class allows action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and model-bind it to an action-method parameter. This is useful in scenarios such as client templating. Client templates enable you to format and display a single data item or set of data items by using a fragment of HTML. ASP.NET MVC 3 lets you connect client templates easily with an action method that both returns and receives JSON data. Support for .NET Framework 4 Validation Attributes and IvalidatableObject The ValidationAttribute class was improved in the .NET Framework 4 to enable richer support for validation. When you write a custom validation attribute, you can use a new IsValid overload that provides a ValidationContext instance. This instance provides information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This change enables scenarios such as validating the current value based on another property of the model. The following example shows a sample custom attribute that ensures that the value of PropertyOne is always larger than the value of PropertyTwo: public class CompareValidationAttribute : ValidationAttribute {     protected override ValidationResult IsValid(object value,              ValidationContext validationContext) {         var model = validationContext.ObjectInstance as SomeModel;         if (model.PropertyOne > model.PropertyTwo) {            return ValidationResult.Success;         }         return new ValidationResult("PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");     } } Validation in ASP.NET MVC also supports the .NET Framework 4 IValidatableObject interface. This interface allows your model to perform model-level validation, as in the following example: public class SomeModel : IValidatableObject {     public int PropertyOne { get; set; }     public int PropertyTwo { get; set; }     public IEnumerable<ValidationResult> Validate(ValidationContext validationContext) {         if (PropertyOne <= PropertyTwo) {            yield return new ValidationResult(                "PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");         }     } } New IClientValidatable Interface The new IClientValidatable interface allows the validation framework to discover at run time whether a validator has support for client validation. This interface is designed to be independent of the underlying implementation; therefore, where you implement the interface depends on the validation framework in use. For example, for the default data annotations-based validator, the interface would be applied on the validation attribute. Support for .NET Framework 4 Metadata Attributes ASP.NET MVC 3 now supports .NET Framework 4 metadata attributes such as DisplayAttribute. New IMetadataAware Interface The new IMetadataAware interface allows you to write attributes that simplify how you can contribute to the ModelMetadata creation process. Before this interface was available, you needed to write a custom metadata provider in order to have an attribute provide extra metadata. This interface is consumed by the AssociatedMetadataProvider class, so support for the IMetadataAware interface is automatically inherited by all classes that derive from that class (notably, the DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider class). New Action Result Types In ASP.NET MVC 3, the Controller class includes two new action result types and corresponding helper methods. HttpNotFoundResult Action The new HttpNotFoundResult action result is used to indicate that a resource requested by the current URL was not found. The status code is 404. This class derives from HttpStatusCodeResult. The Controller class includes an HttpNotFound method that returns an instance of this action result type, as shown in the following example: public ActionResult List(int id) {     if (id < 0) {                 return HttpNotFound();     }     return View(); } HttpStatusCodeResult Action The new HttpStatusCodeResult action result is used to set the response status code and description. Permanent Redirect The HttpRedirectResult class has a new Boolean Permanent property that is used to indicate whether a permanent redirect should occur. A permanent redirect uses the HTTP 301 status code. Corresponding to this change, the Controller class now has several methods for performing permanent redirects: - RedirectPermanent - RedirectToRoutePermanent - RedirectToActionPermanent These methods return an instance of HttpRedirectResult with the Permanent property set to true. Breaking Changes The order of execution for exception filters has changed for exception filters that have the same Order value. In ASP.NET MVC 2 and earlier, exception filters on the controller with the same Order as those on an action method were executed before the exception filters on the action method. This would typically be the case when exception filters were applied without a specified order Order value. In MVC 3, this order has been reversed in order to allow the most specific exception handler to execute first. As in earlier versions, if the Order property is explicitly specified, the filters are run in the specified order. Known Issues When you are editing a Razor view (CSHTML file), the Go To Controller menu item in Visual Studio will not be available, and there are no code snippets.

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  • The last MVVM you'll ever need?

    - by Nuri Halperin
    As my MVC projects mature and grow, the need to have some omnipresent, ambient model properties quickly emerge. The application no longer has only one dynamic pieced of data on the page: A sidebar with a shopping cart, some news flash on the side – pretty common stuff. The rub is that a controller is invoked in context of a single intended request. The rest of the data, even though it could be just as dynamic, is expected to appear on it's own. There are many solutions to this scenario. MVVM prescribes creating elaborate objects which expose your new data as a property on some uber-object with more properties exposing the "side show" ambient data. The reason I don't love this approach is because it forces fairly acute awareness of the view, and soon enough you have many MVVM objects laying around, and views have to start doing null-checks in order to ensure you really supplied all the values before binding to them. Ick. Just as unattractive is the ViewData dictionary. It's not strongly typed, and in both this and the MVVM approach someone has to populate these properties – n'est pas? Where does that live? With MVC2, we get the formerly-futures  feature Html.RenderAction(). The feature allows you plant a line in a view, of the format: <% Html.RenderAction("SessionInterest", "Session"); %> While this syntax looks very clean, I can't help being bothered by it. MVC was touting a very strong separation of concerns, the Model taking on the role of the business logic, the controller handling route and performing minimal view-choosing operations and the views strictly focused on rendering out angled-bracket tags. The RenderAction() syntax has the view calling some controller and invoking it inline with it's runtime rendering. This – to my taste – embeds too much  knowledge of controllers into the view's code – which was allegedly forbidden.  The one way flow "Controller Receive Data –> Controller invoke Model –> Controller select view –> Controller Hand data to view" now gets a "View calls controller and gets it's own data" which is not so one-way anymore. Ick. I toyed with some other solutions a bit, including some base controllers, special view classes etc. My current favorite though is making use of the ExpandoObject and dynamic features with C# 4.0. If you follow Phil Haack or read a bit from David Heyden you can see the general picture emerging. The game changer is that using the new dynamic syntax, one can sprout properties on an object and make use of them in the view. Well that beats having a bunch of uni-purpose MVVM's any day! Rather than statically exposed properties, we'll just use the capability of adding members at runtime. Armed with new ideas and syntax, I went to work: First, I created a factory method to enrich the focuse object: public static class ModelExtension { public static dynamic Decorate(this Controller controller, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest(); result.TagUsage = CodeCampBL.TagUsage(); return result; } } This gives me a nice fluent way to have the controller add the rest of the ambient "side show" items (SessionInterest, TagUsage in this demo) and expose them all as the Model: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); dynamic result = this.Decorate(data); return View(result); } So now what remains is that my view knows to expect a dynamic object (rather than statically typed) so that the ASP.NET page compiler won't barf: <%@ Page Language="C#" Title="Ambient Demo" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Ambient.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<dynamic>" %> Notice the generic ViewPage<dynamic>. It doesn't work otherwise. In the page itself, Model.Value property contains the main data returned from the controller. The nice thing about this, is that the master page (Ambient.Master) also inherits from the generic ViewMasterPage<dynamic>. So rather than the page worrying about all this ambient stuff, the side bars and panels for ambient data all reside in a master page, and can be rendered using the RenderPartial() syntax: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest as Dictionary<string, int>); %> Note here that a cast is necessary. This is because although dynamic is magic, it can't figure out what type this property is, and wants you to give it a type so its binder can figure out the right property to bind to at runtime. I use as, you can cast if you like. So there we go – no violation of MVC, no explosion of MVVM models and voila – right? Well, I could not let this go without a tweak or two more. The first thing to improve, is that some views may not need all the properties. In that case, it would be a waste of resources to populate every property. The solution to this is simple: rather than exposing properties, I change d the factory method to expose lambdas - Func<T> really. So only if and when a view accesses a member of the dynamic object does it load the data. public static class ModelExtension { // take two.. lazy loading! public static dynamic LazyDecorate(this Controller c, object mainValue) { dynamic result = new ExpandoObject(); result.Value = mainValue; result.SessionInterest = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.SessoinInterest()); result.TagUsage = new Func<Dictionary<string, int>>(() => CodeCampBL.TagUsage()); return result; } } Now that lazy loading is in place, there's really no reason not to hook up all and any possible ambient property. Go nuts! Add them all in – they won't get invoked unless used. This now requires changing the signature of usage on the ambient properties methods –adding some parenthesis to the master view: <% Html.RenderPartial("TagCloud", Model.SessionInterest() as Dictionary<string, int>); %> And, of course, the controller needs to call LazyDecorate() rather than the old Decorate(). The final touch is to introduce a convenience method to the my Controller class , so that the tedium of calling Decorate() everywhere goes away. This is done quite simply by adding a bunch of methods, matching View(object), View(string,object) signatures of the Controller class: public ActionResult Index() { var data = SyndicationBL.Refresh(TWEET_SOURCE_URL); return AmbientView(data); } //these methods can reside in a base controller for the solution: public ViewResult AmbientView(dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(result); } public ViewResult AmbientView(string viewName, dynamic data) { dynamic result = ModelExtension.LazyDecorate(this, data); return View(viewName, result); } The call to AmbientView now replaces any call the View() that requires the ambient data. DRY sattisfied, lazy loading and no need to replace core pieces of the MVC pipeline. I call this a good MVC day. Enjoy!

