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• Performing a MYSQL query based off of $_GET results

  - by Michael N

  When a user clicks an item on my items page, it takes them to blank page template using $_GET to pass the item brand and model through. I'd like to perform another MYSQL query when that user clicks through to populate the blank page with the product details from my database. I'd like to retrieve the single row using the model number (unique ID) to populate the page with the information. I've tried a couple of things but am having a little difficulty. On my blank item page, I have $brand = $_GET['Brand']; $modelnumber = $_GET['ModelNumber']; $query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM items WHERE `Model Number` = '$modelnumber'"); $results = mysql_fetch_row($query); echo $results; I think having ''s around Model Number is causing troubles, but without them, I get a Warning: mysql_fetch_row() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given error. My database columns looks like Brand | Model Number | Price | Description | Image A few other things I have tried include $query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM item WHERE Model Number = $_GET['ModelNumber']"); Which gave me a syntax error. I've also tried concatenating the $_GET which gives me a mysql_fetch_row() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given error Which leads me to believe that I'm also going about displaying the results incorrectly. I'm not sure if I need to put it in a where loop like I have with my previous page which displays all items in the database because this is just displaying one.

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• Php header('Location") error

  - by Umeed

  I'm having some difficulty with my php coding. I have 3 files, add.php, lib.php, and view.php I created a simple form, and when the user clicks submit, it should direct them to the view.php where it will display the database. Now I'm having a couple issues I can't seem to resolve. when the user clicks submit and the fields are blank or there is an error no entry should be made into the view page (or database)...however when I click submit a blank entry is made into the database. ALSO if i click "enter product" from the top menu bar anytime I click it, it causes a blank entry into the database. I can't figure out why that's happening. My next issue is with the header('Location') and my browser says: "Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at lib.php:13) in add.php on line 16" However if I click submit on my form it goes away. Here is the code for the pages: http://ideone.com/Vvz8x I truly apologize if the code is really messy. Any help / advice / solution is greatly appreciated thank you. And yes this was an assignment---it was due last week but since I couldn't finish it, it's not worth any marks anymore.

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• Mutate an object into an instance of one its subclasses

  - by Gohu

  Hi, Is it possible to mutate an object into an instance of a derived class of the initial's object class? Something like: class Base(): def __init__(self): self.a = 1 def mutate(self): self = Derived() class Derived(Base): def __init__(self): self.b = 2 But that doesn't work. >>> obj = Base() >>> obj.mutate() >>> obj.a 1 >>> obj.b AttributeError... If this isn't possible, how should I do otherwise? My problem is the following: My Base class is like a "summary", and the Derived class is the "whole thing". Of course getting the "whole thing" is a bit expensive so working on summaries as long as it is possible is the point of having these two classes. But you should be able to get it if you want, and then there's no point in having the summary anymore, so every reference to the summary should now be (or contain, at least) the whole thing. I guess I would have to create a class that can hold both, right? class Thing(): def __init__(self): self.summary = Summary() self.whole = None def get_whole_thing(self): self.whole = Whole()

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• Move links div aside h1, above tagline p

  - by noquierouser

  I have a page that has CSS media queries in it, and I was requested to do this: Mobile layout: Desktop layout: Now, the HTML code is placed like this: <div id="content"> <h1>the title</h1> <p>this is the tagline of the site</p> <ul> <li>link 1</li> <li>link 2</li> <li>link 3</li> </ul> </div> I'm having quite a problem trying to achieve the desktop layout. I tried wrapping <h1> and <p> in a <div> and style it with float: left, but it didn't look as requested (the tagline is wider). I also tried with position: absolute for the <ul>, but also didn't look as requested (make the #content wider is not an option). Do you have any suggestions to achieve this without using javascript? Update: I've uploaded the code to my Koding so you can see what I'm actually doing. This is the CSS. I'm also using normalize.css. The problem I'm having now is what do the different browsers show: I think the problem might be in how do the browsers calculate the tagline's width, but as you can try with the code, if you make the tagline's text shorter, it looks more like Opera's rendering. Have I stumbled with a bug or am I making some mistake in my CSS?

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• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

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• Sorting Algorithms

  - by MarkPearl

  General Every time I go back to university I find myself wading through sorting algorithms and their implementation in C++. Up to now I haven’t really appreciated their true value. However as I discovered this last week with Dictionaries in C# – having a knowledge of some basic programming principles can greatly improve the performance of a system and make one think twice about how to tackle a problem. I’m going to cover briefly in this post the following: Selection Sort Insertion Sort Shellsort Quicksort Mergesort Heapsort (not complete) Selection Sort Array based selection sort is a simple approach to sorting an unsorted array. Simply put, it repeats two basic steps to achieve a sorted collection. It starts with a collection of data and repeatedly parses it, each time sorting out one element and reducing the size of the next iteration of parsed data by one. So the first iteration would go something like this… Go through the entire array of data and find the lowest value Place the value at the front of the array The second iteration would go something like this… Go through the array from position two (position one has already been sorted with the smallest value) and find the next lowest value in the array. Place the value at the second position in the array This process would be completed until the entire array had been sorted. A positive about selection sort is that it does not make many item movements. In fact, in a worst case scenario every items is only moved once. Selection sort is however a comparison intensive sort. If you had 10 items in a collection, just to parse the collection you would have 10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2=54 comparisons to sort regardless of how sorted the collection was to start with. If you think about it, if you applied selection sort to a collection already sorted, you would still perform relatively the same number of iterations as if it was not sorted at all. Many of the following algorithms try and reduce the number of comparisons if the list is already sorted – leaving one with a best case and worst case scenario for comparisons. Likewise different approaches have different levels of item movement. Depending on what is more expensive, one may give priority to one approach compared to another based on what is more expensive, a comparison or a item move. Insertion Sort Insertion sort tries to reduce the number of key comparisons it performs compared to selection sort by not “doing anything” if things are sorted. Assume you had an collection of numbers in the following order… 10 18 25 30 23 17 45 35 There are 8 elements in the list. If we were to start at the front of the list – 10 18 25 & 30 are already sorted. Element 5 (23) however is smaller than element 4 (30) and so needs to be repositioned. We do this by copying the value at element 5 to a temporary holder, and then begin shifting the elements before it up one. So… Element 5 would be copied to a temporary holder 10 18 25 30 23 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 4 would shift to Element 5 10 18 25 30 30 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 3 would shift to Element 4 10 18 25 25 30 17 45 35 – T 23 Element 2 (18) is smaller than the temporary holder so we put the temporary holder value into Element 3. 10 18 23 25 30 17 45 35 – T 23   We now have a sorted list up to element 6. And so we would repeat the same process by moving element 6 to a temporary value and then shifting everything up by one from element 2 to element 5. As you can see, one major setback for this technique is the shifting values up one – this is because up to now we have been considering the collection to be an array. If however the collection was a linked list, we would not need to shift values up, but merely remove the link from the unsorted value and “reinsert” it in a sorted position. Which would reduce the number of transactions performed on the collection. So.. Insertion sort seems to perform better than selection sort – however an implementation is slightly more complicated. This is typical with most sorting algorithms – generally, greater performance leads to greater complexity. Also, insertion sort performs better if a collection of data is already sorted. If for instance you were handed a sorted collection of size n, then only n number of comparisons would need to be performed to verify that it is sorted. It’s important to note that insertion sort (array based) performs a number item moves – every time an item is “out of place” several items before it get shifted up. Shellsort – Diminishing Increment Sort So up to now we have covered Selection Sort & Insertion Sort. Selection Sort makes many comparisons and insertion sort (with an array) has the potential of making many item movements. Shellsort is an approach that takes the normal insertion sort and tries to reduce the number of item movements. In Shellsort, elements in a collection are viewed as sub-collections of a particular size. Each sub-collection is sorted so that the elements that are far apart move closer to their final position. Suppose we had a collection of 15 elements… 10 20 15 45 36 48 7 60 18 50 2 19 43 30 55 First we may view the collection as 7 sub-collections and sort each sublist, lets say at intervals of 7 10 60 55 – 20 18 – 15 50 – 45 2 – 36 19 – 48 43 – 7 30 10 55 60 – 18 20 – 15 50 – 2 45 – 19 36 – 43 48 – 7 30 (Sorted) We then sort each sublist at a smaller inter – lets say 4 10 55 60 18 – 20 15 50 2 – 45 19 36 43 – 48 7 30 10 18 55 60 – 2 15 20 50 – 19 36 43 45 – 7 30 48 (Sorted) We then sort elements at a distance of 1 (i.e. we apply a normal insertion sort) 10 18 55 60 2 15 20 50 19 36 43 45 7 30 48 2 7 10 15 18 19 20 30 36 43 45 48 50 55 (Sorted) The important thing with shellsort is deciding on the increment sequence of each sub-collection. From what I can tell, there isn’t any definitive method and depending on the order of your elements, different increment sequences may perform better than others. There are however certain increment sequences that you may want to avoid. An even based increment sequence (e.g. 2 4 8 16 32 …) should typically be avoided because it does not allow for even elements to be compared with odd elements until the final sort phase – which in a way would negate many of the benefits of using sub-collections. The performance on the number of comparisons and item movements of Shellsort is hard to determine, however it is considered to be considerably better than the normal insertion sort. Quicksort Quicksort uses a divide and conquer approach to sort a collection of items. The collection is divided into two sub-collections – and the two sub-collections are sorted and combined into one list in such a way that the combined list is sorted. The algorithm is in general pseudo code below… Divide the collection into two sub-collections Quicksort the lower sub-collection Quicksort the upper sub-collection Combine the lower & upper sub-collection together As hinted at above, quicksort uses recursion in its implementation. The real trick with quicksort is to get the lower and upper sub-collections to be of equal size. The size of a sub-collection is determined by what value the pivot is. Once a pivot is determined, one would partition to sub-collections and then repeat the process on each sub collection until you reach the base case. With quicksort, the work is done when dividing the sub-collections into lower & upper collections. The actual combining of the lower & upper sub-collections at the end is relatively simple since every element in the lower sub-collection is smaller than the smallest element in the upper sub-collection. Mergesort With quicksort, the average-case complexity was O(nlog2n) however the worst case complexity was still O(N*N). Mergesort improves on quicksort by always having a complexity of O(nlog2n) regardless of the best or worst case. So how does it do this? Mergesort makes use of the divide and conquer approach to partition a collection into two sub-collections. It then sorts each sub-collection and combines the sorted sub-collections into one sorted collection. The general algorithm for mergesort is as follows… Divide the collection into two sub-collections Mergesort the first sub-collection Mergesort the second sub-collection Merge the first sub-collection and the second sub-collection As you can see.. it still pretty much looks like quicksort – so lets see where it differs… Firstly, mergesort differs from quicksort in how it partitions the sub-collections. Instead of having a pivot – merge sort partitions each sub-collection based on size so that the first and second sub-collection of relatively the same size. This dividing keeps getting repeated until the sub-collections are the size of a single element. If a sub-collection is one element in size – it is now sorted! So the trick is how do we put all these sub-collections together so that they maintain their sorted order. Sorted sub-collections are merged into a sorted collection by comparing the elements of the sub-collection and then adjusting the sorted collection. Lets have a look at a few examples… Assume 2 sub-collections with 1 element each 10 & 20 Compare the first element of the first sub-collection with the first element of the second sub-collection. Take the smallest of the two and place it as the first element in the sorted collection. In this scenario 10 is smaller than 20 so 10 is taken from sub-collection 1 leaving that sub-collection empty, which means by default the next smallest element is in sub-collection 2 (20). So the sorted collection would be 10 20 Lets assume 2 sub-collections with 2 elements each 10 20 & 15 19 So… again we would Compare 10 with 15 – 10 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10) leaving us with 20 & 15 19 Compare 20 with 15 – 15 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10 15) leaving us with 20 & 19 Compare 20 with 19 – 19 is the winner so we add it to our sorted collection (10 15 19) leaving us with 20 & _ 20 is by default the winner so our sorted collection is 10 15 19 20. Make sense? Heapsort (still needs to be completed) So by now I am tired of sorting algorithms and trying to remember why they were so important. I think every year I go through this stuff I wonder to myself why are we made to learn about selection sort and insertion sort if they are so bad – why didn’t we just skip to Mergesort & Quicksort. I guess the only explanation I have for this is that sometimes you learn things so that you can implement them in future – and other times you learn things so that you know it isn’t the best way of implementing things and that you don’t need to implement it in future. Anyhow… luckily this is going to be the last one of my sorts for today. The first step in heapsort is to convert a collection of data into a heap. After the data is converted into a heap, sorting begins… So what is the definition of a heap? If we have to convert a collection of data into a heap, how do we know when it is a heap and when it is not? The definition of a heap is as follows: A heap is a list in which each element contains a key, such that the key in the element at position k in the list is at least as large as the key in the element at position 2k +1 (if it exists) and 2k + 2 (if it exists). Does that make sense? At first glance I’m thinking what the heck??? But then after re-reading my notes I see that we are doing something different – up to now we have really looked at data as an array or sequential collection of data that we need to sort – a heap represents data in a slightly different way – although the data is stored in a sequential collection, for a sequential collection of data to be in a valid heap – it is “semi sorted”. Let me try and explain a bit further with an example… Example 1 of Potential Heap Data Assume we had a collection of numbers as follows 1[1] 2[2] 3[3] 4[4] 5[5] 6[6] For this to be a valid heap element with value of 1 at position [1] needs to be greater or equal to the element at position [3] (2k +1) and position [4] (2k +2). So in the above example, the collection of numbers is not in a valid heap. Example 2 of Potential Heap Data Lets look at another collection of numbers as follows 6[1] 5[2] 4[3] 3[4] 2[5] 1[6] Is this a valid heap? Well… element with the value 6 at position 1 must be greater or equal to the element at position [3] and position [4]. Is 6 > 4 and 6 > 3? Yes it is. Lets look at element 5 as position 2. It must be greater than the values at [4] & [5]. Is 5 > 3 and 5 > 2? Yes it is. If you continued to examine this second collection of data you would find that it is in a valid heap based on the definition of a heap.

