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• SQL SERVER – Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database

  - by pinaldave

  While engaging in a performance tuning consultation for a client, a situation occurred where they were facing a lot of CXPACKET Waits Stats. The client asked me if I could help them reduce this huge number of wait stats. I usually receive this kind of request from other client as well, but the important thing to understand is whether this question has any merits or benefits, or not. Before we continue the resolution, let us understand what CXPACKET Wait Stats are. The official definition suggests that CXPACKET Wait Stats occurs when trying to synchronize the query processor exchange iterator. You may consider lowering the degree of parallelism if a conflict concerning this wait type develops into a problem. (from BOL) In simpler words, when a parallel operation is created for SQL Query, there are multiple threads for a single query. Each query deals with a different set of the data (or rows). Due to some reasons, one or more of the threads lag behind, creating the CXPACKET Wait Stat. Threads which came first have to wait for the slower thread to finish. The Wait by a specific completed thread is called CXPACKET Wait Stat. Note that CXPACKET Wait is done by completed thread and not the one which are unfinished. “Note that not all the CXPACKET wait types are bad. You might experience a case when it totally makes sense. There might also be cases when this is also unavoidable. If you remove this particular wait type for any query, then that query may run slower because the parallel operations are disabled for the query.” Now let us see what the best practices to reduce the CXPACKET Wait Stats are. The suggestions, with which you will find that if you search online through the browser, would play a major role as and might be asked about their jobs In addition, might tell you that you should set ‘maximum degree of parallelism’ to 1. I do agree with these suggestions, too; however, I think this is not the final resolutions. As soon as you set your entire query to run on single CPU, you will get a very bad performance from the queries which are actually performing okay when using parallelism. The best suggestion to this is that you set ‘the maximum degree of parallelism’ to a lower number or 1 (be very careful with this – it can create more problems) but tune the queries which can be benefited from multiple CPU’s. You can use query hint OPTION (MAXDOP 0) to run the server to use parallelism. Here is the two-quick script which helps to resolve these issues: Change MAXDOP at Server Level EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max degree of parallelism', N'1' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Run Query with all the CPU (using parallelism) USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY ProductID OPTION (MAXDOP 0) GO Below is the blog post which will help you to find all the parallel query in your server. SQL SERVER – Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan Please note running Queries in single CPU may worsen your performance and it is not recommended at all. Infect this can be very bad advise. I strongly suggest that you identify the queries which are offending and tune them instead of following any other suggestions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• PHP PSR-0 + several namespaces in one file and autoload

  - by Nemoden

  I've been thinking for a while about defining several namespaces in one php file and so, having several classes inside this file. Suppose, I want to implement something like Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr: Expr.php Expr |-- Andx.php |-- Base.php |-- Comparison.php |-- Composite.php |-- From.php |-- Func.php |-- GroupBy.php |-- Join.php |-- Literal.php |-- Math.php |-- OrderBy.php |-- Orx.php `-- Select.php It would be nice if I had all of this in one file - Expr.php: namespace Doctrine\ORM\Query; class Expr { // code } namespace Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr; class Func { // code } // etc... What I'm thinking of is directories naming convention and, unlike PSR-0 having several classes and namespaces in one file. It's best explained by the code: ls Doctrine/orm/query Expr.php that's it - only Expr.php Since Expr.php is somewhat I call a "meta-namespace" for Expr\Func, it make sense to place all the classes inside Expr.php (as shown above). So, the vendor name is still starts with an uppercased letter (Doctrine) and the other parts of namespace start with lowercased letter. We can write an autoload so it would respect this notion: function load_class($class) { if (class_exists($class)) { return true; } $tokenized_path = explode(array("_", "\\"), DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $class); // array('Doctrine', 'orm', 'query', 'Expr', 'Func'); // ^^^^ // first, we are looking for first uppercased namespace part // and if it's not last (not the class name), we use it as a filename // and wiping away the rest to compose a path to a file we need to include if (FALSE !== ($meta_class_index = find_meta_class($tokenized_path))) { $new_tokenized_path = array_slice($tokenized_path, 0, $meta_class_index); $path_to_class = implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $new_tokenized_path); } else { // no meta class found $path_to_class = implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $tokenized_path); } if (file_exists($path_to_class.'.php')) { require_once $path_to_class.'.php'; } return false; } Another reason to do so is to reduce a number of php files scattered among directories. Usually you check file existence before you require a file to fail gracefully: file_exists($path_to_class.'.php'); If you take a look at actual Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr code, you'll see they use all of the "inner-classes", so you actually do: file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/AndX.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Base.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Comparison.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Composite.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/From.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Func.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/GroupBy.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Join.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Literal.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Math.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/OrderBy.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Orx.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Select.php"); in your autoload which causes quite a few I/O reads. Isn't it too much to check on each user's hit? I'm just putting this on a discussion. I want to hear from another PHP programmers what do they think of it. And, of course, if you have a silver bullet addressing this problems I've designated here, please share. I also have been thinking if my vogue question fits here and according to the FAQ it seems like this question addresses "software architecture" problem slash proposal. I'm sorry if my scribble may seem a bit clunky :) Thanks.

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• C# Proposal: Compile Time Static Checking Of Dynamic Objects

  - by Paulo Morgado

  C# 4.0 introduces a new type: dynamic. dynamic is a static type that bypasses static type checking. This new type comes in very handy to work with: The new languages from the dynamic language runtime. HTML Document Object Model (DOM). COM objects. Duck typing … Because static type checking is bypassed, this: dynamic dynamicValue = GetValue(); dynamicValue.Method(); is equivalent to this: object objectValue = GetValue(); objectValue .GetType() .InvokeMember( "Method", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, objectValue, null); Apart from caching the call site behind the scenes and some dynamic resolution, dynamic only looks better. Any typing error will only be caught at run time. In fact, if I’m writing the code, I know the contract of what I’m calling. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the compiler do some static type checking on the interactions with these dynamic objects? Imagine that the dynamic object that I’m retrieving from the GetValue method, besides the parameterless method Method also has a string read-only Property property. This means that, from the point of view of the code I’m writing, the contract that the dynamic object returned by GetValue implements is: string Property { get; } void Method(); Since it’s a well defined contract, I could write an interface to represent it: interface IValue { string Property { get; } void Method(); } If dynamic allowed to specify the contract in the form of dynamic(contract), I could write this: dynamic(IValue) dynamicValue = GetValue(); dynamicValue.Method(); This doesn’t mean that the value returned by GetValue has to implement the IValue interface. It just enables the compiler to verify that dynamicValue.Method() is a valid use of dynamicValue and dynamicValue.OtherMethod() isn’t. If the IValue interface already existed for any other reason, this would be fine. But having a type added to an assembly just for compile time usage doesn’t seem right. So, dynamic could be another type construct. Something like this: dynamic DValue { string Property { get; } void Method(); } The code could now be written like this; DValue dynamicValue = GetValue(); dynamicValue.Method(); The compiler would never generate any IL or metadata for this new type construct. It would only thee used for compile type static checking of dynamic objects. As a consequence, it makes no sense to have public accessibility, so it would not be allowed. Once again, if the IValue interface (or any other type definition) already exists, it can be used in the dynamic type definition: dynamic DValue : IValue, IEnumerable, SomeClass { string Property { get; } void Method(); } Another added benefit would be IntelliSense. I’ve been getting mixed reactions to this proposal. What do you think? Would this be useful?