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  • Granular Clipboard Control in Oracle IRM

    - by martin.abrahams
    One of the main leak prevention controls that customers are looking for is clipboard control. After all, there is little point in controlling access to a document if authorised users can simply make unprotected copies by use of the cut and paste mechanism. Oddly, for such a fundamental requirement, many solutions only offer very simplistic clipboard control - and require the customer to make an awkward choice between usability and security. In many cases, clipboard control is simply an ON-OFF option. By turning the clipboard OFF, you disable one of the most valuable edit functions known to man. Try working for any length of time without copying and pasting, and you'll soon appreciate how valuable that function is. Worse, some solutions disable the clipboard completely - not just for the protected document but for all of the various applications you have open at the time. Normal service is only resumed when you close the protected document. In this way, policy enforcement bleeds out of the particular assets you need to protect and interferes with the entire user experience. On the other hand, turning the clipboard ON satisfies a fundamental usability requirement - but also makes it really easy for users to create unprotected copies of sensitive information, maliciously or otherwise. All they need to do is paste into another document. If creating unprotected copies is this simple, you have to question how much you are really gaining by applying protection at all. You may not be allowed to edit, forward, or print the protected asset, but all you need to do is create a copy and work with that instead. And that activity would not be tracked in any way. So, a simple ON-OFF control creates a real tension between usability and security. If you are only using IRM on a small scale, perhaps security can outweigh usability - the business can put up with the restriction if it only applies to a handful of important documents. But try extending protection to large numbers of documents and large user communities, and the restriction rapidly becomes really unwelcome. I am aware of one solution that takes a different tack. Rather than disable the clipboard, pasting is always permitted, but protection is automatically applied to any document that you paste into. At first glance, this sounds great - protection travels with the content. However, at any scale this model may not be so appealing once you've had to deal with support calls from users who have accidentally applied protection to documents that really don't need it - which would be all too easily done. This may help control leakage, but it also pollutes the system with documents that have policies applied with no obvious rhyme or reason, and it can seriously inconvenience the business by making non-sensitive documents difficult to access. And what policy applies if you paste some protected content into an already protected document? Which policy applies? There are no prizes for guessing that Oracle IRM takes a rather different approach. The Oracle IRM Approach Oracle IRM offers a spectrum of clipboard controls between the extremes of ON and OFF, and it leverages the classification-based rights model to give granular control that satisfies both security and usability needs. Firstly, we take it for granted that if you have EDIT rights, of course you can use the clipboard within a given document. Why would we force you to retype a piece of content that you want to move from HERE... to HERE...? If the pasted content remains in the same document, it is equally well protected whether it be at the beginning, middle, or end - or all three. So, the first point is that Oracle IRM always enables the clipboard if you have the right to edit the file. Secondly, whether we enable or disable the clipboard, we only affect the protected document. That is, you can continue to use the clipboard in the usual way for unprotected documents and applications regardless of whether the clipboard is enabled or disabled for the protected document(s). And if you have multiple protected documents open, each may have the clipboard enabled or disabled independently, according to whether you have Edit rights for each. So, even for the simplest cases - the ON-OFF cases - Oracle IRM adds value by containing the effect to the protected documents rather than to the whole desktop environment. Now to the granular options between ON and OFF. Thanks to our classification model, we can define rights that enable pasting between documents in the same classification - ie. between documents that are protected by the same policy. So, if you are working on this month's financial report and you want to pull some data from last month's report, you can simply cut and paste between the two documents. The two documents are classified the same way, subject to the same policy, so the content is equally safe in both documents. However, if you try to paste the same data into an unprotected document or a document in a different classification, you can be prevented. Thus, the control balances legitimate user requirements to allow pasting with legitimate information security concerns to keep data protected. We can take this further. You may have the right to paste between related classifications of document. So, the CFO might want to copy some financial data into a board document, where the two documents are sealed to different classifications. The CFO's rights may well allow this, as it is a reasonable thing for a CFO to want to do. But policy might prevent the CFO from copying the same data into a classification that is accessible to external parties. The above option, to copy between classifications, may be for specific classifications or open-ended. That is, your rights might enable you to go from A to B but not to C, or you might be allowed to paste to any classification subject to your EDIT rights. As for so many features of Oracle IRM, our classification-based rights model makes this type of granular control really easy to manage - you simply define that pasting is permitted between classifications A and B, but omit C. Or you might define that pasting is permitted between all classifications, but not to unprotected locations. The classification model enables millions of documents to be controlled by a few such rules. Finally, you MIGHT have the option to paste anywhere - such that unprotected copies may be created. This is rare, but a legitimate configuration for some users, some use cases, and some classifications - but not something that you have to permit simply because the alternative is too restrictive. As always, these rights are defined in user roles - so different users are subject to different clipboard controls as required in different classifications. So, where most solutions offer just two clipboard options - ON-OFF or ON-but-encrypt-everything-you-touch - Oracle IRM offers real granularity that leverages our classification model. Indeed, I believe it is the lack of a classification model that makes such granularity impractical for other IRM solutions, because the matrix of rules for controlling pasting would be impossible to manage - there are so many documents to consider, and more are being created all the time.

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  • Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

    - by Rick Strahl
    This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access  still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml    Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different  problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC   IIS7   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • IntelliSense for Razor Hosting in non-Web Applications

    - by Rick Strahl
    When I posted my Razor Hosting article a couple of weeks ago I got a number of questions on how to get IntelliSense to work inside of Visual Studio while editing your templates. The answer to this question is mainly dependent on how Visual Studio recognizes assemblies, so a little background is required. If you open a template just on its own as a standalone file by clicking on it say in Explorer, Visual Studio will open up with the template in the editor, but you won’t get any IntelliSense on any of your related assemblies that you might be using by default. It’ll give Intellisense on base System namespace, but not on your imported assembly types. This makes sense: Visual Studio has no idea what the assembly associations for the single file are. There are two options available to you to make IntelliSense work for templates: Add the templates as included files to your non-Web project Add a BIN folder to your template’s folder and add all assemblies required there Including Templates in your Host Project By including templates into your Razor hosting project, Visual Studio will pick up the project’s assembly references and make IntelliSense available for any of the custom types in your project and on your templates. To see this work I moved the \Templates folder from the samples from the Debug\Bin folder into the project root and included the templates in the WinForm sample project. Here’s what this looks like in Visual Studio after the templates have been included:   Notice that I take my original example and type cast the Context object to the specific type that it actually represents – namely CustomContext – by using a simple code block: @{ CustomContext Model = Context as CustomContext; } After that assignment my Model local variable is in scope and IntelliSense works as expected. Note that you also will need to add any namespaces with the using command in this case: @using RazorHostingWinForm which has to be defined at the very top of a Razor document. BTW, while you can only pass in a single Context 'parameter’ to the template with the default template I’ve provided realize that you can also assign a complex object to Context. For example you could have a container object that references a variety of other objects which you can then cast to the appropriate types as needed: @{ ContextContainer container = Context as ContextContainer; CustomContext Model = container.Model; CustomDAO DAO = container.DAO; } and so forth. IntelliSense for your Custom Template Notice also that you can get IntelliSense for the top level template by specifying an inherits tag at the top of the document: @inherits RazorHosting.RazorTemplateFolderHost By specifying the above you can then get IntelliSense on your base template’s properties. For example, in my base template there are Request and Response objects. This is very useful especially if you end up creating custom templates that include your custom business objects as you can get effectively see full IntelliSense from the ‘page’ level down. For Html Help Builder for example, I’d have a Help object on the page and assuming I have the references available I can see all the way into that Help object without even having to do anything fancy. Note that the @inherits key is a GREAT and easy way to override the base template you normally specify as the default template. It allows you to create a custom template and as long as it inherits from the base template it’ll work properly. Since the last post I’ve also made some changes in the base template that allow hooking up some simple initialization logic so it gets much more easy to create custom templates and hook up custom objects with an IntializeTemplate() hook function that gets called with the Context and a Configuration object. These objects are objects you can pass in at runtime from your host application and then assign to custom properties on your template. For example the default implementation for RazorTemplateFolderHost does this: public override void InitializeTemplate(object context, object configurationData) { // Pick up configuration data and stuff into Request object RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration config = configurationData as RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration; this.Request.TemplatePath = config.TemplatePath; this.Request.TemplateRelativePath = config.TemplateRelativePath; // Just use the entire ConfigData as the model, but in theory // configData could contain many objects or values to set on // template properties this.Model = config.ConfigData as TModel; } to set up a strongly typed Model and the Request object. You can do much more complex hookups here of course and create complex base template pages that contain all the objects that you need in your code with strong typing. Adding a Bin folder to your Template’s Root Path Including templates in your host project works if you own the project and you’re the only one modifying the templates. However, if you are distributing the Razor engine as a templating/scripting solution as part of your application or development tool the original project is likely not available and so that approach is not practical. Another option you have is to add a Bin folder and add all the related assemblies into it. You can also add a Web.Config file with assembly references for any GAC’d assembly references that need to be associated with the templates. Between the web.config and bin folder Visual Studio can figure out how to provide IntelliSense. The Bin folder should contain: The RazorHosting.dll Your host project’s EXE or DLL – renamed to .dll if it’s an .exe Any external (bin folder) dependent assemblies Note that you most likely also want a reference to the host project if it contains references that are going to be used in templates. Visual Studio doesn’t recognize an EXE reference so you have to rename the EXE to DLL to make it work. Apparently the binary signature of EXE and DLL files are identical and it just works – learn something new everyday… For GAC assembly references you can add a web.config file to your template root. The Web.config file then should contain any full assembly references to GAC components: <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true"> <assemblies> <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> <add assembly="System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> <add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" /> </assemblies> </compilation> </system.web> </configuration> And with that you should get full IntelliSense. Note that if you add a BIN folder and you also have the templates in your Visual Studio project Visual Studio will complain about reference conflicts as it’s effectively seeing both the project references and the ones in the bin folder. So it’s probably a good idea to use one or the other but not both at the same time :-) Seeing IntelliSense in your Razor templates is a big help for users of your templates. If you’re shipping an application level scripting solution especially it’ll be real useful for your template consumers/users to be able to get some quick help on creating customized templates – after all that’s what templates are all about – easy customization. Making sure that everything is referenced in your bin folder and web.config is a good idea and it’s great to see that Visual Studio (and presumably WebMatrix/Visual Web Developer as well) will be able to pick up your custom IntelliSense in Razor templates.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in Razor  