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• Stored Procedures with SSRS? Hmm… not so much

  - by Rob Farley

  Little Bobby Tables’ mother says you should always sanitise your data input. Except that I think she’s wrong. The SQL Injection aspect is for another post, where I’ll show you why I think SQL Injection is the same kind of attack as many other attacks, such as the old buffer overflow, but here I want to have a bit of a whinge about the way that some people sanitise data input, and even have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let me say that again, in case you missed it the first time: I want to have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let’s look at the data input sanitisation aspect – except that I’m going to call it ‘parameter validation’. I’m talking about code that looks like this: create procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     /* First check that @eomdate is a valid date */     if isdate(@eomdate) != 1     begin         select 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end     /* Then check that time has passed since @eomdate */     if datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     begin         select 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end         /* If those checks have succeeded, return the data */     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)         and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Notice that the code checks that a date has been entered. Seriously??!! This must only be to check for NULL values being passed in, because anything else would have to be a valid datetime to avoid an error. The other check is maybe fair enough, but I still don’t like it. The two problems I have with this stored procedure are the result sets and the small fact that the stored procedure even exists in the first place. But let’s consider the first one of these problems for starters. I’ll get to the second one in a moment. If you read Jes Borland (@grrl_geek)’s recent post about returning multiple result sets in Reporting Services, you’ll be aware that Reporting Services doesn’t support multiple results sets from a single query. And when it says ‘single query’, it includes ‘stored procedure call’. It’ll only handle the first result set that comes back. But that’s okay – we have RETURN statements, so our stored procedure will only ever return a single result set.  Sometimes that result set might contain a single field called ErrorMessage, but it’s still only one result set. Except that it’s not okay, because Reporting Services needs to know what fields to expect. Your report needs to hook into your fields, so SSRS needs to have a way to get that information. For stored procs, it uses an option called FMTONLY. When Reporting Services tries to figure out what fields are going to be returned by a query (or stored procedure call), it doesn’t want to have to run the whole thing. That could take ages. (Maybe it’s seen some of the stored procedures I’ve had to deal with over the years!) So it turns on FMTONLY before it makes the call (and turns it off again afterwards). FMTONLY is designed to be able to figure out the shape of the output, without actually running the contents. It’s very useful, you might think. set fmtonly on exec dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson '20030401'; set fmtonly off Without the FMTONLY lines, this stored procedure returns a result set that has three columns and fourteen rows. But with FMTONLY turned on, those rows don’t come back. But what I do get back hurts Reporting Services. It doesn’t run the stored procedure at all. It just looks for anything that could be returned and pushes out a result set in that shape. Despite the fact that I’ve made sure that the logic will only ever return a single result set, the FMTONLY option kills me by returning three of them. It would have been much better to push these checks down into the query itself. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Now if we run it with FMTONLY turned on, we get the single result set back. But let’s consider the execution plan when we pass in an invalid date. First let’s look at one that returns data. I’ve got a semi-useful index in place on OrderDate, which includes the SalesPersonID and TotalDue fields. It does the job, despite a hefty Sort operation. …compared to one that uses a future date: You might notice that the estimated costs are similar – the Index Seek is still 28%, the Sort is still 71%. But the size of that arrow coming out of the Index Seek is a whole bunch smaller. The coolest thing here is what’s going on with that Index Seek. Let’s look at some of the properties of it. Glance down it with me… Estimated CPU cost of 0.0005728, 387 estimated rows, estimated subtree cost of 0.0044385, ForceSeek false, Number of Executions 0. That’s right – it doesn’t run. So much for reading plans right-to-left... The key is the Filter on the left of it. It has a Startup Expression Predicate in it, which means that it doesn’t call anything further down the plan (to the right) if the predicate evaluates to false. Using this method, we can make sure that our stored procedure contains a single query, and therefore avoid any problems with multiple result sets. If we wanted, we could always use UNION ALL to make sure that we can return an appropriate error message. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, /*Placeholder: */ '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     /* Now include the error messages */     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     order by SalesPersonID; end But still I don’t like it, because it’s now a stored procedure with a single query. And I don’t like stored procedures that should be functions. That’s right – I think this should be a function, and SSRS should call the function. And I apologise to those of you who are now planning a bonfire for me. Guy Fawkes’ night has already passed this year, so I think you miss out. (And I’m not going to remind you about when the PASS Summit is in 2012.) create function dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) returns table as return (     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5 ); We’ve had to lose the ORDER BY – but that’s fine, as that’s a client thing anyway. We can have our reports leverage this stored query still, but we’re recognising that it’s a query, not a procedure. A procedure is designed to DO stuff, not just return data. We even get entries in sys.columns that confirm what the shape of the result set actually is, which makes sense, because a table-valued function is the right mechanism to return data. And we get so much more flexibility with this. If you haven’t seen the simplification stuff that I’ve preached on before, jump over to http://bit.ly/SimpleRob and watch the video of when I broke a microphone and nearly fell off the stage in Wales. You’ll see the impact of being able to have a simplifiable query. You can also read the procedural functions post I wrote recently, if you didn’t follow the link from a few paragraphs ago. So if we want the list of SalesPeople that made any kind of sales in a given month, we can do something like: select SalesPersonID from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) order by SalesPersonID; This doesn’t need to look up the TotalDue field, which makes a simpler plan. select * from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) where SalesPersonID is not null order by SalesPersonID; This one can avoid having to do the work on the rows that don’t have a SalesPersonID value, pushing the predicate into the Index Seek rather than filtering the results that come back to the report. If we had joins involved, we might see some of those being simplified out. We also get the ability to include query hints in individual reports. We shift from having a single-use stored procedure to having a reusable stored query – and isn’t that one of the main points of modularisation? Stored procedures in Reporting Services are just a bit limited for my liking. They’re useful in plenty of ways, but if you insist on using stored procedures all the time rather that queries that use functions – that’s rubbish. @rob_farley

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• What's up with OCFS2?