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• Text Expansion Awareness for UX Designers: Points to Consider

  - by ultan o'broin

  Awareness of translated text expansion dynamics is important for enterprise applications UX designers (I am assuming all source text for translation is in English, though apps development can takes place in other natural languages too). This consideration goes beyond the standard 'character multiplication' rule and must take into account the avoidance of other layout tricks that a designer might be tempted to try. Follow these guidelines. For general text expansion, remember the simple rule that the shorter the word is in the English, the longer it will need to be in English. See the examples provided by Richard Ishida of the W3C and you'll get the idea. So, forget the 30 percent or one inch minimum expansion rule of the old Forms days. Unfortunately remembering convoluted text expansion rules, based as a percentage of the US English character count can be tough going. Try these: Up to 10 characters: 100 to 200% 11 to 20 characters: 80 to 100% 21 to 30 characters: 60 to 80% 31 to 50 characters: 40 to 60% 51 to 70 characters: 31 to 40% Over 70 characters: 30% (Source: IBM) So it might be easier to remember a rule that if your English text is less than 20 characters then allow it to double in length (200 percent), and then after that assume an increase by half the length of the text (50%). (Bear in mind that ADF can apply truncation rules on some components in English too). (If your text is stored in a database, developers must make sure the table column widths can accommodate the expansion of your text when translated based on byte size for the translated character and not numbers of characters. Use Unicode. One character does not equal one byte in the multilingual enterprise apps world.) Rely on a graceful transformation of translated text. Let all pages to resize dynamically so the text wraps and flow naturally. ADF pages supports this already. Think websites. Don't hard-code alignments. Use Start and End properties on components and not Left or Right. Don't force alignments of components on the page by using texts of a certain length as spacers. Use proper label positioning and anchoring in ADF components or other technologies. Remember that an increase in text length means an increase in vertical space too when pages are resized. So don't hard-code vertical heights for any text areas. Don't be tempted to manually create text or printed reports this way either. They cannot be translated successfully, and are very difficult to maintain in English. Use XML, HTML, RTF and so on. Check out what Oracle BI Publisher offers. Don't force wrapping by using tricks such as /n or /t characters or HTML BR tags or forced page breaks. Once the text is translated the alignment will be destroyed. The position of the breaking character or tag would need to be moved anyway, or even removed. When creating tables, then use table components. Don't use manually created tables that reply on word length to maintain column and row alignment. For example, don't use codeblock elements in HTML; use the proper table elements instead. Once translated, the alignment of manually formatted tabular data is destroyed. Finally, if there is a space restriction, then don't use made-up acronyms, abbreviations or some form of daft text speak to save space. Besides being incomprehensible in English, they may need full translations of the shortened words, even if they can be figured out. Use approved or industry standard acronyms according to the UX style rules, not as a space-saving device. Restricted Real Estate on Mobile Devices On mobile devices real estate is limited. Using shortened text is fine once it is comprehensible. Users in the mobile space prefer brevity too, as they are on the go, performing three-minute tasks, with no time to read lengthy texts. Using fragments and lightning up on unnecessary articles and getting straight to the point with imperative forms of verbs makes sense both on real estate and user experience grounds.

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• Installer Reboots at "Detecting hardware" (disks and other hardware) on all recent Server Installs

  - by Ryan Rosario

  I have a very frustrating problem with my PC. I cannot install any recent version of Ubuntu Server (or even Desktop) since 9.04 even using the text-based installer. I boot from a USB stick created by Unetbootin (I also tried other methods such as startup disk creator with no difference). On the Server installer, it gets to "Detecting Hardware" (the second one about disks and all other hardware, not network hardware) and then either hangs at 0% (waited 24 hours), or reboots after a minute or two. My system (late 2007): ASUS P5NSLI motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz 2 x 1GB Corsair 667MHz RAM nVidia GeForce 6600 I have unplugged everything (including the only hard disk, CD-ROMs and floppy). I have only one stick of RAM (tried each one to no avail) and am booting the installer from a USB stick (booting from CD-ROM yields the same problem). I also tried several of the boot options (nomodeset, nousb, acpi=off, noapic, i915.modeset=1/0, xforcevesa) in all combinations) to no avail. The only active parts of my system are the video card, mouse, keyboard and USB stick. I have also updated the BIOS to the most recent version. (FWIW, on the Desktop installer, I get a black screen after hitting the Install option.) Even after removing "quiet" I am unable to see what kernel panic is occurring (or not occurring) to cause the install to crash. I am only able to save the debug logs via a simple webserver in the installer. After the last line (I repeatedly refreshed), the server stops responding and the installer hangs or reboots: Jan 2 01:04:03 main-menu[302]: INFO: Menu item 'disk-detect' selected Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.154372] sata_nv 0000:00:0e.0: version 3.5 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.154409] sata_nv 0000:00:0e.0: Using SWNCQ mode Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.154531] sata_nv 0000:00:0e.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.164442] scsi0 : sata_nv Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.167610] scsi1 : sata_nv Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.167762] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9f0 ctl 0xbf0 bmdma 0xd400 irq 10 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.167774] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x970 ctl 0xb70 bmdma 0xd408 irq 10 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.167948] sata_nv 0000:00:0f.0: Using SWNCQ mode Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.168071] sata_nv 0000:00:0f.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.171931] scsi2 : sata_nv Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.173793] scsi3 : sata_nv Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.173943] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9e0 ctl 0xbe0 bmdma 0xe800 irq 11 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.173954] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x960 ctl 0xb60 bmdma 0xe808 irq 11 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.174061] pata_amd 0000:00:0d.0: version 0.4.1 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.174160] pata_amd 0000:00:0d.0: setting latency timer to 64 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.177045] scsi4 : pata_amd Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.178628] scsi5 : pata_amd Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.178801] ata5: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0xf000 irq 14 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.178811] ata6: PATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0xf008 irq 15 Jan 2 01:04:04 net/hw-detect.hotplug: Detected hotpluggable network interface eth0 Jan 2 01:04:04 net/hw-detect.hotplug: Detected hotpluggable network interface lo Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.485062] ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.633094] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.641647] ata1.00: ATA-8: ST31000528AS, CC38, max UDMA/133 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.641658] ata1.00: 1953525168 sectors, multi 1: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32) Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.657614] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.657969] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST31000528AS CC38 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.658482] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.658588] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.658812] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.658823] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.658918] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.675630] sda: sda1 sda2 Jan 2 01:04:04 kernel: [ 309.676440] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk Jan 2 01:04:05 kernel: [ 309.969102] ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) Jan 2 01:04:05 kernel: [ 310.281137] ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) Anybody have any additional ideas I could try? I am getting ready to just toss the motherboard.

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• What makes them click ?