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  • Master Data

    - by david.butler(at)oracle.com
    Let's take a deeper look at what we mean when we talk about 'Master' data. In its most general sense, master data is data that exists in more than one operational application. These are the applications that automate business processes. These applications require significant amounts of data to function correctly.  This includes data about the objects that are involved in transactions, as well as the transaction data itself.  For example, when a customer buys a product, the transaction is managed by a sales application.  The objects of the transaction are the Customer and the Product.  The transactional data is the time, place, price, discount, payment methods, etc. used at the point of sale. Many thousands of transactional data attributes are needed within the application. These important data elements are local to the applications and have no bearing on other applications. Harmonization and synchronization across applications is not necessary. The Customer and Product objects of the transaction also have a large number of attributes. Customer for example, includes hierarchies, hierarchical and matrixed relationships, contacts, classifications, preferences, accounts, identifiers, profiles, and addresses galore for 'ship to', 'mail to'; 'service at'; etc. Dozens of attributes exist for individuals, hundreds for organizations, and thousands for products. This data has meaning beyond any particular application. It exists in many applications and drives the vital cross application enterprise business processes. These are the processes that define and differentiate the organization. At every decision point, information about the objects of the process determines the direction of the process flow. This is the nature of the data that exists in more than one application, and this is why we call it 'master data'. Let me elaborate. Parties Oracle has developed a party schema to model all participants in your daily business operations. It models people, organizations, groups, customers, contacts, employees, and suppliers. It models their accounts, locations, classifications, and preferences.  And most importantly, it models the vast array of hierarchical and matrixed relationships that exist between all the participants in your real world operations.  The model logically separates people and organizations from their relationships and accounts.  This separation creates flexibility unmatched in the industry and accounts for the fact that the Oracle schema for Customers, Suppliers, and Accounts is a true superset of the wide variety of commercial and homegrown customer models in existence. Sites Sites are places where business is conducted. They can be addresses, clusters such as retail malls, locations within a cluster, floors within a building, places where meters are located, rooms on floors, etc.  Fully understanding all attributes of a site is key to many business processes. Attributes such as 'noise abatement policy' at a point of delivery, or the size of an oven in a business kitchen drive day-to-day activities such as delivery schedules or food promotions. Typically this kind of data is siloed in departments and scattered across applications and spreadsheets.  This leads to conflicting information and poor operational efficiencies. Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold all site attributes in one place and enables a single version of authoritative site information across the enterprise. Products and Services The Oracle Global Single Schema also includes a number of entities that define the products and services a company creates and offers for sale. Key entities include Items organized into Catalogs and Price Lists. The Catalog structures provide for the ability to capture different views of a product such as engineering, manufacturing, and service which are based on a unified product model. As a result, designers, manufacturing engineers, purchasers and partners can work simultaneously on a common product definition. The Catalog schema allows for unlimited attributes, combines them into meaningful groups, and maps them to catalog categories to track these different types of information. The model also maps an unlimited number of functional structures for each item. For example, multiple Bills of Material (BOMs) can be constructed representing requirements BOM, features BOM, and packaging BOM for an item. The Catalog model also supports hierarchical information about each item and all standard Global Data Synchronization attributes. Business Processes Utilizing Linked Data Entities Each business entity codified into a centralized master data environment significantly improves the efficiency of the automated business processes that use the consolidated data.  When all the key business entities used by an organization's process are so consolidated, the advantages are multiplied.  The primary reason for business process breakdowns (i.e. data errors across application boundaries) is eliminated. All processes are positively impacted and business process automation is itself automated.  I like to use the "Call to Resolution" business process as an example to help illustrate this important point. It involves call center applications, service applications, RMA applications, transportation applications, inventory applications, etc. Customer, Site, Product and Supplier master data must all be correct and consistent across these applications.  What's more, the data relationships between customer and product, and product and suppliers must be right. This is the minimum quality needed to insure the business process flows without error. But that is not the end of the story. Critical master data attributes such as customer loyalty, profitability, credit worthiness, and propensity to buy can optimize the call center point of contact component of the process. Critical product information such as alternative parts or equivalent products can optimize the resolution selected by the process. A comprehensive understanding of the 'service at' location can help insure multiple trips are avoided in the process. Full supplier information on reliability, delivery delays, and potential alternates can prevent supplier exceptions and play a significant role in optimizing the process.  In other words, these master data attributes enable the optimization of the "Call to Resolution" enterprise business process. Master data supports and guides business process flows. Thus the phrase 'Master Data' is indeed appropriate. MDM is the software that houses, manages, and governs the master data that resides in all applications and controls the enterprise business processes. A complete master data solution takes a data model that holds fully attributed master data entities and their inter-relationships. Oracle has this model. Oracle, with its deep understanding of application data is the logical choice for managing all your master data within the enterprise whether or not your organization actually runs any Oracle Applications.

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  • My vertex shader doesn't affect texture coords or diffuse info but works for position

    - by tina nyaa
    I am new to 3D and DirectX - in the past I have only used abstractions for 2D drawing. Over the past month I've been studying really hard and I'm trying to modify and adapt some of the shaders as part of my personal 'study project'. Below I have a shader, modified from one of the Microsoft samples. I set diffuse and tex0 vertex shader outputs to zero, but my model still shows the full texture and lighting as if I hadn't changed the values from the vertex buffer. Changing the position of the model works, but nothing else. Why is this? // // Skinned Mesh Effect file // Copyright (c) 2000-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. // float4 lhtDir = {0.0f, 0.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f}; //light Direction float4 lightDiffuse = {0.6f, 0.6f, 0.6f, 1.0f}; // Light Diffuse float4 MaterialAmbient : MATERIALAMBIENT = {0.1f, 0.1f, 0.1f, 1.0f}; float4 MaterialDiffuse : MATERIALDIFFUSE = {0.8f, 0.8f, 0.8f, 1.0f}; // Matrix Pallette static const int MAX_MATRICES = 100; float4x3 mWorldMatrixArray[MAX_MATRICES] : WORLDMATRIXARRAY; float4x4 mViewProj : VIEWPROJECTION; /////////////////////////////////////////////////////// struct VS_INPUT { float4 Pos : POSITION; float4 BlendWeights : BLENDWEIGHT; float4 BlendIndices : BLENDINDICES; float3 Normal : NORMAL; float3 Tex0 : TEXCOORD0; }; struct VS_OUTPUT { float4 Pos : POSITION; float4 Diffuse : COLOR; float2 Tex0 : TEXCOORD0; }; float3 Diffuse(float3 Normal) { float CosTheta; // N.L Clamped CosTheta = max(0.0f, dot(Normal, lhtDir.xyz)); // propogate scalar result to vector return (CosTheta); } VS_OUTPUT VShade(VS_INPUT i, uniform int NumBones) { VS_OUTPUT o; float3 Pos = 0.0f; float3 Normal = 0.0f; float LastWeight = 0.0f; // Compensate for lack of UBYTE4 on Geforce3 int4 IndexVector = D3DCOLORtoUBYTE4(i.BlendIndices); // cast the vectors to arrays for use in the for loop below float BlendWeightsArray[4] = (float[4])i.BlendWeights; int IndexArray[4] = (int[4])IndexVector; // calculate the pos/normal using the "normal" weights // and accumulate the weights to calculate the last weight for (int iBone = 0; iBone < NumBones-1; iBone++) { LastWeight = LastWeight + BlendWeightsArray[iBone]; Pos += mul(i.Pos, mWorldMatrixArray[IndexArray[iBone]]) * BlendWeightsArray[iBone]; Normal += mul(i.Normal, mWorldMatrixArray[IndexArray[iBone]]) * BlendWeightsArray[iBone]; } LastWeight = 1.0f - LastWeight; // Now that we have the calculated weight, add in the final influence Pos += (mul(i.Pos, mWorldMatrixArray[IndexArray[NumBones-1]]) * LastWeight); Normal += (mul(i.Normal, mWorldMatrixArray[IndexArray[NumBones-1]]) * LastWeight); // transform position from world space into view and then projection space //o.Pos = mul(float4(Pos.xyz, 1.0f), mViewProj); o.Pos = mul(float4(Pos.xyz, 1.0f), mViewProj); o.Diffuse.x = 0.0f; o.Diffuse.y = 0.0f; o.Diffuse.z = 0.0f; o.Diffuse.w = 0.0f; o.Tex0 = float2(0,0); return o; } technique t0 { pass p0 { VertexShader = compile vs_3_0 VShade(4); } } I am currently using the SlimDX .NET wrapper around DirectX, but the API is extremely similar: public void Draw() { var device = vertexBuffer.Device; device.Clear(ClearFlags.Target | ClearFlags.ZBuffer, Color.White, 1.0f, 0); device.SetRenderState(RenderState.Lighting, true); device.SetRenderState(RenderState.DitherEnable, true); device.SetRenderState(RenderState.ZEnable, true); device.SetRenderState(RenderState.CullMode, Cull.Counterclockwise); device.SetRenderState(RenderState.NormalizeNormals, true); device.SetSamplerState(0, SamplerState.MagFilter, TextureFilter.Anisotropic); device.SetSamplerState(0, SamplerState.MinFilter, TextureFilter.Anisotropic); device.SetTransform(TransformState.World, Matrix.Identity * Matrix.Translation(0, -50, 0)); device.SetTransform(TransformState.View, Matrix.LookAtLH(new Vector3(-200, 0, 0), Vector3.Zero, Vector3.UnitY)); device.SetTransform(TransformState.Projection, Matrix.PerspectiveFovLH((float)Math.PI / 4, (float)device.Viewport.Width / device.Viewport.Height, 10, 10000000)); var material = new Material(); material.Ambient = material.Diffuse = material.Emissive = material.Specular = new Color4(Color.White); material.Power = 1f; device.SetStreamSource(0, vertexBuffer, 0, vertexSize); device.VertexDeclaration = vertexDeclaration; device.Indices = indexBuffer; device.Material = material; device.SetTexture(0, texture); var param = effect.GetParameter(null, "mWorldMatrixArray"); var boneWorldTransforms = bones.OrderedBones.OrderBy(x => x.Id).Select(x => x.CombinedTransformation).ToArray(); effect.SetValue(param, boneWorldTransforms); effect.SetValue(effect.GetParameter(null, "mViewProj"), Matrix.Identity);// Matrix.PerspectiveFovLH((float)Math.PI / 4, (float)device.Viewport.Width / device.Viewport.Height, 10, 10000000)); effect.SetValue(effect.GetParameter(null, "MaterialDiffuse"), material.Diffuse); effect.SetValue(effect.GetParameter(null, "MaterialAmbient"), material.Ambient); effect.Technique = effect.GetTechnique(0); var passes = effect.Begin(FX.DoNotSaveState); for (var i = 0; i < passes; i++) { effect.BeginPass(i); device.DrawIndexedPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, 0, 0, skin.Vertices.Length, 0, skin.Indicies.Length / 3); effect.EndPass(); } effect.End(); } Again, I set diffuse and tex0 vertex shader outputs to zero, but my model still shows the full texture and lighting as if I hadn't changed the values from the vertex buffer. Changing the position of the model works, but nothing else. Why is this? Also, whatever I set in the bone transformation matrices doesn't seem to have an effect on my model. If I set every bone transformation to a zero matrix, the model still shows up as if nothing had happened, but changing the Pos field in shader output makes the model disappear. I don't understand why I'm getting this kind of behaviour. Thank you!