  - by wcoekaer

  On Linux there are many filesystem choices and even from Oracle we provide a number of filesystems, all with their own advantages and use cases. Customers often confuse ACFS with OCFS or OCFS2 which then causes assumptions to be made such as one replacing the other etc... I thought it would be good to write up a summary of how OCFS2 got to where it is, what we're up to still, how it is different from other options and how this really is a cool native Linux cluster filesystem that we worked on for many years and is still widely used. Work on a cluster filesystem at Oracle started many years ago, in the early 2000's when the Oracle Database Cluster development team wrote a cluster filesystem for Windows that was primarily focused on providing an alternative to raw disk devices and help customers with the deployment of Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). Oracle RAC is a cluster technology that lets us make a cluster of Oracle Database servers look like one big database. The RDBMS runs on many nodes and they all work on the same data. It's a Shared Disk database design. There are many advantages doing this but I will not go into detail as that is not the purpose of my write up. Suffice it to say that Oracle RAC expects all the database data to be visible in a consistent, coherent way, across all the nodes in the cluster. To do that, there were/are a few options : 1) use raw disk devices that are shared, through SCSI, FC, or iSCSI 2) use a network filesystem (NFS) 3) use a cluster filesystem(CFS) which basically gives you a filesystem that's coherent across all nodes using shared disks. It is sort of (but not quite) combining option 1 and 2 except that you don't do network access to the files, the files are effectively locally visible as if it was a local filesystem. So OCFS (Oracle Cluster FileSystem) on Windows was born. Since Linux was becoming a very important and popular platform, we decided that we would also make this available on Linux and thus the porting of OCFS/Windows started. The first version of OCFS was really primarily focused on replacing the use of Raw devices with a simple filesystem that lets you create files and provide direct IO to these files to get basically native raw disk performance. The filesystem was not designed to be fully POSIX compliant and it did not have any where near good/decent performance for regular file create/delete/access operations. Cache coherency was easy since it was basically always direct IO down to the disk device and this ensured that any time one issues a write() command it would go directly down to the disk, and not return until the write() was completed. Same for read() any sort of read from a datafile would be a read() operation that went all the way to disk and return. We did not cache any data when it came down to Oracle data files. So while OCFS worked well for that, since it did not have much of a normal filesystem feel, it was not something that could be submitted to the kernel mail list for inclusion into Linux as another native linux filesystem (setting aside the Windows porting code ...) it did its job well, it was very easy to configure, node membership was simple, locking was disk based (so very slow but it existed), you could create regular files and do regular filesystem operations to a certain extend but anything that was not database data file related was just not very useful in general. Logfiles ok, standard filesystem use, not so much. Up to this point, all the work was done, at Oracle, by Oracle developers. Once OCFS (1) was out for a while and there was a lot of use in the database RAC world, many customers wanted to do more and were asking for features that you'd expect in a normal native filesystem, a real "general purposes cluster filesystem". So the team sat down and basically started from scratch to implement what's now known as OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster FileSystem release 2). Some basic criteria were : Design it with a real Distributed Lock Manager and use the network for lock negotiation instead of the disk Make it a Linux native filesystem instead of a native shim layer and a portable core Support standard Posix compliancy and be fully cache coherent with all operations Support all the filesystem features Linux offers (ACL, extended Attributes, quotas, sparse files,...) Be modern, support large files, 32/64bit, journaling, data ordered journaling, endian neutral, we can mount on both endian /cross architecture,.. Needless to say, this was a huge development effort that took many years to complete. A few big milestones happened along the way... OCFS2 was development in the open, we did not have a private tree that we worked on without external code review from the Linux Filesystem maintainers, great folks like Christopher Hellwig reviewed the code regularly to make sure we were not doing anything out of line, we submitted the code for review on lkml a number of times to see if we were getting close for it to be included into the mainline kernel. Using this development model is standard practice for anyone that wants to write code that goes into the kernel and having any chance of doing so without a complete rewrite or.. shall I say flamefest when submitted. It saved us a tremendous amount of time by not having to re-fit code for it to be in a Linus acceptable state. Some other filesystems that were trying to get into the kernel that didn't follow an open development model had a lot harder time and a lot harsher criticism. March 2006, when Linus released 2.6.16, OCFS2 officially became part of the mainline kernel, it was accepted a little earlier in the release candidates but in 2.6.16. OCFS2 became officially part of the mainline Linux kernel tree as one of the many filesystems. It was the first cluster filesystem to make it into the kernel tree. Our hope was that it would then end up getting picked up by the distribution vendors to make it easy for everyone to have access to a CFS. Today the source code for OCFS2 is approximately 85000 lines of code. We made OCFS2 production with full support for customers that ran Oracle database on Linux, no extra or separate support contract needed. OCFS2 1.0.0 started being built for RHEL4 for x86, x86-64, ppc, s390x and ia64. For RHEL5 starting with OCFS2 1.2. SuSE was very interested in high availability and clustering and decided to build and include OCFS2 with SLES9 for their customers and was, next to Oracle, the main contributor to the filesystem for both new features and bug fixes. Source code was always available even prior to inclusion into mainline and as of 2.6.16, source code was just part of a Linux kernel download from kernel.org, which it still is, today. So the latest OCFS2 code is always the upstream mainline Linux kernel. OCFS2 is the cluster filesystem used in Oracle VM 2 and Oracle VM 3 as the virtual disk repository filesystem. Since the filesystem is in the Linux kernel it's released under the GPL v2 The release model has always been that new feature development happened in the mainline kernel and we then built consistent, well tested, snapshots that had versions, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8. But these releases were effectively just snapshots in time that were tested for stability and release quality. OCFS2 is very easy to use, there's a simple text file that contains the node information (hostname, node number, cluster name) and a file that contains the cluster heartbeat timeouts. It is very small, and very efficient. As Sunil Mushran wrote in the manual : OCFS2 is an efficient, easily configured, quickly installed, fully integrated and compatible, feature-rich, architecture and endian neutral, cache coherent, ordered data journaling, POSIX-compliant, shared disk cluster file system. Here is a list of some of the important features that are included : Variable Block and Cluster sizes Supports block sizes ranging from 512 bytes to 4 KB and cluster sizes ranging from 4 KB to 1 MB (increments in power of 2). Extent-based Allocations Tracks the allocated space in ranges of clusters making it especially efficient for storing very large files. Optimized Allocations Supports sparse files, inline-data, unwritten extents, hole punching and allocation reservation for higher performance and efficient storage. File Cloning/snapshots REFLINK is a feature which introduces copy-on-write clones of files in a cluster coherent way. Indexed Directories Allows efficient access to millions of objects in a directory. Metadata Checksums Detects silent corruption in inodes and directories. Extended Attributes Supports attaching an unlimited number of name:value pairs to the file system objects like regular files, directories, symbolic links, etc. Advanced Security Supports POSIX ACLs and SELinux in addition to the traditional file access permission model. Quotas Supports user and group quotas. Journaling Supports both ordered and writeback data journaling modes to provide file system consistency in the event of power failure or system crash. Endian and Architecture neutral Supports a cluster of nodes with mixed architectures. Allows concurrent mounts on nodes running 32-bit and 64-bit, little-endian (x86, x86_64, ia64) and big-endian (ppc64) architectures. In-built Cluster-stack with DLM Includes an easy to configure, in-kernel cluster-stack with a distributed lock manager. Buffered, Direct, Asynchronous, Splice and Memory Mapped I/Os Supports all modes of I/Os for maximum flexibility and performance. Comprehensive Tools Support Provides a familiar EXT3-style tool-set that uses similar parameters for ease-of-use. The filesystem was distributed for Linux distributions in separate RPM form and this had to be built for every single kernel errata release or every updated kernel provided by the vendor. We provided builds from Oracle for Oracle Linux and all kernels released by Oracle and for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SuSE provided the modules directly for every kernel they shipped. With the introduction of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux and our interest in reducing the overhead of building filesystem modules for every minor release, we decide to make OCFS2 available as part of UEK. There was no more need for separate kernel modules, everything was built-in and a kernel upgrade automatically updated the filesystem, as it should. UEK allowed us to not having to backport new upstream filesystem code into an older kernel version, backporting features into older versions introduces risk and requires extra testing because the code is basically partially rewritten. The UEK model works really well for continuing to provide OCFS2 without that extra overhead. Because the RHEL kernel did not contain OCFS2 as a kernel module (it is in the source tree but it is not built by the vendor in kernel module form) we stopped adding the extra packages to Oracle Linux and its RHEL compatible kernel and for RHEL. Oracle Linux customers/users obviously get OCFS2 included as part of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, SuSE customers get it by SuSE distributed with SLES and Red Hat can decide to distribute OCFS2 to their customers if they chose to as it's just a matter of compiling the module and making it available. OCFS2 today, in the mainline kernel is pretty much feature complete in terms of integration with every filesystem feature Linux offers and it is still actively maintained with Joel Becker being the primary maintainer. Since we use OCFS2 as part of Oracle VM, we continue to look at interesting new functionality to add, REFLINK was a good example, and as such we continue to enhance the filesystem where it makes sense. Bugfixes and any sort of code that goes into the mainline Linux kernel that affects filesystems, automatically also modifies OCFS2 so it's in kernel, actively maintained but not a lot of new development happening at this time. We continue to fully support OCFS2 as part of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and other vendors make their own decisions on support as it's really a Linux cluster filesystem now more than something that we provide to customers. It really just is part of Linux like EXT3 or BTRFS etc, the OS distribution vendors decide. Do not confuse OCFS2 with ACFS (ASM cluster Filesystem) also known as Oracle Cloud Filesystem. ACFS is a filesystem that's provided by Oracle on various OS platforms and really integrates into Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). It's a very powerful Cluster Filesystem but it's not distributed as part of the Operating System, it's distributed with the Oracle Database product and installs with and lives inside Oracle ASM. ACFS obviously is fully supported on Linux (Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) but OCFS2 independently as a native Linux filesystem is also, and continues to also be supported. ACFS is very much tied into the Oracle RDBMS, OCFS2 is just a standard native Linux filesystem with no ties into Oracle products. Customers running the Oracle database and ASM really should consider using ACFS as it also provides storage/clustered volume management. Customers wanting to use a simple, easy to use generic Linux cluster filesystem should consider using OCFS2. To learn more about OCFS2 in detail, you can find good documentation on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2 in the Documentation area, or get the latest mainline kernel from http://kernel.org and read the source. One final, unrelated note - since I am not always able to publicly answer or respond to comments, I do not want to selectively publish comments from readers. Sometimes I forget to publish comments, sometime I publish them and sometimes I would publish them but if for some reason I cannot publicly comment on them, it becomes a very one-sided stream. So for now I am going to not publish comments from anyone, to be fair to all sides. You are always welcome to email me and I will do my best to respond to technical questions, questions about strategy or direction are sometimes not possible to answer for obvious reasons.