  - by Piet

  The other day (well, actually some weeks ago while relaxing at the beach in Kos) I read ‘Neuro Web Design - What makes them click?’ by Susan Weinschenk. (http://neurowebbook.com) The book is a fast and easy read (no unnecessary filler) and a good introduction on how your site’s visitors can be steered in the direction you want them to go. The Obvious The book handles some of the more known/proven techniques, like for example that ratings/testimonials of other people can help sell your product or service. Another well known technique it talks about is inducing a sense of scarcity/urgency in the visitor. Only 2 seats left! Buy now and get 33% off! It’s not because these are known techniques that they stop working. Luckily 2/3rd of the book handles less obvious techniques, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth buying. The Not So Obvious A less known influencing technique is reciprocity. And then I’m not talking about swapping links with another website, but the fact that someone is more likely to do something for you after you did something for them first. The book cites some studies (I always love the facts and figures) and gives some actual examples of how to implement this in your site’s design, which is less obvious when you think about it. Want to know more ? Buy the book! Other interesting sources For a more general introduction to the same principles, I’d suggest ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. ‘Yes!…’ cites some of the same studies (it seems there’s a rather limited pool of studies covering this subject), but of course doesn’t show how to implement these techniques in your site’s design. I read ‘Yes!…’ last year, making ‘Neuro Web Design’ just a little bit less interesting. !!!Always make sure you’re able to measure your changes. If you haven’t yet, check out the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics (don’t be afraid because it says ‘beta’, it works just fine) and Google Website Optimizer. Worth Buying? Can I recommend it ? Sure, why not. I think it can be useful for anyone who ever had to think about the design or content of a site. You don’t have to be a marketing guy to want a site you’re involved with to be successful. The content/filler ratio is excellent too: you don’t need to wade through dozens of pages to filter out the interesting bits. (unlike ‘The Design of Sites’, which contains too much useless info and because it’s in dead-tree format, you can’t google it) If you like it, you might also check out ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. Tip for people living in Europe: check Amazon UK for your book buying needs. Because of the low UK Pound exchange rate, it’s usually considerably cheaper and faster to get a book delivered to your doorstep by Amazon UK compared to having to order it at the local book store or web-shop.

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• Ann Arbor Day of .NET 2010 Recap

  - by PSteele

  Had a great time at the Ann Arbor Day of .NET on Saturday.  Lots of great speakers and topics.  And chance to meet up with friends you usually only communicate with via email/twitter. My Presentation I presented "Getting up to speed with C# 3.5 — Just in time for 4.0!".  There's still a lot of devs that are either stuck in .NET 2.0 or just now moving to .NET 3.5.  This presentation gave highlights of a lot of the key features of 3.5.  I had great questions from the audience.  Afterwards, I talked with a few people who are just now getting in to 3.5 and they told me they had a lot of "A HA!" moments when something I said finally clicked and made sense from a code sample they had seen on the web.  Thanks to all who attended! A few people have asked me for the slides and demo.  The slides were nothing more than a table of contents.  90% of the presentation was spent inside Visual Studio demo'ing new techniques.  However, I have included it in the ZIP file with the sample solution.  You can download it here. Dennis Burton on MongoDB I caught Dennis Burton's presentation on MongoDB.  I was really interested in this one as I've missed the last few times Dennis had given it to local user groups.  It was very informative and I want to spend some time learning more about MongoDB.  I'm still an old-school relational guy, but I'm willing to investigate alternatives. Brian Genisio on Prism Since I'm not a Silverlight/WPF guy (yet), I wasn't sure this would interest me.  But I talked with Brian for a couple of minutes before the presentation and he convinced me to catch it.  And I'm glad he did.  Prism looks like a very nice framework for "composable UI's" in Silverlight and WPF.  I like the whole "dependency injection" feel to it.  Nice job Brian! GiveCamp Planning I spent some time Saturday working on things for the upcoming GiveCamp (which is why I only caught a few sessions).  Ann Arbor's Day of .NET and GiveCamp have both been held at Washtenaw Community College so I took some time (along with fellow GiveCamp planners Mike Eaton and John Hopkins) to check out the new location for Ann Arbor GiveCamp this year! In the past, WCC has let us use the Business Education (BE) building for our GiveCamp's.  But this year, they're moving us over to the Morris Lawrence (ML) building.  Let me tell you – this is a step UP!  In the BE building, we were spread across two floors and spread out into classrooms.  Plus, our opening and closing ceremonies were held in the Liberal Arts (LA) building – a bit of a walk from the BE building. In the ML building, we're together for the whole weekend.  We've got a large open area (which can be sectioned off if needed) for everyone to work in:   Right next to that, we have a large area where we can set up tables and eat.  And it helps that we have a wonderful view while eating (yes, that's a lake out there with a fountain): The ML building also has showers (which we'll have access to!) and it's own auditorium for our opening and closing ceremonies. All in all, this year's GiveCamp will be great! Stay tuned to the Ann Arbor GiveCamp website.  We'll be looking for volunteers (devs, designers, PM's, etc…) soon! Technorati Tags: .NET,Day of .NET,GiveCamp,MongoDB,Prism

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• Where Next for Google Translate? And What of Information Quality?

  - by ultan o'broin

  Fascinating article in the UK Guardian newspaper called Can Google break the computer language barrier? In it, Andreas Zollman, who works on Google Translate, comments that the quality of Google Translate's output relative to the amount of data required to create that output is clearly now falling foul of the law of diminishing returns. He says: "Each doubling of the amount of translated data input led to about a 0.5% improvement in the quality of the output," he suggests, but the doublings are not infinite. "We are now at this limit where there isn't that much more data in the world that we can use," he admits. "So now it is much more important again to add on different approaches and rules-based models." The Translation Guy has a further discussion on this, called Google Translate is Finished. He says: "And there aren't that many doublings left, if any. I can't say how much text Google has assimilated into their machine translation databases, but it's been reported that they have scanned about 11% of all printed content ever published. So double that, and double it again, and once more, shoveling all that into the translation hopper, and pretty soon you get the sum of all human knowledge, which means a whopping 1.5% improvement in the quality of the engines when everything has been analyzed. That's what we've got to look forward to, at best, since Google spiders regularly surf the Web, which in its vastness dwarfs all previously published content. So to all intents and purposes, the statistical machine translation tools of Google are done. Outstanding job, Googlers. Thanks." Surprisingly, all this analysis hasn't raised that much comment from the fans of machine translation, or its detractors either for that matter. Perhaps, it's the season of goodwill? What is clear to me, however, of course is that Google Translate isn't really finished (in any sense of the word). I am sure Google will investigate and come up with new rule-based translation models to enhance what they have already and that will also scale effectively where others didn't. So too, will they harness human input, which really is the way to go to train MT in the quality direction. But that aside, what does it say about the quality of the data that is being used for statistical machine translation in the first place? From the Guardian article it's clear that a huge humanly translated corpus drove the gains for Google Translate and now what's left is the dregs of badly translated and poorly created source materials that just can't deliver quality translations. There's a message about information quality there, surely. In the enterprise applications space, where we have some control over content this whole debate reinforces the relationship between information quality at source and translation efficiency, regardless of the technology used to do the translation. But as more automation comes to the fore, that information quality is even more critical if you want anything approaching a scalable solution. This is important for user experience professionals. Issues like user generated content translation, multilingual personalization, and scalable language quality are central to a superior global UX; it's a competitive issue we cannot ignore.