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  • Scheduling thread tiles with C++ AMP

    - by Daniel Moth
    This post assumes you are totally comfortable with, what some of us call, the simple model of C++ AMP, i.e. you could write your own matrix multiplication. We are now ready to explore the tiled model, which builds on top of the non-tiled one. Tiling the extent We know that when we pass a grid (which is just an extent under the covers) to the parallel_for_each call, it determines the number of threads to schedule and their index values (including dimensionality). For the single-, two-, and three- dimensional cases you can go a step further and subdivide the threads into what we call tiles of threads (others may call them thread groups). So here is a single-dimensional example: extent<1> e(20); // 20 units in a single dimension with indices from 0-19 grid<1> g(e);      // same as extent tiled_grid<4> tg = g.tile<4>(); …on the 3rd line we subdivided the single-dimensional space into 5 single-dimensional tiles each having 4 elements, and we captured that result in a concurrency::tiled_grid (a new class in amp.h). Let's move on swiftly to another example, in pictures, this time 2-dimensional: So we start on the left with a grid of a 2-dimensional extent which has 8*6=48 threads. We then have two different examples of tiling. In the first case, in the middle, we subdivide the 48 threads into tiles where each has 4*3=12 threads, hence we have 2*2=4 tiles. In the second example, on the right, we subdivide the original input into tiles where each has 2*2=4 threads, hence we have 4*3=12 tiles. Notice how you can play with the tile size and achieve different number of tiles. The numbers you pick must be such that the original total number of threads (in our example 48), remains the same, and every tile must have the same size. Of course, you still have no clue why you would do that, but stick with me. First, we should see how we can use this tiled_grid, since the parallel_for_each function that we know expects a grid. Tiled parallel_for_each and tiled_index It turns out that we have additional overloads of parallel_for_each that accept a tiled_grid instead of a grid. However, those overloads, also expect that the lambda you pass in accepts a concurrency::tiled_index (new in amp.h), not an index<N>. So how is a tiled_index different to an index? A tiled_index object, can have only 1 or 2 or 3 dimensions (matching exactly the tiled_grid), and consists of 4 index objects that are accessible via properties: global, local, tile_origin, and tile. The global index is the same as the index we know and love: the global thread ID. The local index is the local thread ID within the tile. The tile_origin index returns the global index of the thread that is at position 0,0 of this tile, and the tile index is the position of the tile in relation to the overall grid. Confused? Here is an example accompanied by a picture that hopefully clarifies things: array_view<int, 2> data(8, 6, p_my_data); parallel_for_each(data.grid.tile<2,2>(), [=] (tiled_index<2,2> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) { /* todo */ }); Given the code above and the picture on the right, what are the values of each of the 4 index objects that the t_idx variables exposes, when the lambda is executed by T (highlighted in the picture on the right)? If you can't work it out yourselves, the solution follows: t_idx.global       = index<2> (6,3) t_idx.local          = index<2> (0,1) t_idx.tile_origin = index<2> (6,2) t_idx.tile             = index<2> (3,1) Don't move on until you are comfortable with this… the picture really helps, so use it. Tiled Matrix Multiplication Example – part 1 Let's paste here the C++ AMP matrix multiplication example, bolding the lines we are going to change (can you guess what the changes will be?) 01: void MatrixMultiplyTiled_Part1(vector<float>& vC, const vector<float>& vA, const vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 02: { 03: 04: array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 05: array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 06: array_view<writeonly<float>,2> c(M, N, vC); 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid, 08: [=](index<2> idx) restrict(direct3d) { 09: 10: int row = idx[0]; int col = idx[1]; 11: float sum = 0.0f; 12: for(int i = 0; i < W; i++) 13: sum += a(row, i) * b(i, col); 14: c[idx] = sum; 15: }); 16: } To turn this into a tiled example, first we need to decide our tile size. Let's say we want each tile to be 16*16 (which assumes that we'll have at least 256 threads to process, and that c.grid.extent.size() is divisible by 256, and moreover that c.grid.extent[0] and c.grid.extent[1] are divisible by 16). So we insert at line 03 the tile size (which must be a compile time constant). 03: static const int TS = 16; ...then we need to tile the grid to have tiles where each one has 16*16 threads, so we change line 07 to be as follows 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid.tile<TS,TS>(), ...that means that our index now has to be a tiled_index with the same characteristics as the tiled_grid, so we change line 08 08: [=](tiled_index<TS, TS> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) { ...which means, without changing our core algorithm, we need to be using the global index that the tiled_index gives us access to, so we insert line 09 as follows 09: index<2> idx = t_idx.global; ...and now this code just works and it is tiled! Closing thoughts on part 1 The process we followed just shows the mechanical transformation that can take place from the simple model to the tiled model (think of this as step 1). In fact, when we wrote the matrix multiplication example originally, the compiler was doing this mechanical transformation under the covers for us (and it has additional smarts to deal with the cases where the total number of threads scheduled cannot be divisible by the tile size). The point is that the thread scheduling is always tiled, even when you use the non-tiled model. But with this mechanical transformation, we haven't gained anything… Hint: our goal with explicitly using the tiled model is to gain even more performance. In the next post, we'll evolve this further (beyond what the compiler can automatically do for us, in this first release), so you can see the full usage of the tiled model and its benefits… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • JPA 2?EJB 3.1?JSF 2????????! WebLogic Server 12c?????????Java EE 6??????|WebLogic Channel|??????