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 28, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, November 28, 2011Popular ReleasesCommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 - Alpha: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 4.0 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars, Logging, Authentication, and much more. Samples in <root>\src\Lib\CommonLibrary.NET\Samples CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.8 AlphaNew Dynamic Scripting Language : workitem : 7493 Fixes 1622 6803Widget Suite for DotNetNuke: 01.04.00: The following features/enhancements are associated with this release: Bug: Removed the empty box/white space created by some widgets New Widget: FlexSlider New Widget: Google+ Button New Widget: Klout Badge Sample Widget Script FileTools for SharePoint: Reset SharePoint Configuration Cache: This tool is used to detect the existing location of the SharePoint configuration cache files then remove them to trigger the timer service to rebuild a fresh new cache. This tool runs on any SharePoint box version 2003 and above supporting x64 bit & x32 bit OS assuming .NET framework 3.5 is installed. You must run the tool with elevated privileges if running on Win 2008 server to ensure that the tool has enough rights to restart the timer service. The tool auto-detects whether its running i...WinRT File Based Database: 0.9.1.5: Implement IsBusy property to support Save button state. See Quick Start project that is distributed as part of the download for details on how to implement Save button, use IsBusy property and how to implement SimpleCommand to use behind the Save button.Multiwfn: Multiwfn2.2_source: Multiwfn2.2_sourceBatchus-GUI: Batchus-GUI-vb 0.1.3.3: Here is v0.1.3.3. It is relatively stable. Just need some more designer layout, and tutorials, and templates.Groovy IM: Groovy IM Version 0.3: Groovy IM Version 0.3 for Windows Phone 7Internet Cache Examiner: Internet Cache Examiner 0.9.2: This is the release binary for the 0.9.2 version of Internet Cache Examiner.Composite Data Service Framework: Composite Data Service Framework 1.0: This solution contains the Composite Data Service framework solution along with a Sample Project.FxCop Integrator for Visual Studio 2010: FxCop Integrator 2.0.0 RC: Replaced the MSBuild Tasks installer to fix the bug of the targets file. FxCop Integrator is not affected by this bug. (Nov 28 2011) New FeatureSupported calculating code metrics with Code Metrics PowerTool. (Work Item #6568: 6568). Provided MSBuild tasks. #7454: 7454 Supported to filter out auto-generated code from code analysis result. #7485: 7485 Supported exporting report of code analysis result. Supported multi-project analysis. Supported file level analysis. Added the featu...Terminals: Version 2 - Beta 4 Release: Beta 4 Refresh Build Dont forget to backup your config files BEFORE upgrading! As usual, please take time to use and abuse this release. We left logging in place, and this is a debug build so be sure to submit your logs on each bug reported, and please do report all bugs! Updated the About form to include the date and time of the build. Useful for CI builds to ensure we have the correct version "Favourites" and "History" save their expanded states after app restarts Code cleanup, secu...MiniTwitter: 1.76: MiniTwitter 1.76 ???? ?? ?????????? User Streams ???????????? User Streams ???????????、??????????????? REST ?????????? ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????Media Companion: MC 3.424b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movie Show Resolutions... Resolved issue when reverting multiselection of movies to "-none-" Added movie rename support for subtitle files '.srt' & '.sub' Finalised code for '-1' fix - radiobutton to choose either filename or title Fixed issue with Movie Batch Wizard Fanart - ...Advanced Windows Phone Enginering Tool: WPE Downloads: This version of WPE gives you basic updating, restoring, and, erasing for your Windows Phone device.Anno 2070 Assistant: Beta v1.0 (STABLE): Anno 2070 Assistant Beta v1.0 Released! Features Included: Complete Building Layouts for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Complete Production Chains for Ecos, Tycoons & Techs Completed Credits Screen Known Issues: Not all production chains and building layouts may be on the lists because they have not yet been discovered. However, data is still 99.9% complete. Currently the Supply & Demand, including Calculator screen are disabled until version 1.1.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.7: Including updated Minecraft Biome Extractor and mcmap to support the new Minecraft 1.0.0 release (new block types, etc).Visual Leak Detector for Visual C++ 2008/2010: v2.2.1: Enhancements: * strdup and _wcsdup functions support added. * Preliminary support for VS 11 added. Bugs Fixed: * Low performance after upgrading from VLD v2.1. * Memory leaks with static linking fixed (disabled calloc support). * Runtime error R6002 fixed because of wrong memory dump format. * version.h fixed in installer. * Some PVS studio warning fixed.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.10: 3.6.0.10 22-Nov-2011 Update: Removed PreEmptive Platform integration (PreEmptive analytics) Removed all PreEmptive attributes Removed PreEmptive.dll assembly references from all projects Added first support to ADAM/AD LDS Thanks to PatBea. Work Item 9775: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/9775VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF & Silverlight 5: VideoLan DotNet for WinForm, WPF, SL5 - 2011.11.22: The new version contains Silverlight 5 library: Vlc.DotNet.Silverlight. A sample could be tested here The new version add and correct many features : Correction : Reinitialize some variables Deprecate : Logging API, since VLC 1.2 (08/20/2011) Add subitem in LocationMedia (for Youtube videos, ...) Update Wpf sample to use Youtube videos Many others correctionsSharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.2.0: Web parts are now fully customizable via html templates (Issue #323) FBA Pack is now completely localizable using resource files. Thank you David Chen for submitting the code as well as Chinese translations of the FBA Pack! The membership request web part now gives the option of having the user enter the password and removing the captcha (Issue # 447) The FBA Pack will now work in a zone that does not have FBA enabled (Another zone must have FBA enabled, and the zone must contain the me...New ProjectsA lightweight database access component: DataAccessor?????????????，??DataAccessor????????????： 1.??????????SQL??，?????SQL???????????； 2.?????????； 3.????????????，??MSAccess??????????????????????????????????????，?????????； 4.?????????????DBMS，??：SqlServer、Oracle??MSAccess，??????DBMS???，??????N?????????； 5.????，?????????DataAccess??????DBMS； 6.???Sql????xml??????????????dbms?SQL?????，??sql??????????????； 7.???，???DLL??????????……AdHoc.Wavesque: Wavesque provides a simple infrastructure to generate waveforms.AIRO - Interoperable Experiment Automation Package: The main goal of this project is to provide engineers and scientists flexible and extendable framework for building test, measurement and control applications. This framework is compatible with IVI-COM drivers and extends IVI Instrument Classes with custom .NET (and COM) interfaces for such devices as: step motors, different positioning devices, magnet power supplies, lock-in amplifiers etc. We maintain IVI Foundation's aim: "simplify upgrading or replacing components in complex test systems...AKBK-Schulprojekt - USB-Guard: Das Projekt USB-Überwachung wird im Rahmen des Anwendungsentwicklungs-Unterrichts des Adolf-Kolping-Berufskollegs geplant und durchgeführt. Die Software wird zur Prävention von Manipulationsversuchen während einer Informatikklausur entwickelt. Sie erkennt manipulierte und nicht erlaubte USB-Datenträger, protokolliert deren Inhalt und gibt ggf. eine Warnung aus. Sie hilft dem Lehrer dabei, Manipulationsversuche schneller und effizienter zu erkennen.Android Vision: Project to learn all things Android and some image processingAuto Fill Title of Document in Document Library in SharePoint 2010: Automatically fill title of any document in any document library in SharePoint 2010.Batchus-GUI: A graphical user interface, used to create batch files.Bazeli: Windows Phone 7 application that supports tracking of expenses.Clannad: This is a family of many things.Csv2Entity: CSV 2 Entity is a serials of tools that deal with CSV files as well as Excel files and Access files. This framework include: A VSIX file which contains VB and CS source code generate wizard for CSV Objects. Read/Write CSV files facilities. Documentation Help facilities.Cypher Bot: Encrypt secrets, messages, documents, files and more. Then decrypt them. Then repeat with the US government's encryption standard: AES 256-bit (Accepted by NIST and NSA).Cypher Bot makes it fun and easy for anyone to secure files. This is the best security solution available on the web. You are now able to encrypt/decrypt files (avi, mov, mpeg, mp3, wav, png, jpg, txt, html, vb, js) and text ALL IN ONE beautiful slick interface. Cypher Bot is developed in visual basic.EmailWebLinker: A very simple text to html converter designed to deal with those email messages that contain a list of links to images. Any http links it finds to pictures are converted inline. eps files are downloaded and rendered. Can be easily extended.FileHasher: This project provides a simple tool for generating and verifying file hashes. I created this to help the QA team I work with. The project is all C# using .NET 3.5 SP1.Financial Controls: WPF/Silverlight Controls for Financial ApplicationsGroovy IM: Groovy IM makes it easy for Windows Phone 7 consumers to chat while on there Windows Phone 7 device(s). Groovy IM is developed in C# under the GPL V2 license.IBlog: Project created to learn things ASP.NETInjectivity (Dependency Injection): Injectivity is a dependency injection framework (written in C#) with a strong focus on the ease of configuration and performance. Having been written over 5 years and at version 2.8 with unit tests & intellisense comments it is a mature framework.Lizard Chess: Chess openings preparation tool using F#. WinForms C# used for UI.MCPD: I am doing a self study course for MCPD in .NET 4 (web track), so I am committing any custom source code as a result of my study in this open source location which I can later show the work for. * MCTS Exam 70-515 Web Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4MVC TreeView Helper: This fluent MVC TreeView helper makes it easy to build and customize an HTML unordered-list tree from a recursive model.Onion Architecture with ASP.NET MVC: Onion Architecture with ASP.NET MVCOpenBank: OpenBank est une application client/serveur destinée à la gestion de compte banquaire.Philosophy Widget: This Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard aids in memorizing the association between known works of philosophy and their authors.Physic Engine: Physic EnginePUL Programming Utility Language: PUL is a programming utility language that allows people to do tasks automatically without having to manually do them, which that process would take longer. Using PUL, you can make programs that automatically do the work for you.QuakeMeApp: QuakeMeApp is a Windows Phone 7 Earthquake Alert AppSense/Net SourceCode Field Control: This is a Field Control for Sense/Net ECMS, it provides syntax highlighting.Silverlight Video CoverFlow: This a Silverlight Sample Application including a Coverflow of Video (streaming)SpaceConquest: Incorporated standard design patterns to build a peer to peer game in Java. The game rules were similar in complexity to games like Civilization and StarcraftSPGE - An XNA 2D graphics engine for Windows and Windows Phone 7.: SPGE is an open-source graphics engine build over XNA that allows the creation of simple 2D games that target Windows and Windows Phone 7. The aim of this graphic engine is to allow for an easy creation of simle 2D games, game prototyping, and teaching of game development.SQL CRUD Expression Builder: A library to build sql crud commands that is based on expressions so every part of the sql statement could be an expression like ColumnSetExpression, FilterExpression, JoinExpression, etc, is intended to be agnostic but right now is being tested only with SqlServer and MySql.TDD-Katas: *TDD-Katas* simply defines the Test Driven Development Katas. In this, I tried to create most famous katas to understand what is exactly Kata. So, get into the code and let us know for any improvementTFS Team Project Manager: TFS Team Project Manager automates various tasks across Team Projects in Team Foundation Server. If you find yourself managing multiple Team Projects for an organization and have recurring tasks and questions that repeat themselves over and over again, Team Project Manager probably has some answers for you. Team Project Manager can help you... * Manage build process templates (understanding which build templates are used by which build definitions, uploading new build process templates,...USB Camera Driver for Windows Embedded Compact 7: This project helps people to get the USB camera working on the Windows Embedded Compact 7.This is modified source of the WinCE 6.0 USB Camera Shared source available from the following link http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=19512 User Profile with RecordID replicator: <User Profile with RecordID replicator> will let SharePoint 2010 administrators create a new Profile database maintaining the RecordId of the profile to make sure the social features (I like it, tags, notes) are not gone.VS Tool for WSS 3.0: Visual Studio (2005 and 2008) add-ons for WSS. Included: - schema.xml explorerWhs2Smugmug: Windows Home Server Add-In for uploading files to Smugmug. Written in C# using .Net 3.5 and WCF. Also using the Smugmug API Project. ??UBBCODE: PHP????UBBCODE????，??????： 1.??????（10px ? 24px）； 2.????； 3.?????； 4.??????； 5.??????； 6.??????（????????????）； 7.??????； 8.?????； 9.?????； 10.???QQ??，??????； 11.???????（?????，??????????）； 12.?????????； 13.????????； 14.?????????； 15.?????????； 16.?????????。