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• Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud

  - by Asian Angel

  Backing up important files is something that all of us should do on a regular basis, but may not have given as much thought to as we should. This week we would like to know if you use local storage, cloud storage, or a combination of both to back your files up. Photo by camknows. For some people local storage media may be the most convenient and/or affordable way to back up their files. Having those files stored on media under your control can also provide a sense of security and peace of mind. But storing your files locally may also have drawbacks if something happens to your storage media. So how do you know whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages or not? Here are some possible pros and cons that may affect your decision to use local storage to back up your files: Local Storage Pros You are in control of your data Your files are portable and can go with you when needed if using external or flash drives Files are accessible without an internet connection You can easily add more storage capacity as needed (additional drives, etc.) Cons You need to arrange room for your storage media (if you have multiple externals drives, etc.) Possible hardware failure No access to your files if you forget to bring your storage media with you or it is too bulky to bring along Theft and/or loss of home with all contents due to circumstances like fire If you are someone who is always on the go and needs to travel as lightly as possible, cloud storage may be the perfect way for you to back up and access your files. Perhaps your laptop has a hard-drive failure or gets stolen…unhappy events to be sure, but you will still have a copy of your files available. Perhaps a company wants to make sure their records, files, and other information are backed up off site in case of a major hardware or system failure…expensive and/or frustrating to fix if it happens, but once again there is a nice backup ready to go once things are fixed. As with local storage, here are some possible pros and cons that may influence your choice of cloud storage to back up your files: Cloud Storage Pros No need to carry around flash or bulky external drives All of your files are accessible wherever there is an internet connection No need to deal with local storage media (or its’ upkeep) Your files are still safe if your home is broken into or other unfortunate circumstances occur Cons Your files and data are not 100% under your control Possible hardware failure or loss of files on the part of your cloud storage provider (this could include a disgruntled employee wreaking havoc) No access to your files if you do not have an internet connection The cloud storage provider may eventually shutdown due to financial hardship or other unforeseen circumstances The possibility of your files and data being stolen by hackers due to a security breach on the part of your cloud storage provider You may also prefer to try and cover all of the possibilities by using both local and cloud storage to back up your files. If something happens to one, you always have the other to fall back on. Need access to those files at or away from home? As long as you have access to either your storage media or an internet connection, you are good to go. Maybe you are getting ready to choose a backup solution but are not sure which one would work better for you. Here is your chance to ask your fellow HTG readers which one they would recommend. Got a great backup solution already in place? Then be sure to share it with your fellow readers! How-To Geek Polls require Javascript. Please Click Here to View the Poll. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know Winter Sunset by a Mountain Stream Wallpaper Add Sleek Style to Your Desktop with the Aston Martin Theme for Windows 7 Awesome WebGL Demo – Flight of the Navigator from Mozilla Sunrise on the Alien Desert Planet Wallpaper Add Falling Snow to Webpages with the Snowfall Extension for Opera [Browser Fun] Automatically Keep Up With the Latest Releases from Mozilla Labs in Firefox 4.0

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• Home Energy Management & Automation with Windows Phone 7

  A number of people at Clarity are personally interested in home energy conservation and home automation. We feel that a mobile device is a great fit for bringing this idea to fruition. While this project is merely a concept and not directly associated with Microsofts Hohm web service, it provides a great model for communicating the concept. I wanted to take the idea a step further and combine saving energy in your home with the ability to track water usage and control your home devices. I designed an application that focuses on total home control and not just energy usage. Application Overview By monitoring home consumption in real time and with yearly projections users can pinpoint vampire devices, times of high or low consumption, and wasteful patterns of energy use. Energy usage meters indicate total current consumption as well as individual device consumption. Users can then use the information to take action, make adjustments, and change their consumption behaviors. The app can be used to automate certain systems like lighting, temperature, or alarms. Other features can be turned on an off at the touch of a toggle switch on your phone, away from home. Forget to turn off the TV or shut the garage door? No problem, you can do it from your phone. Through settings you can enable and disable features of the phone that apply to your home making it a completely customized and convenient experience. To be clear, this equates to more security, big environmental impact, and even bigger savings.   Design and User Interface  Since this panorama application is designed for win phone 7 devices, it complies with the UI Design and Interaction Guide for wp7. I developed the frame and page hierarchy from existing examples. The interface takes advantage of the interactive nature of touch screens with slider controls, pivot control views, and toggle switches to turn on and off devices (not shown in mockup). I followed recommendations for text based elements and adapted the tile notifications to display the most recent user activity. For example, the mockup indicates upon launching the app that the last thing you did was program the thermostat. This model is great for quick launching common user actions. One last design feature to point out is the technical reasons for supplying both light and dark themes for the app. Since this application is targeting energy consumption it only makes sense to consider the effect of the apps background color or image on the phones energy use. When displaying darker colors like black the OLED display may use less power, extending battery life. Other Considerations For now I left out options of wind and solar powered energy options because they are not available to everyone. Renewable energy sources and new technologies associated with them are definitely ideas to keep in mind for a next iteration. Another idea to explore for such an application would be to include a savings model similar to mint.com. In addition to general energy-saving recommendations the application could recommend customized ways to save based on your current utility providers and available options in your area. If your television or refrigerator is guilty of sucking a lot of energy then you may see recommendations for energy star products that could save you even more money! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• It&rsquo;s ok to throw System.Exception&hellip;

  - by Chris Skardon

  No. No it’s not. It’s not just me saying that, it’s the Microsoft guidelines: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229007.aspx  Do not throw System.Exception or System.SystemException. Also – as important: Do not catch System.Exception or System.SystemException in framework code, unless you intend to re-throw.. Throwing: Always, always try to pick the most specific exception type you can, if the parameter you have received in your method is null, throw an ArgumentNullException, value received greater than expected? ArgumentOutOfRangeException. For example: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("theInt", theInt, "theInt needs to be greater than zero."); if (theString == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("theString"); if (theString.Length == 0) throw new ArgumentException("theString needs to have content.", "theString"); } Why do we want to do this? It’s a lot of extra code when compared with a simple: public void ArgChecker(int theInt, string theString) { if (theInt < 0 || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(theString)) throw new Exception("The parameters were invalid."); } It all comes down to a couple of things; the catching of the exceptions, and the information you are passing back to the calling code. Catching: Ok, so let’s go with introduction level Exception handling, taught by many-a-university: You do all your work in a try clause, and catch anything wrong in the catch clause. So this tends to give us code like this: try { /* All the shizzle */ } catch { /* Deal with errors */ } But of course, we can improve on that by catching the exception so we can report on it: try { } catch(Exception ex) { /* Log that 'ex' occurred? */ } Now we’re at the point where people tend to go: Brilliant, I’ve got exception handling nailed, what next??? and code gets littered with the catch(Exception ex) nastiness. Why is it nasty? Let’s imagine for a moment our code is throwing an ArgumentNullException which we’re catching in the catch block and logging. Ok, the log entry has been made, so we can debug the code right? We’ve got all the info… What about an OutOfMemoryException – what can we do with that? That’s right, not a lot, chances are you can’t even log it (you are out of memory after all), but you’ve caught it – and as such - have hidden it. So, as part of this, there are two things you can do one, is the rethrow method: try { /* code */ } catch (Exception ex) { //Log throw; } Note, it’s not catch (Exception ex) { throw ex; } as that will wipe all your important stack trace information. This does get your exception to continue, and is the only reason you would catch Exception (anywhere other than a global catch-all) in your code. The other preferred method is to catch the exceptions you can deal with. It may not matter that the string I’m passing in is null, and I can cope with it like this: try{ DoSomething(myString); } catch(ArgumentNullException){} And that’s fine, it means that any exceptions I can’t deal with (OutOfMemory for example) will be propagated out to other code that can deal with it. Of course, this is horribly messy, no one wants try / catch blocks everywhere and that’s why Microsoft added the ‘Try’ methods to the framework, and it’s a strategy we should continue. If I try: int i = (int) "one"; I will get an InvalidCastException which means I need the try / catch block, but I could mitigate this using the ‘TryParse’ method: int i; if(!Int32.TryParse("one", out i)) return; Similarly, in the ‘DoSomething’ example, it might be beneficial to have a ‘TryDoSomething’ that returns a boolean value indicating the success of continuing. Obviously this isn’t practical in every case, so use the ol’ common sense approach. Onwards Yer thanks Chris, I’m looking forward to writing tonnes of new code. Fear not, that is where helpers come into it… (but that’s the next post)

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• Where’s my MD.050?