    - by ???02
    2012?2???????????????WebLogic Server 12c?????????Java EE 6?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 12c??WebLogic Server 12c(???)????Java EE 6??????3??????????????????????????????JPA 2.0??????????·?????????EJB 3.1???????·???????????????(???)???????O/R?????????????JPA 2.0 Java EE 6????????????????????Web?????????????3?????(3????)???????·????????????·????????????????????????????????JPA(Java Persistence API) 2.0???EJB(Enterprise JavaBeans) 3.1???JSF(JavaServer Faces) 2.0????3????????????????·???????????JPA??Java??????????????·?????????????O/R?????????????????????·???????????EJB?Session Bean??????????????????·??????????????????????JSF??????????????????????????????????????? ??????JPA????Oracle Database??EMPLOYEES?????Java??????????????????????Entity Bean??????XML?????????????????????????XML????????????????????????????????????????????????????·?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Java EE 6??????JPA 2.0??????????·???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse(OEPE)??????File????????New?-?Other??????? ??????New??????????????????????????Web?-?Dynamic Web Project???????Next????????????????Dynamic Web Project?????????????Project name????OOW???????????Target Runtime????New Runtime????????? ???New Server Runtime Environment???????????????Oracle?-?Oracle WebLogic Server 12c(12.1.1)???????Next???????????????????????????WebLogic home????C:\Oracle\Middleware\wlserver_12.1???????Finish?????????????WebLogic Home????????????????????????Java home?????????????????????Finish??????????????????????Dynamic Web Project????????????????Finish??????????????????JPA 2.0??????????·?????? ???????????????JPA 2.0???????????????·??????????????????Eclipse??Project Explorer?(??????·???)?????????OOW?????????????????????????????·???????????????Properties?????????????????·???·????????????????????????????Project Facets?????????????JPA??????(?????????????Details?????JPA 2.0?????????????????????)???????????????????Further configuration available????????? ???Modify Faceted Project??????????????????????????????????Connection????????????????????????????Add Connection????????? ??????New Connection Profile????????????????Connection Profile Type????Oracle Database Connection??????Next???????????? ???Specify a Driver and Connection Details???????Drivers????Oracle Database 10g Driver Default???????????Properties?????????????????????SIDxeHostlocalhostPort number1521User nameHRPasswordhr ???????????Test Connection??????????????????Ping Succeeded!?????????????????????????????Finish???????????Modify Faceted Project????????OK????????????????Properties for OOW????????OK?????????????????? ?????????Eclipse????????????????OOW?????????????????·???????????????JPA Tools?-?Generate Entities from Tables...??????? ????Generate Custom Entities???????????????????????????????Schema????HR??????Tables????EMPLOYEES???????????Next???????????? ???????????Next???????????Customize Default Entity Generation??????Package????model???????Finish?????????????JPQL?????????? ?????????Oracle Database??EMPLOYEES??????????????????·????model.Employee.java?????????????????????????????????·?????OOW????Java Resources?-?src?-?model???????Employee.java????????????????????????????????·???Employee????(Employee.java)?package model; import java.io.Serializable; import java.math.BigDecimal; import java.util.Date; import java.util.Set; import javax.persistence.Column;<...?...>/**  * The persistent class for the EMPLOYEES database table.  *  */ @Entity  // ?@Table(name="EMPLOYEES")  // ?// Apublic class Employee implements Serializable {        private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;       @Id  // ?       @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_ID")        private long employeeId;        @Column(name="COMMISSION_PCT")        private BigDecimal commissionPct;        @Column(name="DEPARTMENT_ID")        private BigDecimal departmentId;        private String email;        @Column(name="FIRST_NAME")        private String firstName;       @Temporal( TemporalType.DATE)  //?       @Column(name="HIRE_DATE")        private Date hireDate;        @Column(name="JOB_ID")        private String jobId;        @Column(name="LAST_NAME")        private String lastName;        @Column(name="PHONE_NUMBER")        private String phoneNumber;        private BigDecimal salary;        //bi-directional many-to-one association to Employee<...?...>}  ???????????????·???????????????????????????????????????????@Table(name="")??????@Table??????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????·???????????????? ?????????????????????????????SQL?Data?????????? ???????????????A?????JPA?????????JPQL(Java Persistence Query Language)?????????????JPQL?????SQL???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Employee.selectByNameEmployee??firstName????????????????????employeeId????????? ?????????????????????import java.util.Date;import java.util.Set;import javax.persistence.Column;<...?...>/**  * The persistent class for the EMPLOYEES database table.  *  */ @Entity  // ?@Table(name="EMPLOYEES")  // ?@NamedQueries({       @NamedQuery(name="Employee.selectByName" , query="select e from Employee e where e.firstName like :name order by e.employeeId")})<...?...> ?????????·??????OOW?-?JPA Content?-?persistent.xml??????Connection???????????????Database????JTA data source:???jdbc/test????????????????????????Java EE 6??????JPA 2.0???????????????????????????????????·??????????????????????????????????????SQL????????????????????????·????????????·??????????????XML??????????????????1??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????EJB 3.1????????·???????????EJB 3.1????????·?????????????????EJB 3.1?Stateless Session Bean?????·????????????????·???????????????????·??????????????????? EJB3.1?????JPA 2.0???????????·???????????????????????XML???????????????????????????????EJB 3.1?????????·????EJB?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????EJB 3.1?Session Bean?????·????????????????????????????????????????????????????public List<Employee> getEmp(String keyword)firstName????????????Employee?????? ????????????????????·???????????OOW????????????·???????????????New?-?Other???????????????????????????????????EJB?-?Session Bean(EJB 3.x)??????NEXT????????????????????Create EJB 3.x Session Bean?????????????Java Package????ejb???class name????EmpLogic???????????State Type????Stateless?????????No-interface???????????????????????Finish???????????? ?????????Stateless Session Bean??????·?????EmpLogic.java????????????????????EmpLogic????·????????EJB?????????????Stateless Session Bean?????????@Stateless?????????????????????????????????????EmpLogic????(EmpLogic.java)?package ejb;import javax.ejb.LocalBean;import javax.ejb.Stateless;<...?...>import model.Employee;@Stateless@LocalBeanpublic class EmpLogic {       public EmpLogic() {       }} ??????????????????????????????????????·???????????????????????import??????????????????EmpLogic??????????????????????????·???????????????????????import????????(EmpLogic.java)?package ejb;import javax.ejb.LocalBean;import javax.ejb.Stateless;import javax.persistence.EntityManager;  // ?import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext;  // ?<...?...>import model.Employee;@Stateless@LocalBeanpublic class EmpLogic {      @PersistenceContext(unitName = "OOW")  // ?      private EntityManager em;  // ?       public EmpLogic() {       }} ?????????·???????JPA???????????????????·????????????????????????????CRUD???????????????????·????????????EntityManager???????????????????????????1????????????????·???????????????????????@PersistenceContext?????unitName?????????????persistence.xml????persistence-unit???name?????????????? ???????EmpLogic?????·???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????EmpLogic????????·???????(EmpLogic.java)?package ejb;import java.util.List;  // ? import javax.ejb.LocalBean;import javax.ejb.Stateless;import javax.persistence.EntityManager;  // ? import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext;  // ? <...?...>import model.Employee;@Stateless@LocalBeanpublic class EmpLogic {       @PersistenceContext(unitName = "OOW")  // ?        private EntityManager em;  // ?        public EmpLogic() {       }      @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")  // ?      public List<Employee> getEmp(String keyword) {  // ?             StringBuilder param = new StringBuilder();  // ?             param.append("%");  // ?             param.append(keyword);  // ?             param.append("%");  // ?             return em.createNamedQuery("Employee.selectByName")  // ?                    .setParameter("name", param.toString()).getResultList();  // ?      }} ???EJB 3.1???Stateless Session Bean?????????? ???JSF 2.0???????????????????????????????????????????????????JAX-RS????RESTful?Web??????????????????????

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  • Building applications with WPF, MVVM and Prism(aka CAG)