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• 64-bit Archives Needed

  - by user9154181

  A little over a year ago, we received a question from someone who was trying to build software on Solaris. He was getting errors from the ar command when creating an archive. At that time, the ar command on Solaris was a 32-bit command. There was more than 2GB of data, and the ar command was hitting the file size limit for a 32-bit process that doesn't use the largefile APIs. Even in 2011, 2GB is a very large amount of code, so we had not heard this one before. Most of our toolchain was extended to handle 64-bit sized data back in the 1990's, but archives were not changed, presumably because there was no perceived need for it. Since then of course, programs have continued to get larger, and in 2010, the time had finally come to investigate the issue and find a way to provide for larger archives. As part of that process, I had to do a deep dive into the archive format, and also do some Unix archeology. I'm going to record what I learned here, to document what Solaris does, and in the hope that it might help someone else trying to solve the same problem for their platform. Archive Format Details Archives are hardly cutting edge technology. They are still used of course, but their basic form hasn't changed in decades. Other than to fix a bug, which is rare, we don't tend to touch that code much. The archive file format is described in /usr/include/ar.h, and I won't repeat the details here. Instead, here is a rough overview of the archive file format, implemented by System V Release 4 (SVR4) Unix systems such as Solaris: Every archive starts with a "magic number". This is a sequence of 8 characters: "!<arch>\n". The magic number is followed by 1 or more members. A member starts with a fixed header, defined by the ar_hdr structure in/usr/include/ar.h. Immediately following the header comes the data for the member. Members must be padded at the end with newline characters so that they have even length. The requirement to pad members to an even length is a dead giveaway as to the age of the archive format. It tells you that this format dates from the 1970's, and more specifically from the era of 16-bit systems such as the PDP-11 that Unix was originally developed on. A 32-bit system would have required 4 bytes, and 64-bit systems such as we use today would probably have required 8 bytes. 2 byte alignment is a poor choice for ELF object archive members. 32-bit objects require 4 byte alignment, and 64-bit objects require 64-bit alignment. The link-editor uses mmap() to process archives, and if the members have the wrong alignment, we have to slide (copy) them to the correct alignment before we can access the ELF data structures inside. The archive format requires 2 byte padding, but it doesn't prohibit more. The Solaris ar command takes advantage of this, and pads ELF object members to 8 byte boundaries. Anything else is padded to 2 as required by the format. The archive header (ar_hdr) represents all numeric values using an ASCII text representation rather than as binary integers. This means that an archive that contains only text members can be viewed using tools such as cat, more, or a text editor. The original designers of this format clearly thought that archives would be used for many file types, and not just for objects. Things didn't turn out that way of course — nearly all archives contain relocatable objects for a single operating system and machine, and are used primarily as input to the link-editor (ld). Archives can have special members that are created by the ar command rather than being supplied by the user. These special members are all distinguished by having a name that starts with the slash (/) character. This is an unambiguous marker that says that the user could not have supplied it. The reason for this is that regular archive members are given the plain name of the file that was inserted to create them, and any path components are stripped off. Slash is the delimiter character used by Unix to separate path components, and as such cannot occur within a plain file name. The ar command hides the special members from you when you list the contents of an archive, so most users don't know that they exist. There are only two possible special members: A symbol table that maps ELF symbols to the object archive member that provides it, and a string table used to hold member names that exceed 15 characters. The '/' convention for tagging special members provides room for adding more such members should the need arise. As I will discuss below, we took advantage of this fact to add an alternate 64-bit symbol table special member which is used in archives that are larger than 4GB. When an archive contains ELF object members, the ar command builds a special archive member known as the symbol table that maps all ELF symbols in the object to the archive member that provides it. The link-editor uses this symbol table to determine which symbols are provided by the objects in that archive. If an archive has a symbol table, it will always be the first member in the archive, immediately following the magic number. Unlike member headers, symbol tables do use binary integers to represent offsets. These integers are always stored in big-endian format, even on a little endian host such as x86. The archive header (ar_hdr) provides 15 characters for representing the member name. If any member has a name that is longer than this, then the real name is written into a special archive member called the string table, and the member's name field instead contains a slash (/) character followed by a decimal representation of the offset of the real name within the string table. The string table is required to precede all normal archive members, so it will be the second member if the archive contains a symbol table, and the first member otherwise. The archive format is not designed to make finding a given member easy. Such operations move through the archive from front to back examining each member in turn, and run in O(n) time. This would be bad if archives were commonly used in that manner, but in general, they are not. Typically, the ar command is used to build an new archive from scratch, inserting all the objects in one operation, and then the link-editor accesses the members in the archive in constant time by using the offsets provided by the symbol table. Both of these operations are reasonably efficient. However, listing the contents of a large archive with the ar command can be rather slow. Factors That Limit Solaris Archive Size As is often the case, there was more than one limiting factor preventing Solaris archives from growing beyond the 32-bit limits of 2GB (32-bit signed) and 4GB (32-bit unsigned). These limits are listed in the order they are hit as archive size grows, so the earlier ones mask those that follow. The original Solaris archive file format can handle sizes up to 4GB without issue. However, the ar command was delivered as a 32-bit executable that did not use the largefile APIs. As such, the ar command itself could not create a file larger than 2GB. One can solve this by building ar with the largefile APIs which would allow it to reach 4GB, but a simpler and better answer is to deliver a 64-bit ar, which has the ability to scale well past 4GB. Symbol table offsets are stored as 32-bit big-endian binary integers, which limits the maximum archive size to 4GB. To get around this limit requires a different symbol table format, or an extension mechanism to the current one, similar in nature to the way member names longer than 15 characters are handled in member headers. The size field in the archive member header (ar_hdr) is an ASCII string capable of representing a 32-bit unsigned value. This places a 4GB size limit on the size of any individual member in an archive. In considering format extensions to get past these limits, it is important to remember that very few archives will require the ability to scale past 4GB for many years. The old format, while no beauty, continues to be sufficient for its purpose. This argues for a backward compatible fix that allows newer versions of Solaris to produce archives that are compatible with older versions of the system unless the size of the archive exceeds 4GB. Archive Format Differences Among Unix Variants While considering how to extend Solaris archives to scale to 64-bits, I wanted to know how similar archives from other Unix systems are to those produced by Solaris, and whether they had already solved the 64-bit issue. I've successfully moved archives between different Unix systems before with good luck, so I knew that there was some commonality. If it turned out that there was already a viable defacto standard for 64-bit archives, it would obviously be better to adopt that rather than invent something new. The archive file format is not formally standardized. However, the ar command and archive format were part of the original Unix from Bell Labs. Other systems started with that format, extending it in various often incompatible ways, but usually with the same common shared core. Most of these systems use the same magic number to identify their archives, despite the fact that their archives are not always fully compatible with each other. It is often true that archives can be copied between different Unix variants, and if the member names are short enough, the ar command from one system can often read archives produced on another. In practice, it is rare to find an archive containing anything other than objects for a single operating system and machine type. Such an archive is only of use on the type of system that created it, and is only used on that system. This is probably why cross platform compatibility of archives between Unix variants has never been an issue. Otherwise, the use of the same magic number in archives with incompatible formats would be a problem. I was able to find information for a number of Unix variants, described below. These can be divided roughly into three tribes, SVR4 Unix, BSD Unix, and IBM AIX. Solaris is a SVR4 Unix, and its archives are completely compatible with those from the other members of that group (GNU/Linux, HP-UX, and SGI IRIX). AIX AIX is an exception to rule that Unix archive formats are all based on the original Bell labs Unix format. It appears that AIX supports 2 formats (small and big), both of which differ in fundamental ways from other Unix systems: These formats use a different magic number than the standard one used by Solaris and other Unix variants. They include support for removing archive members from a file without reallocating the file, marking dead areas as unused, and reusing them when new archive items are inserted. They have a special table of contents member (File Member Header) which lets you find out everything that's in the archive without having to actually traverse the entire file. Their symbol table members are quite similar to those from other systems though. Their member headers are doubly linked, containing offsets to both the previous and next members. Of the Unix systems described here, AIX has the only format I saw that will have reasonable insert/delete performance for really large archives. Everyone else has O(n) performance, and are going to be slow to use with large archives. BSD BSD has gone through 4 versions of archive format, which are described in their manpage. They use the same member header as SVR4, but their symbol table format is different, and their scheme for long member names puts the name directly after the member header rather than into a string table. GNU/Linux The GNU toolchain uses the SVR4 format, and is compatible with Solaris. HP-UX HP-UX seems to follow the SVR4 model, and is compatible with Solaris. IRIX IRIX has 32 and 64-bit archives. The 32-bit format is the standard SVR4 format, and is compatible with Solaris. The 64-bit format is the same, except that the symbol table uses 64-bit integers. IRIX assumes that an archive contains objects of a single ELFCLASS/MACHINE, and any archive containing ELFCLASS64 objects receives a 64-bit symbol table. Although they only use it for 64-bit objects, nothing in the archive format limits it to ELFCLASS64. It would be perfectly valid to produce a 64-bit symbol table in an archive containing 32-bit objects, text files, or anything else. Tru64 Unix (Digital/Compaq/HP) Tru64 Unix uses a format