  - by Dave Burke

  A question that I’m sometimes asked is “where’s my MD.050 in OUM?” For those not familiar with an MD.050, it serves the purpose of being a Functional Design Document (FDD) in one of Oracle’s legacy Methods. Functional Design Documents have existed for many years with their primary purpose being to describe the functional aspects of one or more components of an IT system, typically, a Custom Extension of some sort. So why don’t we have a direct replacement for the MD.050/FDD in OUM? In simple terms, the disadvantage of the MD.050/FDD approach is that it tends to lead practitioners into “Design mode” too early in the process. Whereas OUM encourages more emphasis on gathering, and describing the functional requirements of a system ahead of the formal Analysis and Design process. So that just means more work up front for the Business Analyst or Functional Consultants right? Well no…..the design of a solution, particularly when it involves a complex custom extension, does not necessarily take longer just because you put more thought into the functional requirements. In fact, one could argue the complete opposite, in that by putting more emphasis on clearly understanding the nuances of functionality requirements early in the process, then the overall time and cost incurred during the Analysis to Design process should be less. In short, as your understanding of requirements matures over time, it is far easier (and more cost effective) to update a document or a diagram, than to change lines of code. So how does that translate into Tasks and Work Products in OUM? Let us assume you have reached a point on a project where a Custom Extension is needed. One of the first things you should consider doing is creating a Use Case, and remember, a Use Case could be as simple as a few lines of text reflecting a “User Story”, or it could be what Cockburn1 describes a “fully dressed Use Case”. It is worth mentioned at this point the highly scalable nature of OUM in the sense that “documents” should not be produced just because that is the way we have always done things. Some projects may well be predicated upon a base of electronic documents, whilst other projects may take a much more Agile approach to describing functional requirements; through “User Stories” perhaps. In any event, it is quite common for a Custom Extension to involve the creation of several “components”, i.e. some new screens, an interface, a report etc. Therefore several Use Cases might be required, which in turn can then be assembled into a Use Case Package. Once you have the Use Cases attributed to an appropriate (fit-for-purpose) level of detail, and assembled into a Package, you can now create an Analysis Model for the Package. An Analysis Model is conceptual in nature, and depending on the solution being developing, would involve the creation of one or more diagrams (i.e. Sequence Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams etc.) which collectively describe the Data, Behavior and Use Interface requirements of the solution. If required, the various elements of the Analysis Model may be indexed via an Analysis Specification. For Custom Extension projects that follow a pure Object Orientated approach, then the Analysis Model will naturally support the development of the Design Model without any further artifacts. However, for projects that are transitioning to this approach, then the various elements of the Analysis Model may be represented within the Analysis Specification. If we now return to the original question of “Where’s my MD.050”. The full answer would be: Capture the functional requirements within a Use Case Group related Use Cases into a Package Create an Analysis Model for each Package Consider creating an Analysis Specification (AN.100) as a index to each Analysis Model artifact An alternative answer for a relatively simple Custom Extension would be: Capture the functional requirements within a Use Case Optionally, group related Use Cases into a Package Create an Analysis Specification (AN.100) for each package 1 Cockburn, A, 2000, Writing Effective Use Case, Addison-Wesley Professional; Edition 1

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• Google TV Gets Bad Reception. Can Media Center Pull in the Signal?

  - by andrewbrust

  The news hit Monday morning that Google has decided to delay the release of its Google TV platform, and has asked its OEMs to delay any products that embed the software.  Coming just about two weeks prior to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Google’s timing is about the worst imaginable.  CES is where the platform should have had its coming out party, especially given all the anticipation that has built up since its initial announcement came 7 months ago. At last year’s CES, it seemed every consumer electronics company had fashioned its own software stack for Internet-based video programming and applications/widgets on its TVs, optical disc players and set top boxes.  In one case, I even saw two platforms on a single TV set (one provided by Yahoo and the other one native to the TV set). The whole point of Google TV was to solve this problem and offer a standard, embeddable platform.  But that won’t be happening, at least not for a while.  Google seems unable to get it together, and more proprietary approaches, like Apple TV, don’t seem to be setting the world of TV-Internet convergence on fire, either. It seems to me, that when it comes to building a “TV operating system,” Windows Media Center is still the best of a bad bunch.  But it won’t stay so for much longer without some changes.  Will Redmond pick up the ball that Google has fumbled?  I’m skeptical, but hopeful.  Regardless, here are some steps that could help Microsoft make the most of Google’s faux pas: Introduce a new Media Center version that uses XBox 360, rather than Windows 7 (or 8), as the platform.  TV platforms should be appliance-like, not PC-like.  Combine that notion with the runaway sales numbers for Xbox 360 Kinect, and the mass appeal it has delivered for Xbox, and the switch form Windows makes even more sense. As I have pointed out before, Microsoft’s Xbox implementation of its Mediaroom platform (announced and demoed at last year’s CES) gets Redmond 80% of the way toward this goal.  Nothing stops Microsoft from going the other 20%, other than its own apathy, which I hope has dissipated. Reverse the decision to remove Drive Extender technology from Windows Home Server (WHS), and create deep integration between WHS and Media Center.  I have suggested this previously as well, but the recent announcement that Drive Extender would be dropped from WHS 2.0 creates the need for me to a) join the chorus of people urging Microsoft to reconsider and b) reiterate the importance of Media Center-WHS integration in the context of a Google compete scenario. Enable Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as a Media Center client.  This would tighten the integration loop already established between WP7, Xbox and Zune.  But it would also counter Echostar/DISH Network/Sling Media, strike a blow against Google/Android (and even Apple/iOS) and could be the final strike against TiVO. Bring the WP7 user interface to Media Center and Kinect-enable it.  This would further the integration discussed above and would be appropriate recognition of WP7’s Metro UI having been built on the heritage of the original Media Center itself.  And being able to run your DVR even if you can’t find the remote (or can’t see its buttons in the dark) could be a nifty gimmick. Microsoft can do this but its consumer-oriented organization, responsible for Xbox, Zune and WP7, has to take the reins here, or none of this will likely work.  There’s a significant chance that won’t happen, but I won’t let that stop me from hoping that it does and insisting that it must.  Honestly, this fight is Microsoft’s to lose.