    - by skjagini
    In this article I am going to walk through an application using WPF and Prism (aka composite application guidance, CAG) which simulates engaging a taxi (cab).  The rules are simple, the app would have3 screens A login screen to authenticate the user An information screen. A screen to engage the cab and roam around and calculating the total fare Metered Rate of Fare The meter is required to be engaged when a cab is occupied by anyone $3.00 upon entry $0.35 for each additional unit The unit fare is: one-fifth of a mile, when the cab is traveling at 6 miles an hour or more; or 60 seconds when not in motion or traveling at less than 12 miles per hour. Night surcharge of $.50 after 8:00 PM & before 6:00 AM Peak hour Weekday Surcharge of $1.00 Monday - Friday after 4:00 PM & before 8:00 PM New York State Tax Surcharge of $.50 per ride. Example: Friday (2010-10-08) 5:30pm Start at Lexington Ave & E 57th St End at Irving Pl & E 15th St Start = $3.00 Travels 2 miles at less than 6 mph for 15 minutes = $3.50 Travels at more than 12 mph for 5 minutes = $1.75 Peak hour Weekday Surcharge = $1.00 (ride started at 5:30 pm) New York State Tax Surcharge = $0.50 Before we dive into the app, I would like to give brief description about the framework.  If you want to jump on to the source code, scroll all the way to the end of the post. MVVM MVVM pattern is in no way related to the usage of PRISM in your application and should be considered if you are using WPF irrespective of PRISM or not. Lets say you are not familiar with MVVM, your typical UI would involve adding some UI controls like text boxes, a button, double clicking on the button,  generating event handler, calling a method from business layer and updating the user interface, it works most of the time for developing small scale applications. The problem with this approach is that there is some amount of code specific to business logic wrapped in UI specific code which is hard to unit test it, mock it and MVVM helps to solve the exact problem. MVVM stands for Model(M) – View(V) – ViewModel(VM),  based on the interactions with in the three parties it should be called VVMM,  MVVM sounds more like MVC (Model-View-Controller) so the name. Why it should be called VVMM: View – View Model - Model WPF allows to create user interfaces using XAML and MVVM takes it to the next level by allowing complete separation of user interface and business logic. In WPF each view will have a property, DataContext when set to an instance of a class (which happens to be your view model) provides the data the view is interested in, i.e., view interacts with view model and at the same time view model interacts with view through DataContext. Sujith, if view and view model are interacting directly with each other how does MVVM is helping me separation of concerns? Well, the catch is DataContext is of type Object, since it is of type object view doesn’t know exact type of view model allowing views and views models to be loosely coupled. View models aggregate data from models (data access layer, services, etc) and make it available for views through properties, methods etc, i.e., View Models interact with Models. PRISM Prism is provided by Microsoft Patterns and Practices team and it can be downloaded from codeplex for source code,  samples and documentation on msdn.  The name composite implies, to compose user interface from different modules (views) without direct dependencies on each other, again allowing  loosely coupled development. Well Sujith, I can already do that with user controls, why shall I learn another framework?  That’s correct, you can decouple using user controls, but you still have to manage some amount of coupling, like how to do you communicate between the controls, how do you subscribe/unsubscribe, loading/unloading views dynamically. Prism is not a replacement for user controls, provides the following features which greatly help in designing the composite applications. Dependency Injection (DI)/ Inversion of Control (IoC) Modules Regions Event Aggregator  Commands Simply put, MVVM helps building a single view and Prism helps building an application using the views There are other open source alternatives to Prism, like MVVMLight, Cinch, take a look at them as well. Lets dig into the source code.  1. Solution The solution is made of the following projects Framework: Holds the common functionality in building applications using WPF and Prism TaxiClient: Start up project, boot strapping and app styling TaxiCommon: Helps with the business logic TaxiModules: Holds the meat of the application with views and view models TaxiTests: To test the application 2. DI / IoC Dependency Injection (DI) as the name implies refers to injecting dependencies and Inversion of Control (IoC) means the calling code has no direct control on the dependencies, opposite of normal way of programming where dependencies are passed by caller, i.e inversion; aside from some differences in terminology the concept is same in both the cases. The idea behind DI/IoC pattern is to reduce the amount of direct coupling between different components of the application, the higher the dependency the more tightly coupled the application resulting in code which is hard to modify, unit test and mock.  Initializing Dependency Injection through BootStrapper TaxiClient is the starting project of the solution and App (App.xaml)  is the starting class that gets called when you run the application. From the App’s OnStartup method we will invoke BootStrapper.   namespace TaxiClient { /// <summary> /// Interaction logic for App.xaml /// </summary> public partial class App : Application { protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e) { base.OnStartup(e);   (new BootStrapper()).Run(); } } } BootStrapper is your contact point for initializing the application including dependency injection, creating Shell and other frameworks. We are going to use Unity for DI and there are lot of open source DI frameworks like Spring.Net, StructureMap etc with different feature set  and you can choose a framework based on your preferences. Note that Prism comes with in built support for Unity, for example we are deriving from UnityBootStrapper in our case and for any other DI framework you have to extend the Prism appropriately   namespace TaxiClient { public class BootStrapper: UnityBootstrapper { protected override IModuleCatalog CreateModuleCatalog() { return new ConfigurationModuleCatalog(); } protected override DependencyObject CreateShell() { Framework.FrameworkBootStrapper.Run(Container, Application.Current.Dispatcher);   Shell shell = new Shell(); shell.ResizeMode = ResizeMode.NoResize; shell.Show();   return shell; } } } Lets take a look into  FrameworkBootStrapper to check out how to register with unity container. namespace Framework { public class FrameworkBootStrapper { public static void Run(IUnityContainer container, Dispatcher dispatcher) { UIDispatcher uiDispatcher = new UIDispatcher(dispatcher); container.RegisterInstance<IDispatcherService>(uiDispatcher);   container.RegisterType<IInjectSingleViewService, InjectSingleViewService>( new ContainerControlledLifetimeManager());   . . . } } } In the above code we are registering two components with unity container. You shall observe that we are following two different approaches, RegisterInstance and RegisterType.  With RegisterInstance we are registering an existing instance and the same instance will be returned for every request made for IDispatcherService   and with RegisterType we are requesting unity container to create an instance for us when required, i.e., when I request for an instance for IInjectSingleViewService, unity will create/return an instance of InjectSingleViewService class and with RegisterType we can configure the life time of the instance being created. With ContaienrControllerLifetimeManager, the unity container caches the instance and reuses for any subsequent requests, without recreating a new instance. Lets take a look into FareViewModel.cs and it’s constructor. The constructor takes one parameter IEventAggregator and if you try to find all references in your solution for IEventAggregator, you will not find a single location where an instance of EventAggregator is passed directly to the constructor. The compiler still finds an instance and works fine because Prism is already configured when used with Unity container to return an instance of EventAggregator when requested for IEventAggregator and in this particular case it is called constructor injection. public class FareViewModel:ObservableBase, IDataErrorInfo { ... private IEventAggregator _eventAggregator;   public FareViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) { _eventAggregator = eventAggregator; InitializePropertyNames(); InitializeModel(); PropertyChanged += OnPropertyChanged; } ... 3. Shell Shells are very similar in operation to Master Pages in asp.net or MDI in Windows Forms. And shells contain regions which display the views, you can have as many regions as you wish in a given view. You can also nest regions. i.e, one region can load a view which in itself may contain other regions. We have to create a shell at the start of the application and are doing it by overriding CreateShell method from BootStrapper From the following Shell.xaml you shall notice that we have two content controls with Region names as ‘MenuRegion’ and ‘MainRegion’.  The idea here is that you can inject any user controls into the regions dynamically, i.e., a Menu User Control for MenuRegion and based on the user action you can load appropriate view into MainRegion.    <Window x:Class="TaxiClient.Shell" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Regions="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Regions;assembly=Microsoft.Practices.Prism" Title="Taxi" Height="370" Width="800"> <Grid Margin="2"> <ContentControl Regions:RegionManager.RegionName="MenuRegion" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch" />   <ContentControl Grid.Row="1" Regions:RegionManager.RegionName="MainRegion" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" HorizontalContentAlignment="Stretch" VerticalContentAlignment="Stretch" /> <!--<Border Grid.ColumnSpan="2" BorderThickness="2" CornerRadius="3" BorderBrush="LightBlue" />-->   </Grid> </Window> 4. Modules Prism provides the ability to build composite applications and modules play an important role in it. For example if you are building a Mortgage Loan Processor application with 3 components, i.e. customer’s credit history,  existing mortgages, new home/loan information; and consider that the customer’s credit history component involves gathering data about his/her address, background information, job details etc. The idea here using Prism modules is to separate the implementation of these 3 components into their own visual studio projects allowing to build components with no dependency on each other and independently. If we need to add another component to the application, the component can be developed by in house team or some other team in the organization by starting with a new Visual Studio project and adding to the solution at the run time with very little knowledge about the application. Prism modules are defined by implementing the IModule interface and each visual studio project to be considered as a module should implement the IModule interface.  From the BootStrapper.cs you shall observe that we are overriding the method by returning a ConfiguratingModuleCatalog which returns the modules that are registered for the application using the app.config file  and you can also add module using code. Lets take a look into configuration file.   <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <configSections> <section name="modules" type="Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Modularity.ModulesConfigurationSection, Microsoft.Practices.Prism"/> </configSections> <modules> <module assemblyFile="TaxiModules.dll" moduleType="TaxiModules.ModuleInitializer, TaxiModules" moduleName="TaxiModules"/> </modules> </configuration> Here we are adding TaxiModules project to our solution and TaxiModules.ModuleInitializer implements IModule interface   5. Module Mapper With Prism modules you can dynamically add or remove modules from the regions, apart from that Prism also provides API to control adding/removing the views from a region within the same module. Taxi Information Screen: Engage the Taxi Screen: The sample application has two screens, ‘Taxi Information’ and ‘Engage the Taxi’ and they both reside in same module, TaxiModules. ‘Engage the Taxi’ is again made of two user controls, FareView on the left and TotalView on the right. We have created a Shell with two regions, MenuRegion and MainRegion with menu loaded into MenuRegion. We can create a wrapper user control called EngageTheTaxi made of FareView and TotalView and load either TaxiInfo or EngageTheTaxi into MainRegion based on the user action. Though it will work it tightly binds the user controls and for every combination of user controls, we need to create a dummy wrapper control to contain them. Instead we can apply the principles we learned so far from Shell/regions and introduce another template (LeftAndRightRegionView.xaml) made of two regions Region1 (left) and Region2 (right) and load  FareView and TotalView dynamically.  