much like ours, but their symbol table is a hash table, making specific symbol lookup much faster. The Solaris link-editor uses archives by examining the entire symbol table looking for unsatisfied symbols for the link, and not by looking up individual symbols, so there would be no benefit to Solaris from such a hash table. The Tru64 ld must use a different approach in which the hash table pays off for them. Widening the existing SVR4 archive symbol tables rather than inventing something new is the simplest path forward. There is ample precedent for this approach in the ELF world. When ELF was extended to support 64-bit objects, the approach was largely to take the existing data structures, and define 64-bit versions of them. We called the old set ELF32, and the new set ELF64. My guess is that there was no need to widen the archive format at that time, but had there been, it seems obvious that this is how it would have been done. The Implementation of 64-bit Solaris Archives As mentioned earlier, there was no desire to improve the fundamental nature of archives. They have always had O(n) insert/delete behavior, and for the most part it hasn't mattered. AIX made efforts to improve this, but those efforts did not find widespread adoption. For the purposes of link-editing, which is essentially the only thing that archives are used for, the existing format is adequate, and issues of backward compatibility trump the desire to do something technically better. Widening the existing symbol table format to 64-bits is therefore the obvious way to proceed. For Solaris 11, I implemented that, and I also updated the ar command so that a 64-bit version is run by default. This eliminates the 2 most significant limits to archive size, leaving only the limit on an individual archive member. We only generate a 64-bit symbol table if the archive exceeds 4GB, or when the new -S option to the ar command is used. This maximizes backward compatibility, as an archive produced by Solaris 11 is highly likely to be less than 4GB in size, and will therefore employ the same format understood by older versions of the system. The main reason for the existence of the -S option is to allow us to test the 64-bit format without having to construct huge archives to do so. I don't believe it will find much use outside of that. Other than the new ability to create and use extremely large archives, this change is largely invisible to the end user. When reading an archive, the ar command will transparently accept either form of symbol table. Similarly, the ELF library (libelf) has been updated to understand either format. Users of libelf (such as the link-editor ld) do not need to be modified to use the new format, because these changes are encapsulated behind the existing functions provided by libelf. As mentioned above, this work did not lift the limit on the maximum size of an individual archive member. That limit remains fixed at 4GB for now. This is not because we think objects will never get that large, for the history of computing says otherwise. Rather, this is based on an estimation that single relocatable objects of that size will not appear for a decade or two. A lot can change in that time, and it is better not to overengineer things by writing code that will sit and rot for years without being used. It is not too soon however to have a plan for that eventuality. When the time comes when this limit needs to be lifted, I believe that there is a simple solution that is consistent with the existing format. The archive member header size field is an ASCII string, like the name, and as such, the overflow scheme used for long names can also be used to handle the size. The size string would be placed into the archive string table, and its offset in the string table would then be written into the archive header size field using the same format "/ddd" used for overflowed names.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 08, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, November 08, 2011Popular ReleasesFacebook C# SDK: v5.3.2: This is a RTW release which adds new features and bug fixes to v5.2.1. Query/QueryAsync methods uses graph api instead of legacy rest api. removed dependency from Code Contracts enabled Task Parallel Support in .NET 4.0+ (experimental) added support for early preview for .NET 4.5 (binaries not distributed in codeplex nor nuget.org, will need to manually build from Facebook-Net45.sln) added additional method overloads for .NET 4.5 to support IProgress<T> for upload progress added ne...Delete Inactive TS Ports: List and delete the Inactive TS Ports: List and delete the Inactive TS Ports - The InactiveTSPortList.EXE accepts command line arguments The InactiveTSPortList.Standalone.WithoutPrompt.exe runs as a standalone exe without the need for any command line arguments.ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.60.0: Added almost full support for auto filters (missing custom date filters). See examples Filter Values, Custom Filters Fixed issues 7016, 7391, 7388, 7389, 7198, 7196, 7194, 7186, 7067, 7115, 7144Microsoft Research Boogie: Nightly builds: This download category contains automatically released nightly builds, reflecting the current state of Boogie's development. We try to make sure each nightly build passes the test suite. If you suspect that was not the case, please try the previous nightly build to see if that really is the problem. Also, please see the installation instructions.DotSpatial: Release 821: Updated releaseGoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 6.0: Major design changes to the control in order to achieve better scalability and extensibility for the new features comming with GoogleMaps API. GoogleMap control switched to GoogleMaps API v3 and .NET 4.0. GoogleMap control is 100% ScriptControl now, it requires ScriptManager to be registered on the pages where and before it is used. Markers, polylines, polygons and directions were implemented as ExtenderControl, instead of being inner properties of GoogleMap control. Better perfomance. Better...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: V2.1: Version 2.1 (click on the right) this uses V4.0 of .net Version 2.1 adds the following features: (apologize if I forget some, added a lot of little things) Manual Lookup with TV or Movie (finally huh!), you can look up a movie or TV episode directly, you can right click on anythign, and choose manual lookup, then will allow you to type anything you want to look up and it will assign it to the file you right clicked. No Rename: a very popular request, this is an option you can set so that t...SubExtractor: Release 1020: Feature: added "baseline double quotes" character to selector box Feature: added option to save SRT files as ANSI (instead of previous UTF-8 only) Feature: made "Save Sup files to Source directory" apply to both Sup and Idx source files. Fix: removed SDH text (...) or [...] that is split over 2 lines Fix: better decision-making in when to prefix a line with a '-' because SDH was removedAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6.1: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6.1?? ??.hlv...Track Folder Changes: Track Folder Changes 1.1: Fixed exception when right-clicking the root nodeMapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.6 - Final release - 32Bit: This is the final release of MapWindow v4.8. It has 4.8.6 as version number. This version has been thoroughly tested. If you do get an exception send the exception to us. Don't forget to include your e-mail address. Use the forums at http://www.mapwindow.org/phorum/ for questions. Please consider donating a small portion of the money you have saved by having free GIS tools: http://www.mapwindow.org/pages/donate.php What’s New in 4.8.6 (Final release) · A few minor issues have been fixed Wha...Kinect Paint: Kinect Paint 1.1: Updated for Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 Beta 2!Kinect Mouse Cursor: Kinect Mouse Cursor 1.1: Updated for Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 Beta 2!Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit: Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit 1.1: Updated for Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 Beta 2!Async Executor: 1.0: Source code of the AsyncExecutorMedia Companion: MC 3.421b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) TV Show Resolutions... Fix to show the season-specials.tbn when selecting an episode from season 00. Before, MC would try & load season00.tbn Fix for issue #197 - new show added by 'Manually Add Path' not being picked up. Also made non-visible the same thing in Root Folders...?????????? - ????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-11-02: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ??????，11??，?????20????Microsoft OneCode Sample，????6?Program Language Sample，2?Windows Base Sample，2?GDI+ Sample，4?Internet Explorer Sample?6?ASP.NET Sample。?????????????。 ????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 Program Language CSImageFullScreenSlideShow VBImageFullScreenSlideShow CSDynamicallyBuildLambdaExpressionWithFie...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.1 Alpha: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1 Alpha. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python programming language. This release includes new core IDE features, a couple of new sample libraries for interacting with Kinect and Excel, and many bug fixes for issues reported since the release of 1.0. For the core IDE features we’ve added many new features which improve the basic edit...BExplorer (Better Explorer): Better Explorer 2.0.0.631 Alpha: Changelog: Added: Some new functions in ribbon Added: Possibility to choose displayed columns Added: Basic Search Fixed: Some bugs after navigation Fixed: Attempt to fix slow navigation and slow start Known issues: - BreadcrumbBar fails on some situations - Basic search does not work well in some situations Please if anyone finds bugs be kind and report them at the Issue Tracker! Thanks!DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue with upgrades on systems that had upgraded the Telerik library to 6.0.0 Fixed issue with Razor Host upgrade to 5.6.3 The logic for module administration checks contains incorrect logic in 1 place, opening the possibility of a user with edit permissions gaining access to functionality they should not have through a particularly crafted url Security FixesBrowsers support the ability to remember common strings such as usernames/addresses etc. Code was adde...New ProjectsAddThis for DotNetNuke: A simple AddThis module (plugin) for DotNetNukeAgnisExchange: <AGNIS>as A Growable Network Infor;ation System is developped in <C#>Blogger auto poster: Do you want to have a links blog? Share your favorites links in Google+ and then allow BAP(Blogger auto poster) to read its JSON feed and post its daily summary at your Blogger weblog automatically. CarbonEmissions: CarbonEmissionsCredivale: CredivaleCRM 2011 TreeView for Lookup: CRM 2011 WebResource Utility for showing Self-Joined Lookup data in TreeView form.Dafuscator: Dafuscator is a database data obfuscation system that allows you to tactically obfuscate or delete data out of your production database while leaving most of the data intact.DigDesDevSchoolHomeSaleSystem: This is study project. Done by Russian students. Use ASP.NET MVC.Dynamic Data Extensions: Dynamic Data Extensions add new features to the current ASP.Net 4 Dynamic Data versionEchosoft NoCrash From Scratch: Nocrash From scratch, a operating system designed (but not promised to be) almost invincible from viruses and %20 Windows-like using DoubleTime emulation to make it act like Windows 2000EdiProj: Just a PHP and Asp.Net project.experteer: decision theory class projectFlan Project: Fast-paced Action-RPG (2D Scrolling)GameXNA_Master: XNA MASETR GD 2011 Gyrf: SecretJogo Da Velha em CSharp: Jogo da velha feito para o curso de c#.Jogo das cores: Projeto da aula de extensão de C#Kookaburra: Kookaburra is a framework based on Windows PowerShell 2.0 that can be used for automating SharePoint 2010 administration. It contains a menu, several functions and a well defined structure for adding PowerShell scriptlets.LaunchWithParams: LaunchWithParams is a Windows Explorer add-on that allows you to launch an application executable with specific command-line parameters without having to open a command