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• Extracting the Date from a DateTime in Entity Framework 4 and LINQ

  - by Ken Cox [MVP]

  In my current ASP.NET 4 project, I’m displaying dates in a GridDateTimeColumn of Telerik’s ASP.NET Radgrid control. I don’t care about the time stuff, so my DataFormatString shows only the date bits: <telerik:GridDateTimeColumn FilterControlWidth="100px"   DataField="DateCreated" HeaderText="Created"    SortExpression="DateCreated" ReadOnly="True"    UniqueName="DateCreated" PickerType="DatePicker"    DataFormatString="{0:dd MMM yy}"> My problem was that I couldn’t get the built-in column filtering (it uses Telerik’s DatePicker control) to behave.  The DatePicker assumes that the time is 00:00:00 but the data would have times like 09:22:21. So, when you select a date and apply the EqualTo filter, you get no results. You would get results if all the time portions were 00:00:00. In essence, I wanted my Entity Framework query to give the DatePicker what it wanted… a Date without the Time portion. Fortunately, EF4 provides the TruncateTime  function. After you include Imports System.Data.Objects.EntityFunctions You’ll find that your EF queries will accept the TruncateTime function. Here’s my routine: Protected Sub RadGrid1_NeedDataSource _     (ByVal source As Object, _      ByVal e As Telerik.Web.UI.GridNeedDataSourceEventArgs) _     Handles RadGrid1.NeedDataSource     Dim ent As New OfficeBookDBEntities1     Dim TopBOMs = From t In ent.TopBom, i In ent.Items _                   Where t.BusActivityID = busActivityID _       And i.BusActivityID And t.ItemID = i.RecordID _       Order By t.DateUpdated Descending _       Select New With {.TopBomID = t.TopBomID, .ItemID = t.ItemID, _                        .PartNumber = i.PartNumber, _                        .Description = i.Description, .Notes = t.Notes, _                        .DateCreated = TruncateTime(t.DateCreated), _                        .DateUpdated = TruncateTime(t.DateUpdated)}     RadGrid1.DataSource = TopBOMs End Sub Now when I select March 14, 2011 on the DatePicker, the filter doesn’t stumble on time values that don’t make sense. Full Disclosure: Telerik gives me (and other developer MVPs) free copies of their suite.

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• Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

  - by Marc Schluper

  The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in web applications, the one thing we do not want to happen is a complete change of context. In applications we typically like a hyperlink selection to initiate an action that updates a part of the screen. For instance, if my application has a map displayed with some text next to it, the map would react to a selection of a hyperlink in the text, e.g. by zooming in on a location and displaying additional locational information in a popup. In this way, the text becomes interactive text. It is quite common that one company creates and maintains websites for many client companies. To keep maintenance cost low, it is important that the content of these websites can be updated by the client companies themselves, without the need to involve a software engineer. To accommodate this scenario, we want the author of the interactive text to configure all hyperlinks (without writing any code). In a Silverlight RichTextArea, the default action of a Hyperlink is the same as a traditional hyperlink, but it can be changed: if the Command property has a value then upon a click event this command is called with the value of the CommandParameter as parameter. How can we let the author of the text specify a command for each hyperlink in the text, and how can we let an application react properly to a hyperlink selection event? We are talking about any command here. Obviously, the application would recognize only a specific set of commands, with well defined parameters, but the approach we take here is generic in the sense that it pertains to the RichTextArea and any command. So what do we require? We wish that: As a text author, I can configure the action of a hyperlink in a (rich) text without writing code; As a text author, I can persist the action of a hyperlink with the text; As a reader of persisted text, I can click a hyperlink and the configured action will happen; As an application developer, I can configure a control to use my application specific commands. In an excellent introduction to the RichTextArea, John Papa shows (among other things) how to persist a text created using this control. To meet our requirements, we can create a subclass of RichTextArea that uses John's code and allows plugging in two command specific components: one to prompt for a command definition, and one to execute the command. Since both of these plugins are application specific, our RichTextArea subclass should not assume anything about them except their interface. public interface IDefineCommand { void Prompt(string content, // the link content Action<string, object> callback); // the method called to convey the link definition } public interface IPerformCommand : ICommand {} The IDefineCommand plugin receives the content of the link (the text visible to the reader) and displays some kind of control that allows the author to define the link. When that's done, this (possibly changed) content string is conveyed back to the RichTextArea, together with an object that defines the command to execute when the link is clicked by the reader of the published text. The IPerformCommand plugin simply implements System.Windows.Input.ICommand. Let's use MEF to load the proper plugins. In the example solution there is a project that contains rudimentary implementations of these. The IDefineCommand plugin simply prompts for a command string (cf. a command line or query string), and the IPerformCommand plugin displays a MessageBox showing this command string. An actual application using this extended RichTextArea would have its own set of commands, each having their own parameters, and hence would provide more user friendly application specific plugins. Nonetheless, in any case a command can be persisted as a string and hence the two interfaces defined above suffice. For a Visual Studio 2010 solution, see my article on The Code Project.

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• Backing up my Windows Home Server to the Cloud&hellip;

  - by eddraper

  Ok, here’s my scenario: Windows Home Server with a little over 3TB of storage.  This includes many years of our home network’s PC backups, music, videos, etcetera. I’d like to get a backup off-site, and the existing APIs and apps such as CloudBerry Labs WHS Backup service are making it easy.  Now, all it’s down to is vendor and the cost of the actual storage.   So,  I thought I’d take a lazy Saturday morning and do some research on this and get the ball rolling.  What I discovered stunned me…   First off, the pricing for just about everything was loaded with complexity.  I learned that it wasn’t just about storage… it was about network usage, requests, sites, replication, and on and on. I really don’t see this as rocket science.  I have a disk image.  I want to put it in the cloud.  I’m not going to be be using it but once daily for incremental backups.  Sounds like a common scenario.  Yes, if “things get real” and my server goes down, I will need to bring down a lot of data and utilize a fair amount of vendor infrastructure.  However, this may never happen.  Offsite storage is an insurance policy.   The complexity of the cost structures, perhaps by design, create an environment where it’s incredibly hard to model bottom line costs and compare vendor all-up pricing.  As it is a “lazy Saturday morning,” I’m not in the mood for such antics and I decide to shirk the endeavor entirely.  Thus, I decided to simply fire up calc.exe and do some a simple arithmetic model based on price per GB.  I shuddered at the results.  Certainly something was wrong… did I misplace a decimal point?  Then I discovered CloudBerry’s own calculator.   Nope, I hadn’t misplaced those decimals after all.  Check it out (pricing based on 3174 GB):   Amazon S3 $398.00 per month $4761 per year Azure $396.75 per month $4761 per year Google $380.88 per month $4570.56 per year   Conclusion: Rampant crack smoking at vendors.  Seriously.  Out. Of. Their. Minds. Now, to Amazon’s credit, vision, and outright common sense, they had one offering which directly addresses my scenario:   Amazon Glacier $31.74 per month $380.88 per year   hmmm… It’s on the table.  Let’s see what it would cost to just buy some drives, an enclosure and cart them over to a friend’s house.   2 x 2TB Drives from NewEgg.com $199.99   Enclosure $39.99     $239.98   Carting data to back and forth to friend’s within walking distance pain   Leave drive unplugged at friend’s $0 for electricity   Possible data loss No way I can come and go every day.     I think I’ll think on this a bit more…

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• Is Microsoft&rsquo;s Cloud Bet Placed on the Ground?