To help with loading of the views dynamically I have introduce an helper an interface, IInjectSingleViewService,  idea suggested by Mike Taulty, a must read blog for .Net developers. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel;   namespace Framework.PresentationUtility.Navigation {   public interface IInjectSingleViewService : INotifyPropertyChanged { IEnumerable<CommandViewDefinition> Commands { get; } IEnumerable<ModuleViewDefinition> Modules { get; }   void RegisterViewForRegion(string commandName, string viewName, string regionName, Type viewType); void ClearViewFromRegion(string viewName, string regionName); void RegisterModule(string moduleName, IList<ModuleMapper> moduleMappers); } } The Interface declares three methods to work with views: RegisterViewForRegion: Registers a view with a particular region. You can register multiple views and their regions under one command.  When this particular command is invoked all the views registered under it will be loaded into their regions. ClearViewFromRegion: To unload a specific view from a region. RegisterModule: The idea is when a command is invoked you can load the UI with set of controls in their default position and based on the user interaction, you can load different contols in to different regions on the fly.  And it is supported ModuleViewDefinition and ModuleMappers as shown below. namespace Framework.PresentationUtility.Navigation { public class ModuleViewDefinition { public string ModuleName { get; set; } public IList<ModuleMapper> ModuleMappers; public ICommand Command { get; set; } }   public class ModuleMapper { public string ViewName { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public Type ViewType { get; set; } } } 6. Event Aggregator Prism event aggregator enables messaging between components as in Observable pattern, Notifier notifies the Observer which receives notification it is interested in. When it comes to Observable pattern, Observer has to unsubscribes for notifications when it no longer interested in notifications, which allows the Notifier to remove the Observer’s reference from it’s local cache. Though .Net has managed garbage collection it cannot remove inactive the instances referenced by an active instance resulting in memory leak, keeping the Observers in memory as long as Notifier stays in memory.  Developers have to be very careful to unsubscribe when necessary and it often gets overlooked, to overcome these problems Prism Event Aggregator uses weak references to cache the reference (Observer in this case)  and releases the reference (memory) once the instance goes out of scope. Using event aggregator is very simple, declare a generic type of CompositePresenationEvent by inheriting from it. using Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Events; using TaxiCommon.BAO;   namespace TaxiCommon.CompositeEvents { public class TaxiOnMoveEvent:CompositePresentationEvent<TaxiOnMove> { } }   TaxiOnMove.cs includes the properties which we want to exchange between the parties, FareView and TotalView. using System;   namespace TaxiCommon.BAO { public class TaxiOnMove { public TimeSpan MinutesAtTweleveMPH { get; set; } public double MilesAtSixMPH { get; set; } } }   Lets take a look into FareViewodel (Notifier) and how it raises the event.  Here we are raising the event by getting the event through GetEvent<..>() and publishing it with the payload private void OnAddMinutes(object obj) { TaxiOnMove payload = new TaxiOnMove(); if(MilesAtSixMPH != null) payload.MilesAtSixMPH = MilesAtSixMPH.Value; if(MinutesAtTweleveMPH != null) payload.MinutesAtTweleveMPH = new TimeSpan(0,0,MinutesAtTweleveMPH.Value,0);   _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiOnMoveEvent>().Publish(payload); ResetMinutesAndMiles(); } And TotalViewModel(Observer) subscribes to notifications by getting the event through GetEvent<..>() namespace TaxiModules.ViewModels { public class TotalViewModel:ObservableBase { .... private IEventAggregator _eventAggregator;   public TotalViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) { _eventAggregator = eventAggregator; ... }   private void SubscribeToEvents() { _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiStartedEvent>() .Subscribe(OnTaxiStarted, ThreadOption.UIThread,false,(filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiOnMoveEvent>() .Subscribe(OnTaxiMove, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiResetEvent>() .Subscribe(OnTaxiReset, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); }   ... private void OnTaxiMove(TaxiOnMove taxiOnMove) { OnMoveFare fare = new OnMoveFare(taxiOnMove); Fares.Add(fare); SetTotalFare(new []{fare}); }   .... 7. MVVM through example In this section we are going to look into MVVM implementation through example.  I have all the modules declared in a single project, TaxiModules, again it is not necessary to have them into one project. Once the user logs into the application, will be greeted with the ‘Engage the Taxi’ screen which is made of two user controls, FareView.xaml and TotalView.Xaml. As you can see from the solution explorer, each of them have their own code behind files and  ViewModel classes, FareViewMode.cs, TotalViewModel.cs Lets take a look in to the FareView and how it interacts with FareViewModel using MVVM implementation. FareView.xaml acts as a view and FareViewMode.cs is it’s view model. The FareView code behind class   namespace TaxiModules.Views { /// <summary> /// Interaction logic for FareView.xaml /// </summary> public partial class FareView : UserControl { public FareView(FareViewModel viewModel) { InitializeComponent(); this.Loaded += (s, e) => { this.DataContext = viewModel; }; } } } The FareView is bound to FareViewModel through the data context  and you shall observe that DataContext is of type Object, i.e. the FareView doesn’t really know the type of ViewModel (FareViewModel). This helps separation of View and ViewModel as View and ViewModel are independent of each other, you can bind FareView to FareViewModel2 as well and the application compiles just fine. Lets take a look into FareView xaml file  <UserControl x:Class="TaxiModules.Views.FareView" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Controls;assembly=WPFToolkit" xmlns:Commands="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Commands;assembly=Microsoft.Practices.Prism"> <Grid Margin="10" > ....   <Border Style="{DynamicResource innerBorder}" Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Grid.RowSpan="11" Grid.ColumnSpan="2" Panel.ZIndex="1"/>   <Label Grid.Row="0" Content="Engage the Taxi" Style="{DynamicResource innerHeader}"/> <Label Grid.Row="1" Content="Select the State"/> <ComboBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" ItemsSource="{Binding States}" Height="auto"> <ComboBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/> </DataTemplate> </ComboBox.ItemTemplate> <ComboBox.SelectedItem> <Binding Path="SelectedState" Mode="TwoWay"/> </ComboBox.SelectedItem> </ComboBox> <Label Grid.Row="2" Content="Select the Date of Entry"/> <Toolkit:DatePicker Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1" SelectedDate="{Binding DateOfEntry, ValidatesOnDataErrors=true}" /> <Label Grid.Row="3" Content="Enter time 24hr format"/> <TextBox Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding TimeOfEntry, TargetNullValue=''}"/> <Button Grid.Row="4" Grid.Column="1" Content="Start the Meter" Commands:Click.Command="{Binding StartMeterCommand}" />   <Label Grid.Row="5" Content="Run the Taxi" Style="{DynamicResource innerHeader}"/> <Label Grid.Row="6" Content="Number of Miles &lt;@6mph"/> <TextBox Grid.Row="6" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding MilesAtSixMPH, TargetNullValue='', ValidatesOnDataErrors=true}"/> <Label Grid.Row="7" Content="Number of Minutes @12mph"/> <TextBox Grid.Row="7" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding MinutesAtTweleveMPH, TargetNullValue=''}"/> <Button Grid.Row="8" Grid.Column="1" Content="Add Minutes and Miles " Commands:Click.Command="{Binding AddMinutesCommand}"/> <Label Grid.Row="9" Content="Other Operations" Style="{DynamicResource innerHeader}"/> <Button Grid.Row="10" Grid.Column="1" Content="Reset the Meter" Commands:Click.Command="{Binding ResetCommand}"/>   </Grid> </UserControl> The highlighted code from the above code shows data binding, for example ComboBox which displays list of states has it’s ItemsSource bound to States property, with DataTemplate bound to Name and SelectedItem  to SelectedState. You might be wondering what are all these properties and how it is able to bind to them.  The answer lies in data context, i.e., when you bound a control, WPF looks for data context on the root object (Grid in this case) and if it can’t find data context it will look into root’s root, i.e. FareView UserControl and it is bound to FareViewModel.  Each of those properties have be declared on the ViewModel for the View to bind correctly. To put simply, View is bound to ViewModel through data context of type object and every control that is bound on the View actually binds to the public property on the ViewModel. Lets look into the ViewModel code (the following code is not an exact copy of FareViewMode.cs, pasted relevant code for this section)   namespace TaxiModules.ViewModels { public class FareViewModel:ObservableBase, IDataErrorInfo { public List<USState> States { get { return USStates.StateList; } }   public USState SelectedState { get { return _selectedState; } set { _selectedState = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_selectedStatePropertyName); } }   public DateTime? DateOfEntry { get { return _dateOfEntry; } set { _dateOfEntry = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_dateOfEntryPropertyName); } }   public TimeSpan? TimeOfEntry { get { return _timeOfEntry; } set { _timeOfEntry = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_timeOfEntryPropertyName); } }   public double? MilesAtSixMPH { get { return _milesAtSixMPH; } set { _milesAtSixMPH = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_distanceAtSixMPHPropertyName); } }   public int? MinutesAtTweleveMPH { get { return _minutesAtTweleveMPH; } set { _minutesAtTweleveMPH = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_minutesAtTweleveMPHPropertyName); } }   public ICommand StartMeterCommand { get { if(_startMeterCommand == null) { _startMeterCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(OnStartMeter, CanStartMeter); } return _startMeterCommand; } }   public ICommand AddMinutesCommand { get { if(_addMinutesCommand == null) { _addMinutesCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(OnAddMinutes, CanAddMinutes); } return _addMinutesCommand; } }   public ICommand ResetCommand { get { if(_resetCommand == null) { _resetCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(OnResetCommand); } return _resetCommand; } }   } private void OnStartMeter(object obj) { _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiStartedEvent>().Publish( new TaxiStarted() { EngagedOn = DateOfEntry.Value.Date + TimeOfEntry.Value, EngagedState = SelectedState.Value });   _isMeterStarted = true; OnPropertyChanged(this,null); } And views communicate user actions like button clicks, tree view item selections, etc using commands. When user clicks on ‘Start the Meter’ button it invokes the method StartMeterCommand, which calls the method OnStartMeter which publishes the event to TotalViewModel using event aggregator  and TaxiStartedEvent. namespace TaxiModules.ViewModels { public class TotalViewModel:ObservableBase { ... private IEventAggregator _eventAggregator;   public TotalViewModel(IEventAggregator eventAggregator) { _eventAggregator = eventAggregator;   InitializePropertyNames(); InitializeModel(); SubscribeToEvents(); }   public decimal? TotalFare { get { return _totalFare; } set { _totalFare = value; RaisePropertyChanged(_totalFarePropertyName); } } .... private void SubscribeToEvents() { _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiStartedEvent>().Subscribe(OnTaxiStarted, ThreadOption.UIThread,false,(filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiOnMoveEvent>().Subscribe(OnTaxiMove, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); _eventAggregator.GetEvent<TaxiResetEvent>().Subscribe(OnTaxiReset, ThreadOption.UIThread, false, (filter) => true); }   private void OnTaxiStarted(TaxiStarted taxiStarted) { Fares.Add(new EntryFare()); Fares.Add(new StateTaxFare(taxiStarted)); Fares.Add(new NightSurchargeFare(taxiStarted)); Fares.Add(new PeakHourWeekdayFare(taxiStarted));   SetTotalFare(Fares); }   private void SetTotalFare(IEnumerable<IFare> fares) { TotalFare = (_totalFare ?? 0) + TaxiFareHelper.GetTotalFare(fares); } ....   } }   TotalViewModel subscribes to events, TaxiStartedEvent and rest. When TaxiStartedEvent gets invoked it calls the OnTaxiStarted method which sets the total fare which includes entry fee, state tax, nightly surcharge, peak hour weekday fare.   Note that TotalViewModel derives from ObservableBase which implements the method RaisePropertyChanged which we are invoking in Set of TotalFare property, i.e, once we update the TotalFare property it raises an the event that  allows the TotalFare text box to fetch the new value through the data context. ViewModel is communicating with View through data context and it has no knowledge about View, helping in loose coupling of ViewModel and View.   I have attached the source code (.Net 4.0, Prism 4.0, VS 2010) , download and play with it and don’t forget to leave your comments.  