prompt.MerchantTribe - Shopping Cart and Ecommerce Platform in C# MVC ASP.NET: MerchantTribe is a free, open-source ASP.NET MVC ecommerce platform in C#. For more than a decade, we've been building and selling commercial .NET shopping cart software. Now, we're releasing an open-source project based on our award winning BV Commerce software. Thousands of companies use our shopping cart include Pebble Beach Resorts, DataPipe, TastyKake, MathBlaster and Chesapeake Energy. We need as many people as possible using MerchantTribe for it to thrive. We need Merchants, De...NaiveAlgorithms: Naive C# implementation of basic, general purpose algorithms, with an emphasis on readability, maintainability and correctness. While asymptotic complexity of algorithms is preserved, there is no premature optimisation performed to improve performance. NeonMikaWebserver: NeonMikaWebserver is easy to set up on your .Net MF device, as long as it has an ethernet port. It's espacially created for the Netduino, but I think it's no big work to port it to other plattforms. It provides the following functionalities: -XML Responses ... Just create an Instance of XMLResponse, give it an URI to listen for and fill a Hashtable with your response keys and values... Voila ;) -File Response ... No XML Response fitting your URL? Probably you want to watch a file sa...Next Action: The Next Action web application is a GTD task manager implemented with using MVC3, jQuery, Entity Framework. Orchard Comments Refactoring: Refactoring Orchard's comments moduleoutsource: outsourceScutex: Scutex, pronounced (sec-u-techs), is a 100% managed .Net Framework licensing platform for your applications. Scutex is a flexible licensing system allowing multiple licensing schemes allowing you the most control over how you licensing your products. Unlike any other licensing system on the market, Scutex provides 4 distinct licensing schemes, allowing you to protect your products at different levels using completely different licensing schemes, key types and protection systems. Using Scut...sigem2: Proyecto sigem2SSDL: An easy way to call and manage stored procedures in .NET.Trabalho C# - Datilografia: Software de datilografia produzido para o curso de extensão em C# da UFSCar Sorocaba.triliporra: Triliporra Euro 2012User Interface Toolkit: Ever dreamed about having one framework to write UI independently of your targetted client ? Now your dream has come true !vimrc: my vimrc fileVisuospatial Web Browsing using Kinect: The Kinect Web Browser project explores how users might use the Kinect sensor as a natural interface to browse the visual web. It's developed in C#.VNManager: VNManager or Version Number Manager is a simple Windows command line application which will update your Microsoft Visual Studio AssemblyInfo.cs files AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes based on rules defined as comments on the same lines.WeddingAssistant: My site will be a ‘gift wish’ site for couples getting married. It will also be a place where people can come and look at ideas for hen and stag nights. Users log in and create a list of items they wish to receive for their wedding or look for ideas for hen and stag nights. The site will allow users to compile a list of items they have found on the internet from specific listed shops and order them in preference. The compiled list is then sent out to friends and relatives who can create a...WMS.NET: thewms is warehouse manager system! For the logistics industry! The team learning project! Built on the mvc3.0 and wcf ! Using jquery js framework as front endWorkflowRobot: Workflow based automation software.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011Popular ReleasesKoober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.?????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????VidCoder: 1.2.0: Updated to HandBrake svn 4311. Refactored to read in list of encoders from HandBrake itself. Added ffaac, FLAC audio and ffmpeg2 video. Reworked audio encoding UI: removed grid and gave each encoding more vertical space. Added audio quality targeting and compression. Added status messages. Added messages for a few events (encode start/stop, playing a preview clip, update available, update download finished). Made source and destination path UI elements smarter about what parts they cut ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 2.2.0.1: In this version: Custom Icons - now you can change the icons of the bookmarks. By default, whenever an image is added, the icon is automatically changed to a thumbnail of the picture. This can be turned off in the settings (Options... > Settings) Ability to remove items from the 'Recent' category Bugfixes - 'Choose' button in 'Edit Bookmark' now works Another bug fix: another problem in the 'Edit Bookmark' windowMedia Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.Image Converter: Image Converter 0.3: New Features: - English and German support Technical Improvements: - Microsoft All Rules using Code Analysis Planned Features for future release: 1. Unit testing 2. Command line interface 3. Automatic UpdatesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)NDepend TFS 2010 integration: version 0.5.0 beta 1: Only the activity and the VS plugin are avalaible right now. They basically work. Data types that are logged into tfs reports are subject to change. This is no big deal since data is not yet sent into the warehouse.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...DotNetNuke® FAQ: 05.00.00: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 05.00.00 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. It is the first version which is rewritten in C#. The scope of this update is to fix all known issues and improve user interface. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESManage Categories button text was not localized Edit/Add FAQ Entry: button text was not localized ENHANCEMENTSAdded an option to select the control for category display: Listbox with checkboxes (flat category ...New ProjectsalphaCards: Digitale LernkarteiBinary Code Interpreter: The Binary Code Interpreter is a small and funny programming languaage. This interpreter works a bit like a Turing Machine.Buscar ciudades: This is the source code for the application "Buscar ciudades" published in the Windows Phone Marketplace. CamOnWeb - Componente para WebCam: Este projeto tem como objetivo o desenvolvimento um componente para captura e exibição de videos da webcam. Compare.Net: Compare.Net is a configurable application to compare and reconclie from different sources. C# WPF applcation targeting .Net 4CSGame: Academic project for our studies. Subject "Client -server technology"curbside: curbsideDanish Language Pack for Community Server: Danish Language Packs for Community Server 2.1 and 2007. At its inception, this project contains quite incomplete translations to Danish. This project provides a common resource where all interested parties can gradually improve on this language pack. Please join to improve the contents. The source code tree contains two major folders: One for Community Server 2.1 and one for Community Server 2007.Dependency Variable Lib: ??????????????????、?????????????????????。（???????、?????????????ｗ） ???、「??×??＝??」???????????????、????????、????????、???「??×??」????????????????????????????????????。 FreedBack: FreedBack allows you to quickly and easily embed a configurable feedback form into any web application. It can be a standalone application that you install and deploy, then embed a bit of script into existing apps to implement feedback, or you can make it part of your MVC App.Hageveld - NieuwsModule (Chris' Tutorial: A news article manager made for educational purposes.Idea Resto: Aplicación para restaurantes.jqgridmvcgeneration: codesmith template that creates js, html and asp.net mvc server side json server for a jqgrid -based table on a arbitratrary database table. The code includes pagination and server side sorting. Jqgrid is a great jquery extension that provides an ajax-enabled fully customizable interactive table based on server side data. However, the actual coding can be a bit tedious and cryptic. This project provides a template base approach that basically performs two tasks: 1. creates a client si...MyClassMapper: A simple configurable classmapper for mapping ClassA to ClassB and vice versa, the ideas are borrowed from the Dozer project (http://dozer.sourceforge.net). Most code is based on 'Dynamic Access' code from Hongju Cao <hjcao_wei@hotmail.com> (All that code is located in the "DynamicAccess" sub-directory from the project.)NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NObsidian: A proxy component to access Obisidian Portal API from .NetNSession: The objective of this project is to allow ASP Classic to access ASP.NET out-of-process session stores in the same way that ASP.NET accesses them, and thus share the session state with ASP.NET.NTextile: NTextile is a lightweight, humane web compatible markup generator. It generates valid XHTML output using simple easy to remember conventions and text characters (a.k.a modifiers), to markup plain text. NTextile is especially useful to provide quick and valid markup for .NET web applications. For e.g. wikis, blogs, online forums, content management systems etc. This project was inspired by Dean Allen’s original Textile features, as included in the Textpattern content management application. T...OpenTasksBehaviorsLibrary for Windows Phone: Open Tasks Behavior for Windows Phone *OpenWebBrowserTask *OpenMediaLauncherTaskPowerShell Cmdlet Sample: PowerShell Cmdlet SamplePrismEx: PrismEx is a library of helpers and extension methods to allow developers to more easily develop and test Prism applications. QuickDelete: A Windows Explorer add-on to delete files and folders very quickly, much more so than the usual Explorer command. Works on Windows XP or later. Currently in EXPERIMENTAL state. No releases have been produced yet.Quiz Module for DotNetNuke: This is a module that allows you to quickly and easily provide a quiz that can be taken by the visitors on your DotNetNuke website.RaptorDB - The Key Value Store: Smallest, fastest embedded nosql persisted dictionary using b+tree or MurMur hash indexing. (Now with Hybrid WAH bitmap indexes)Rockin CMS-LMS Combo: RockinCmsLms Combo provides a great way for users to build their content and training sites with one great tool. It will be developed with C# 4.0-4.5, Silverlight, JQuery, and ASP.Net and MVC 3.0 with Razor. This project will demonstrate how to use todays technologies to build solutions that last. We may have 2 versions - one with a local db and one with a Windows Azure storage solution. Suggest using the Web Platform Installer to get all of the components.SandKeeper - Time Tracking Addin for Outlook 2010 tasks: SandKeeper is an Outlook Addin that enables you to track time for your tasks.Share: Share is a new web-based content management system. For more information about this project, please visit http://blog.aphysoft.com.SharePoint 2010 ViewEdit Group By Content Type: A simple project that injects JavaScript into the ribbon bar area to add "Content Type" as a choice on the ViewEdit.aspx page. With this, users can once again create views that group by Content Type without having to use SharePoint Designer 2010.Simple Merge Sort: This is a simple implementation of Merge-Sort, using to sort an Array of Integers.UKag: Unity3D?Kr2/KAG3??moduleUsingLinq: TestUtec Logger: Utec Logger is meant to be used the Turbo XS UTEC and UTEC Delta. It is simply a data logger application, it will auto logged based on pre defined conditionals. It also takes this information and displays it in a two dimensional table, averaging the values appropriately to ease of log analysis.WOXalizer: Fork of WOX project. http://woxserializer.sourceforge.net/Zeta Backup Validator: A small .NET 3.5 console application that helps you verifying whether your backups succeed by checking files and folders with various configurable rules (folder size, file age, etc.).Zeta Links: A web application for generating and measuring shortcut hyperlinks, similar to bit.ly.Zombie Slayer v1.0: Zombie Slayer v1.0 is an action first person shooter where players can try and survive a never-ending wave of zombies for as long as they can while a timer keeps track of how long they survived and posts times online from longest to shortest.?????????????: ??????????????????，????。