  - by andrewbrust

  Today at the Unversity of Washington, Steve Ballmer gave a speech on Microsoft’s cloud strategy.  Significantly, Azure was only briefly mentioned and was not shown.  Instead, Ballmer spoke about what he called the five “dimensions” of the cloud, and used that as the basis for an almost philosophical discussion.  Ballmer opined on how the cloud should be distinguished from the Internet.as well as what the cloud will and should enable.  Ballmer worked hard to portray the cloud not as a challenger to Windows and PCs (as Google would certainly suggest it is) but  really as just the latest peripheral that adds value to PCs and devices. At one point during his speech, Ballmer said “We start with Windows at Microsoft.  It’s the most popular smart device on the planet.  And our design center for the future of Windows is to make it one of those smarter devices that the cloud really wants.”  I’m not sure I agree with Ballmer’s ambition here, but I must admit he’s taken the “software + services” concept and expanded on it in more consumer-friendly fashion. There were demos too.  For example, Blaise Aguera y Arcas reprised his Bing Maps demo from the TED conference held last month.  And Simon Atwell showed how Microsoft has teamed with Sky TV in the UK to turn Xbox into something that looks uncannily like Windows Media Center.  Specifically, an Xbox console app called Sky Player provides full access to Sky’s on-demand programming but also live TV access to an array of networks carried on its home TV service, complete with an on-screen programming guide.  Windows Phone 7 Series was shown quickly and Ballmer told us that while Windows Mobile/Phone 6.5 and earlier were designed for voice and legacy functionality, Windows Phone 7 Series is designed for the cloud. Over and over during Ballmer’s talk (and those of his guest demo presenters), the message was clear: Microsoft believes that client (“smart”) devices, and not mere HTML terminals, are the technologies to best deliver on the promise of the cloud.  The message was that PCs running Windows, game consoles and smart phones  whose native interfaces are Internet-connected offer the most effective way to utilize cloud capabilities.  Even the Bing Maps demo conveyed this message, because the advanced technology shown in the demo uses Silverlight (and thus the PCs computing power), and not AJAX (which relies only upon the browser’s native scripting and rendering capabilities) to produce the impressive interface shown to the audience. Microsoft’s new slogan, with respect to the cloud, is “we’re all in.”  Just as a Texas Hold ‘em player bets his entire stash of chips when he goes all in, so too is Microsoft “betting the company” on the cloud.  But it would seem that Microsoft’s bet isn’t on the cloud in a pure sense, and is instead on the power of the cloud to fuel new growth in PCs and other client devices, Microsoft’s traditional comfort zone.  Is that a bet or a hedge?  If the latter, is Microsoft truly all in?  I don’t really know.  I think many people would say this is a sucker’s bet.  But others would say it’s suckers who bet against Microsoft.  No matter what, the burden is on Microsoft to prove this contrarian view of the cloud is a sensible one.  To do that, they’ll need to deliver on cloud-connected device innovation.  And to do that, the whole company will need to feel that victory is crucial.  Time will tell.  And I expect to present progress reports in future posts.

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• A Closer Look at the HiddenInput Attribute in MVC 2

  - by Steve Michelotti

  MVC 2 includes an attribute for model metadata called the HiddenInput attribute. The typical usage of the attribute looks like this (line #3 below): 1: public class PersonViewModel 2: { 3: [HiddenInput(DisplayValue = false)] 4: public int? Id { get; set; } 5: public string FirstName { get; set; } 6: public string LastName { get; set; } 7: } So if you displayed your PersonViewModel with Html.EditorForModel() or Html.EditorFor(m => m.Id), the framework would detect the [HiddenInput] attribute metadata and produce HTML like this: 1: <input id="Id" name="Id" type="hidden" value="21" /> This is pretty straight forward and allows an elegant way to keep the technical key for your model (e.g., a Primary Key from the database) in the HTML so that everything will be wired up correctly when the form is posted to the server and of course not displaying this value visually to the end user. However, when I was giving a recent presentation, a member of the audience asked me (quite reasonably), “When would you ever set DisplayValue equal to true when using a HiddenInput?” To which I responded, “Well, it’s an edge case. There are sometimes when…er…um…people might want to…um…display this value to the user.” It was quickly apparent to me (and I’m sure everyone else in the room) what a terrible answer this was. I realized I needed to have a much better answer here. First off, let’s look at what is produced if we change our view model to use “true” (which is equivalent to use specifying [HiddenInput] since “true” is the default) on line #3: 1: public class PersonViewModel 2: { 3: [HiddenInput(DisplayValue = true)] 4: public int? Id { get; set; } 5: public string FirstName { get; set; } 6: public string LastName { get; set; } 7: } Will produce the following HTML if rendered from Htm.EditorForModel() in your view: 1: <div class="editor-label"> 2: <label for="Id">Id</label> 3: </div> 4: <div class="editor-field"> 5: 21<input id="Id" name="Id" type="hidden" value="21" /> 6: <span class="field-validation-valid" id="Id_validationMessage"></span> 7: </div> The key is line #5. We get the text of “21” (which happened to be my DB Id in this instance) and also a hidden input element (again with “21”). So the question is, why would one want to use this? The best answer I’ve found is contained in this MVC 2 whitepaper: When a view lets users edit the ID of an object and it is necessary to display the value as well as to provide a hidden input element that contains the old ID so that it can be passed back to the controller. Well, that actually makes sense. Yes, it seems like something that would happen *rarely* but, for those instances, it would enable them easily. It’s effectively equivalent to doing this in your view: 1: <%: Html.LabelFor(m => m.Id) %> 2: <%: Model.Id %> 3: <%: Html.HiddenFor(m => m.Id) %> But it’s allowing you to specify it in metadata on your view model (and thereby take advantage of templated helpers like Html.EditorForModel() and Html.EditorFor()) rather than having to explicitly specifying everything in your view.

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• Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

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• To sample or not to sample...

  - by [email protected]

  Ideally, we would know the exact answer to every question. How many people support presidential candidate A vs. B? How many people suffer from H1N1 in a given state? Does this batch of manufactured widgets have any defective parts? Knowing exact answers is expensive in terms of time and money and, in most cases, is impractical if not impossible. Consider asking every person in a region for their candidate preference, testing every person with flu symptoms for H1N1 (assuming every person reported when they had flu symptoms), or destructively testing widgets to determine if they are "good" (leaving no product to sell). Knowing exact answers, fortunately, isn't necessary or even useful in many situations. Understanding the direction of a trend or statistically significant results may be sufficient to answer the underlying question: who is likely to win the election, have we likely reached a critical threshold for flu, or is this batch of widgets good enough to ship? Statistics help us to answer these questions with a certain degree of confidence. This focuses on how we collect data. In data mining, we focus on the use of data, that is data that has already been collected. In some cases, we may have all the data (all purchases made by all customers), in others the data may have been collected using sampling (voters, their demographics and candidate choice). Building data mining models on all of your data can be expensive in terms of time and hardware resources. Consider a company with 40 million customers. Do we need to mine all 40 million customers to get useful data mining models? The quality of models built on all data may be no better than models built on a relatively small sample. Determining how much is a reasonable amount of data involves experimentation. When starting the model building process on large datasets, it is often more efficient to begin with a small sample, perhaps 1000 - 10,000 cases (records) depending on the algorithm, source data, and hardware. This allows you to see quickly what issues might arise with choice of algorithm, algorithm settings, data quality, and need for further data preparation. Instead of waiting for a model on a large dataset to build only to find that the results don't meet expectations, once you are satisfied with the results on the initial sample, you can  take a larger sample to see if model quality improves, and to get a sense of how the algorithm scales to the particular dataset. If model accuracy or quality continues to improve, consider increasing the sample size. Sampling in data mining is also used to produce a held-aside or test dataset for assessing classification and regression model accuracy. Here, we reserve some of the build data (data that includes known target values) to be used for an honest estimate of model error using data the model has not seen before. This sampling transformation is often called a split because the build data is split into two randomly selected sets, often with 60% of the records being used for model building and 40% for testing. Sampling must be performed with care, as it can adversely affect model quality and usability. Even a truly random sample doesn't guarantee that all values are represented in a given attribute. This is particularly troublesome when the attribute with omitted values is the target. A predictive model that has not seen any examples for a particular target value can never predict that target value! For other attributes, values may consist of a single value (a constant attribute) or all unique values (an identifier attribute), each of which may be excluded during mining. Values from categorical predictor attributes that didn't appear in the training data are not used when testing or scoring datasets. In subsequent posts, we'll talk about three sampling techniques using Oracle Database: simple random sampling without replacement, stratified sampling, and simple random sampling with replacement.