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  • Application Demos in UPK

    - by [email protected]
    Over the years, User Productivity Kit has expanded to include solutions to many project challenges. As of UPK 3.6.1, solutions are provided for pre and post application go-live learning, application testing, system documentation, presentation output, and more. New in UPK 3.6.1 are additional features that can be used effectively for application demo purposes. This can come in handy when you need to do a demo but don't want to show or can't show the live application. Maybe you're doing a presentation for a group of project stakeholders and want to focus on the business workflow implemented by the application rather than the mechanics of using it. Or possibly, you need to show the application but you're disconnected from any network preventing you from running the live application. In any of these cases, a presentation aid that represents the live application is what's needed. Previous versions of the UPK topic player would allow you to do this but would always show those UPK user interface elements that help a user learn the application. When you're presenting the narrative live, the UPK bubbles can be a distraction. UPK 3.6.1 provides some new features that allow you to control whether the bubbles display. There are two ways to hide bubbles in a topic. The first is a topic property that allows you to control bubbles across the entire topic. There are 3 settings for the Show Bubbles topic property. The default setting is Use frame settings which allows you to control whether bubbles display on a frame by frame basis. When you choose Always, the bubbles will always display regardless of the frame setting. The final choice is Never. Choosing Never will hide every bubble in your topic with one setting change. As with Always, choosing Never will ignore the frame setting. The second way to control the bubbles is at the frame level. First ensure that the topic's Show Bubbles property is set to Use frame settings. Navigate to the frame on which you want to turn off the bubble and click the Display bubble for this frame button to turn off the bubble. When you play the topic, the bubble will no longer be displayed. Depending on your needs, you might also use another longstanding UPK feature that allows you to control whether the action area displays on a frame. Just click the Action area on/off button to toggle its display. I've found the frame properties to be useful beyond creating presentation aids. When creating "See It!" only topics for more advanced users, I may hide the bubbles on some of the more straightforward frames. For example, if I have a form where one needs to fill out an address, I may display the first bubble in the sequence and explain what the subsequent steps are doing. I then hide bubbles on the remaining frames which are the more mechanical steps of entering the address. We'd like to hear your thoughts on this new UPK feature. Use the comments below to tell us how you've used it. John Zaums Senior Director, Product Development Oracle User Productivity Kit

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  • AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

    - by Daniel Moth
    Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

    - by Daniel Moth
    Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Extend Your Applications Your Way: Oracle OpenWorld Live Poll Results

    - by Applications User Experience
    Lydia Naylor, Oracle Applications User Experience Manager At OpenWorld 2012, I attended one of our team’s very exciting sessions: “Extend Your Applications, Your Way”. It was clear that customers were engaged by the topics presented. Not only did we see many heads enthusiastically nodding in agreement during the presentation, and witness a large crowd surround our speakers Killian Evers, Kristin Desmond and Greg Nerpouni afterwards, but we can prove it…with data! Figure 1. Killian Evers, Kristin Desmond, and Greg Nerpouni of Oracle at the OOW 2012 session. At the beginning of our OOW 2012 journey, Greg Nerpouni, Fusion HCM Principal Product Manager, told me he really wanted to get feedback from the audience on our extensibility direction. Initially, we were thinking of doing a group activity at the OOW UX labs events that we hold every year, but Greg was adamant- he wanted “real-time” feedback. So, after a little tinkering, we came up with a way to use an online survey tool, a simple QR code (Quick Response code: a matrix barcode that can include information like URLs and can be read by mobile device cameras), and the audience’s mobile devices to do just that. Figure 2. Actual QR Code for survey Prior to the session, we developed a short survey in Vovici (an online survey tool), with questions to gather feedback on certain points in the presentation, as well as demographic data from our participants. We used Vovici’s feature to generate a mobile HTML version of the survey. At the session, attendees accessed the survey by simply scanning a QR code or typing in a TinyURL (a shorthand web address that is easily accessible through mobile devices). Killian, Kristin and Greg paused at certain points during the session and asked participants to answer a few survey questions about what they just presented. Figure 3. Session survey deployed on a mobile phone The nice thing about Vovici’s survey tool is that you can see the data real-time as participants are responding to questions - so we knew during the session that not only was our direction on track but we were hitting the mark and fulfilling Greg’s request. We planned on showing the live polling results to the audience at the end of the presentation but it ran just a little over time, and we were gently nudged out of the room by the session attendants. We’ve included a quick summary below and this link to the full results for your enjoyment. Figure 4. Most important extensions to Fusion Applications So what did participants think of our direction for extensibility? A total of 94% agreed that it was an improvement upon their current process. The vast majority, 80%, concurred that the extensibility model accounts for the major roles involved: end user, business systems analyst and programmer. Attendees suggested a few supporting roles such as systems administrator, data architect and integrator. Customers and partners in the audience verified that Oracle‘s Fusion Composers allow them to make changes in the most common areas they need to: user interface, business processes, reporting and analytics. Integrations were also suggested. All top 10 things customers can do on a page rated highly in importance, with all but two getting an average rating above 4.4 on a 5 point scale. The kinds of layout changes our composers allow customers to make align well with customers’ needs. The most common were adding columns to a table (94%) and resizing regions and drag and drop content (both selected by 88% of participants). We want to thank the attendees of the session for allowing us another great opportunity to gather valuable feedback from our customers! If you didn’t have a chance to attend the session, we will provide a link to the OOW presentation when it becomes available.

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  • Microsoft Build 2012 Day 1 Keynote Summary

    - by Tim Murphy
    So I have finally dried the tears after watching the Keynote for Build 2012.  This wasn’t because it was an emotional presentation, but because for the second year I missed the goodies.  Each on site attendee got a Surface RT, a Lumia 920 and a voucher for 100GB of SkyDrive storage. The event was opened with the announcement that in the three days since the launch of Windows 8 over 4 million upgrades have been sold.  I don’t care who you are that is an impressive stat.  Ballmer then spent a fair amount of time remaking the case for the Windows and Windows Phone platforms similar to what we have heard over the last to launch events. There were some cool, but non-essential demos.  The one that was the most fun was the Perceptive Pixel 82” slate device.  At first glance I wondered why I would ever want such a device, but then Ballmer explained it’s possible use for schools and boardrooms.  The actually made sense. Then things got strange.  Steve started explaining features that developers could leverage.  Usually this type of information is left to the product leads.  He focused on the integration with the Charms features such as Search and Share. Steve “Guggs” Guggenheim showed off an app that would appeal to my kids from Disney called “Agent P” which is base on Phineas and Ferb.  Then he got to the meat of the presentation.  We found out that you could add a tile that can be used to sell ad space.  In the same vein we also found out that you could use Microsoft’s, Paypal’s or any commerce engine of your own creation or choosing. For those who are interested in sports and especially developing sports apps you would have found the small presentation from Michael Bayle of ESPN.  He introduced the ESPN app which has tons of features.  For the developers in the crowd he also mentioned that ESPN has an API available at developer.espn.com. During the launch events we were told apps were coming.  In this presentation we were actually shown a scrolling list of logos and told about a couple of them.  Ballmer mentioned specifically Twitter, SAP and DropBox.  These are impressive names that were just a couple of the list impressive names. Steve Ballmer addressed the question of why you should develop for the Windows 8 platform.  He feels that Microsoft has the best commercial terms for developers, a better way to build apps than other platforms and a variety of form factors.  His key point though was the available volume of customers given the current Windows install base and assuming even a flat growth of the platform.  This he backed with a promise that Microsoft is going to do better at marketing and you won’t be able to avoid the ads that they are bringing out. The last section of the key note was present by Kevin Gallo from the Windows Phone team.  This was the real reason I tuned into the webcast.  He impressed upon those watching that the strength of developing for the Microsoft platform is the common programming model that now exist.  While there are difference between form factor implementations you can leverage code across them. He claimed that 90% of developer requests for Windows Phone 8 had been implemented.  These include: More controls with better performance Better live tiles including lock screen integration Speech support in custom apps Easier submission to the market place App camera integration VOIP and chat support Bluetooth and NFC support Native C++ development Direct 3D development   The quote from Kevin that stood out for me was that “Take your Dramamine and buckle your seatbelt type of games are coming to Windows Phone 8”.  He back this up by displaying a list of game development frameworks and then having Unity come out and do a demo. Ok, almost done … The last two things of note for me were the announcement that the SDK is immediately available at dev.windowsphone.com and that they were reducing the cost of an individual developer account to $8 for the next 8 days. Let the development commence. del.icio.us Tags: Build 2012,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Windows Phone

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