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• Parsing Concerns

  - by Jesse

  If you’ve ever written an application that accepts date and/or time inputs from an external source (a person, an uploaded file, posted XML, etc.) then you’ve no doubt had to deal with parsing some text representing a date into a data structure that a computer can understand. Similarly, you’ve probably also had to take values from those same data structure and turn them back into their original formats. Most (all?) suitably modern development platforms expose some kind of parsing and formatting functionality for turning text into dates and vice versa. In .NET, the DateTime data structure exposes ‘Parse’ and ‘ToString’ methods for this purpose. This post will focus mostly on parsing, though most of the examples and suggestions below can also be applied to the ToString method. The DateTime.Parse method is pretty permissive in the values that it will accept (though apparently not as permissive as some other languages) which makes it pretty easy to take some text provided by a user and turn it into a proper DateTime instance. Here are some examples (note that the resulting DateTime values are shown using the RFC1123 format): DateTime.Parse("3/12/2010"); //Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT DateTime.Parse("2:00 AM"); //Sat, 01 Jan 2011 02:00:00 GMT (took today's date as date portion) DateTime.Parse("5-15/2010"); //Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT DateTime.Parse("7/8"); //Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT DateTime.Parse("Thursday, July 1, 2010"); //Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT Dealing With Inaccuracy While the DateTime struct has the ability to store a date and time value accurate down to the millisecond, most date strings provided by a user are not going to specify values with that much precision. In each of the above examples, the Parse method was provided a partial value from which to construct a proper DateTime. This means it had to go ahead and assume what you meant and fill in the missing parts of the date and time for you. This is a good thing, especially when we’re talking about taking input from a user. We can’t expect that every person using our software to provide a year, day, month, hour, minute, second, and millisecond every time they need to express a date. That said, it’s important for developers to understand what assumptions the software might be making and plan accordingly. I think the assumptions that were made in each of the above examples were pretty reasonable, though if we dig into this method a little bit deeper we’ll find that there are a lot more assumptions being made under the covers than you might have previously known. One of the biggest assumptions that the DateTime.Parse method has to make relates to the format of the date represented by the provided string. Let’s consider this example input string: ‘10-02-15’. To some people. that might look like ‘15-Feb-2010’. To others, it might be ‘02-Oct-2015’. Like many things, it depends on where you’re from. This Is America! Most cultures around the world have adopted a “little-endian” or “big-endian” formats. (Source: Date And Time Notation By Country) In this context,  a “little-endian” date format would list the date parts with the least significant first while the “big-endian” date format would list them with the most significant first. For example, a “little-endian” date would be “day-month-year” and “big-endian” would be “year-month-day”. It’s worth nothing here that ISO 8601 defines a “big-endian” format as the international standard. While I personally prefer “big-endian” style date formats, I think both styles make sense in that they follow some logical standard with respect to ordering the date parts by their significance. Here in the United States, however, we buck that trend by using what is, in comparison, a completely nonsensical format of “month/day/year”. Almost no other country in the world uses this format. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have done some international travel, so I’ve been aware of this difference for many years, but never really thought much about it. Until recently, I had been developing software for exclusively US-based audiences and remained blissfully ignorant of the different date formats employed by other countries around the world. The web application I work on is being rolled out to users in different countries, so I was recently tasked with updating it to support different date formats. As it turns out, .NET has a great mechanism for dealing with different date formats right out of the box. Supporting date formats for different cultures is actually pretty easy once you understand this mechanism. Pulling the Curtain Back On the Parse Method Have you ever taken a look at the different flavors (read: overloads) that the DateTime.Parse method comes in? In it’s simplest form, it takes a single string parameter and returns the corresponding DateTime value (if it can divine what the date value should be). You can optionally provide two additional parameters to this method: an ‘System.IFormatProvider’ and a ‘System.Globalization.DateTimeStyles’. Both of these optional parameters have some bearing on the assumptions that get made while parsing a date, but for the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the ‘System.IFormatProvider’ parameter. The IFormatProvider exposes a single method called ‘GetFormat’ that returns an object to be used for determining the proper format for displaying and parsing things like numbers and dates. This interface plays a big role in the globalization capabilities that are built into the .NET Framework. The cornerstone of these globalization capabilities can be found in the ‘System.Globalization.CultureInfo’ class. To put it simply, the CultureInfo class is used to encapsulate information related to things like language, writing system, and date formats for a certain culture. Support for many cultures are “baked in” to the .NET Framework and there is capacity for defining custom cultures if needed (thought I’ve never delved into that). While the details of the CultureInfo class are beyond the scope of this post, so for now let me just point out that the CultureInfo class implements the IFormatInfo interface. This means that a CultureInfo instance created for a given culture can be provided to the DateTime.Parse method in order to tell it what date formats it should expect. So what happens when you don’t provide this value? Let’s crack this method open in Reflector: When no IFormatInfo parameter is provided (i.e. we use the simple DateTime.Parse(string) overload), the ‘DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo’ is used instead. Drilling down a bit further we can see the implementation of the DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo property: From this property we can determine that, in the absence of an IFormatProvider being specified, the DateTime.Parse method will assume that the provided date should be treated as if it were in the format defined by the CultureInfo object that is attached to the current thread. The culture specified by the CultureInfo instance on the current thread can vary depending on several factors, but if you’re writing an application where a single instance might be used by people from different cultures (i.e. a web application with an international user base), it’s important to know what this value is. Having a solid strategy for setting the current thread’s culture for each incoming request in an internationally used ASP .NET application is obviously important, and might make a good topic for a future post. For now, let’s think about what the implications of not having the correct culture set on the current thread. Let’s say you’re running an ASP .NET application on a server in the United States. The server was setup by English speakers in the United States, so it’s configured for US English. It exposes a web page where users can enter order data, one piece of which is an anticipated order delivery date. Most users are in the US, and therefore enter dates in a ‘month/day/year’ format. The application is using the DateTime.Parse(string) method to turn the values provided by the user into actual DateTime instances that can be stored in the database. This all works fine, because your users and your server both think of dates in the same way. Now you need to support some users in South America, where a ‘day/month/year’ format is used. The best case scenario at this point is a user will enter March 13, 2011 as ‘25/03/2011’. This would cause the call to DateTime.Parse to blow up since that value doesn’t look like a valid date in the US English culture (Note: In all likelihood you might be using the DateTime.TryParse(string) method here instead, but that method behaves the same way with regard to date formats). “But wait a minute”, you might be saying to yourself, “I thought you said that this was the best case scenario?” This scenario would prevent users from entering orders in the system, which is bad, but it could be worse! What if the order needs to be delivered a day earlier than that, on March 12, 2011? Now the user enters ‘12/03/2011’. Now the call to DateTime.Parse sees what it thinks is a valid date, but there’s just one problem: it’s not the right date. Now this order won’t get delivered until December 3, 2011. In my opinion, that kind of data corruption is a much bigger problem than having the Parse call fail. What To Do? My order entry example is a bit contrived, but I think it serves to illustrate the potential issues with accepting date input from users. There are some approaches you can take to make this easier on you and your users: Eliminate ambiguity by using a graphical date input control. I’m personally a fan of a jQuery UI Datepicker widget. It’s pretty easy to setup, can be themed to match the look and feel of your site, and has support for multiple languages and cultures. Be sure you have a way to track the culture preference of each user in your system. For a web application this could be done using something like a cookie or session state variable. Ensure that the current user’s culture is being applied correctly to DateTime formatting and parsing code. This can be accomplished by ensuring that each request has the handling thread’s CultureInfo set properly, or by using the Format and Parse method overloads that accept an IFormatProvider instance where the provided value is a CultureInfo object constructed using the current user’s culture preference. When in doubt, favor formats that are internationally recognizable. Using the string ‘2010-03-05’ is likely to be recognized as March, 5 2011 by users from most (if not all) cultures. Favor standard date format strings over custom ones. So far we’ve only talked about turning a string into a DateTime, but most of the same “gotchas” apply when doing the opposite. Consider this code: someDateValue.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy"); This will output the same string regardless of what the current thread’s culture is set to (with the exception of some cultures that don’t use the Gregorian calendar system, but that’s another issue all together). For displaying dates to users, it would be better to do this: someDateValue.ToString("d"); This standard format string of “d” will use the “short date format” as defined by the culture attached to the current thread (or provided in the IFormatProvider instance in the proper method overload). This means that it will honor the proper month/day/year, year/month/day, or day/month/year format for the culture. Knowing Your Audience The examples and suggestions shown above can go a long way toward getting an application in shape for dealing with date inputs from users in multiple cultures. There are some instances, however, where taking approaches like these would not be appropriate. In some cases, the provider or consumer of date values that pass through your application are not people, but other applications (or other portions of your own application). For example, if your site has a page that accepts a date as a query string parameter, you’ll probably want to format that date using invariant date format. Otherwise, the same URL could end up evaluating to a different page depending on the user that is viewing it. In addition, if your application exports data for consumption by other systems, it’s best to have an agreed upon format that all systems can use and that will not vary depending upon whether or not the users of the systems on either side prefer a month/day/year or day/month/year format. I’ll look more at some approaches for dealing with these situations in a future post. If you take away one thing from this post, make it an understanding of the importance of knowing where the dates that pass through your system come from and are going to. You will likely want to vary your parsing and formatting approach depending on your audience.

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• Intel Extreme Tuning utility options are greyed

  - by Abhishek Sha

  I'm having a ASUS K55VM with Intel Core i7 3610QM (IvyBridge) with a NVIDIA GT630M. I'm trying to operate the Intel XTU, but as you can see in the screenshot, all the options are greyed out. Can you please help with this situation. Another are is the CPU Throttling (Intel SpeedStep) which is always shown as 0%. But in the Intel Turbo Monitor, the Speed keeps dynamically changing. Then why is the CPU Throttling always at 0%?:

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• Pfsense mbuf full, what to do?

  - by sathia

  I noticed today that the MBUF usage has hit its limit. Apparently the site I'm running under pfsense is having some troubles too, I'd like to know if it would be safe to just sysctl kern.ipc.nmbclusters=65536 I wouldn't like to reboot the server, is it safe (or useful) to do it via pfsense shell? thanks you very much 2.0-RELEASE (amd64) built on Tue Sep 13 17:05:32 EDT 2011 State table size 35573/550000 MBUF Usage 25600/25600 CPU usage 2% Memory usage 17% (2GB) Swap 0% CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5450 @ 3.00GHz

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• ZTE ZXDSL 831 Series firmware update

  - by Eugenio Miró

  Hi everybody! I'm having a problem with my broadband connection established through a ZTE ZXDSL 831 Series DSL modem and wandered if a firmware update could help me fix that. The networking problem is not important at this point but my question is where to find this modem firmware updates because ZTE does not provide the bits. Does anyone know where I can find it? Thanks in advance!

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• Microsoft deployment toolkit 2010 failure message

  - by elhombre

  Hi all I am having a problem with the deployment of Windows 7 from a server with Microsoft Toolkit 2010. When deployment has finished I get a Windows error report which shows following message. FAILURE (Er): 70: CreateObject(Microsoft.BDD.Utility) - Permission denied Litetouch deployment failed, Return Code = - 2147023589 0x8007051B I don't get it what Microsoft.BDD.Utility is exactly and when this utility is used (Tasksequence?) ? Can anyone help me on this problem?

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• How to burn WIM image to DVD or to convert it to ISO?

  - by dv9000

  I need to run vista recovery but its boot loader is destoryed. The only way to run reovery seems to be burning a temporary DVD from base.wim and boot.wim taken from vista recovery partition. How can I do this without having any vista installation or DVD? I can dowload anything but ony from legitimate sources (e.g. not torrents etc). Thank you in advance.

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• SMTP 552 4.3.1 Session size exceeds fixed maximum session size.

  - by JL

  I'm having a frustrating problem with one of our clients who is running an exchange SMTP server. I have an emailing component that is written in .net and I've specifically used Mono DLL's to ensure that the email component sends the ELO and QUIT command for each message it sends. Each mail I send will never exceed 10MB's including attachments, which is lower than the session size value set in the clients exchange configuration. Still the problem persists. Any ideas where to look?

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• Is there a HTML5 Validator plugin for Firefox?

  - by Andreas Bonini

  Is there a plugin for firefox to validate HTML 5? I've always used this but if my webpage has a <!DOCTYPE HTML> doctype it complains about it not having a doctype at all.

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• How to install SQL Server 2005 Configuration Manager without installing SQL Server Management Studio

  - by Arnold Zokas

  Hi, I need to configure SQL Server aliases on a public-facing production server. To do that, I need to install SQL Server Configuration Manager. I was not able to find a standalone installer for that, so I am having to install SQL Server 2005 Client Components. This approach is not ideal as we don't want to have SSMS on an public-facing production server. Is there a way to install SQL Server 2005 Configuration Manager without installing SQL Server Management Studio? Thanks, Arnold

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• Vmware 7 AppHangB1 on windows 7 x64 (host) and windows xp (guest)

  - by frabiacca

  I'm having an issue running Windows XP professional guests using Vmware workstation 7.0.0 build-203739 in a Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit host. My platform is a Dell Studio XPS 13 with 6GB RAM with an x64 processor. The VMWare freezes for up to 90s every 15 - 20 minutes, then just carries on as if nothing happened! I've no idea what the problem is ... Any idea?

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• Windows 7 won't boot past starting windows screen / stuck on Classpnp.sys in safe mode....

  - by alex

  I'm having trouble with my Windows 7 machine It was fine, until this morning, when, for no reason what so ever, it decided not to boot past the "Starting Windows" screen No hardware has been installed / removed. I tried to boot into Safe mode, but it got stuck on classpnp.sys I tried to do a recovery - by booting on to the windows 7 dvd... This did not work either. Any ideas?

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• Taming XCode's auto-complete options

  - by Nippysaurus

  I am fairly new to XCode and the Objective-C language. When I am instantiating a class, for example an NSMutableArray, XCode will provide a whole lot of auto-complete options. Even for an empty class which simply extends an NSObject has many options, most of which seem completely useless. What is the reason for having so many auto-complete options, or can they be "tamed" in the preferences?

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• Httpd + Expect Script Fail (no more ptys) if httpd is not run through cli

  - by Apostolis

  I have a CentOS virtual server through Vmware. The server runs an httpd daemon which serves an php page with a form. The users complete the form, and by clicking submit the php page calls an expect scripts. If i run the httpd throught the default init.d script i get a "no more ptys" error, but if i run httpd through root terminal the script runs without problems. How can i make the httpd run the expect scripts without having to run the httpd daemon by hand.

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