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• Odd MVC 4 Beta Razor Designer Issue

  - by Rick Strahl

  This post is a small cry for help along with an explanation of a problem that is hard to describe on twitter or even a connect bug and written in hopes somebody has seen this before and any ideas on what might cause this. Lots of helpful people had comments on Twitter for me, but they all assumed that the code doesn't run, which is not the case - it's a designer issue. A few days ago I started getting some odd problems in my MVC 4 designer for an app I've been working on for the past 2 weeks. Basically the MVC 4 Razor designer keeps popping me errors, about the call signature to various Html Helper methods being incorrect. It also complains about the ViewBag object and not supporting dynamic requesting to load assemblies into the project. Here's what the designer errors look like: You can see the red error underlines under the ViewBag and an Html Helper I plopped in at the top to demonstrate the behavior. Basically any HtmlHelper I'm accessing is showing the same errors. Note that the code *runs just fine* - it's just the designer that is complaining with Errors. What's odd about this is that *I think* this started only a few days ago and nothing consequential that I can think of has happened to the project or overall installations. These errors aren't critical since the code runs but pretty annoying especially if you're building and have .csHtml files open in Visual Studio mixing these fake errors with real compiler errors. What I've checked Looking at the errors it indeed looks like certain references are missing. I can't make sense of the Html Helpers error, but certainly the ViewBag dynamic error looks like System.Core or Microsoft.CSharp assemblies are missing. Rest assured they are there and the code DOES run just fine at runtime. This is a designer issue only. I went ahead and checked the namespaces that MVC has access to in Razor which lives in the Views folder's web.config file: /Views/web.config For good measure I added <system.web.webPages.razor> <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, <split for layout> Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage"> <namespaces> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" /> <add namespace="System.Linq" /> <add namespace="System.Linq.Expressions" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsBusiness" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsWeb"/> <add namespace="Westwind.Utilities" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web.Mvc" /> </namespaces> </pages> </system.web.webPages.razor> For good measure I added System.Linq and System.Linq.Expression on which some of the Html.xxxxFor() methods rely, but no luck. So, has anybody seen this before? Any ideas on what might be causing these issues only at design time rather, when the final compiled code runs just fine?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Razor  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Lazy Evaluation &ndash; Why being lazy in F# blows my mind!

  - by MarkPearl

  First of all – shout out to Peter Adams – from the feedback I have gotten from him on the last few posts of F# that I have done – my mind has just been expanded. I did a blog post a few days ago about infinite sequences – I didn’t really understand what was going on with it, and I still don’t really get it – but I am getting closer. In Peter’s last comment he made mention of Lazy Evaluation. I am ashamed to say that up till then I had never heard about lazy evaluation – how can evaluation be lazy? I mean, I know about lazy loading and that makes sense… but surely something is either evaluated or not! Well… a bit of reading today and I have been enlightened to a point – if you do know of any good articles explaining lazy evaluation please send them to me. So what is lazy evaluation and why is it useful? Lazy evaluation is a process whereby the system only computes the values needed and “ignores” the computations not needed. I’m going out on a limb here, but with this explanation in hand, imagine the following C# code… public int CalculatedVal() { int Val1 = 0; int Val2 = 0; for (int Count = 0; Count < 1000000; Count++) { Val1++; } return Val2; }   Normally, even though Val1 is never needed, the system would loop 1000000 times and add 1 to the current value of Val1. Imagine if the system realized this and so just skipped this segment of code and instead did the following…. public int CalculatedVal() { int Val1 = 0; return Val2; }   A massive saving in computation and wasted effort. Now I am pretty sure it isn’t as simple as this but I think this is the basic idea. For a more detailed explanation of lazy evaluation in c#, Pedram Rezei has a wonderful post on lazy evaluation and makes some C# comparisons. I am not going to take any thunder from him by repeating everything he said since I think he did such a good job of explaining it himself. What I am interested in though is how in F# do you tell something to have lazy evalution, and how do you know if something will be eager or lazy by looking at it. I found this post was useful. From reading around F# by default uses eager evaluation unless explicitly told to use lazy evaluation. One exception to this is sequences, which are lazy by default. Now reading about lazy evaluation has helped me understand more about F# coding… From my understanding of F# because of its declarative nature, most of the actual code you are declaring properties and rules – very little code is actually saying do this right now - but when it comes to a “do this” code section, it then evaluates and optimizes code and applies the rules. So props to lazy evaluation and its optimizations…

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• A debugging experience with "highly compatible" ASP.NET 4.5

  - by Jeff

  I have to admit that I will pretty much upgrade software for no reason other than being on the latest version. I won't do it if it's super expensive (Adobe gets money from me about once every three or four years at best), but particularly with frameworks and stuff generally available as part of my MSDN subscription, I'll be bleeding edge. CoasterBuzz was running on the MVC 4 framework pretty much as soon as they did a "go live" license for it. I didn't really jump in head-first with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012, in part because I just wasn't interested in doing the reinstalls for each new version. Turns out there weren't that many revisions anyway. But when the final versions were released a week and a half ago, I jumped in. I saw on one of the Microsoft sites that .Net 4.5 was a "highly compatible in-place update" to the framework. Good enough for me. I was obviously running it by default in Windows 8, and installed it on my production server. I suppose it's "highly compatible," except when it isn't. Three of my sites are running with various flavors of the MVC version of POP Forums. All of them stopped working under ASP.NET 4.5. It was not immediately obvious what the problem might be beyond an exception indicating that there were no repository classes registered with Ninject, which I use for dependency injection in the forums. This was made all the more weird by the fact that it ran fine locally in the dev Web host. My first instinct was to spin up a Windows Server VM on my local box and put the remote debugger on it. (Side note: running multiple VM's on a Retina MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of RAM is pretty much the most awesome thing ever. I can't believe this computer is for real, and not a 50-pound tower under my desk.) What might have been going on in IIS that doesn't happen in Visual Studio? In the debugging process, I realized that I might be looking in the wrong place. POP Forums creates a Ninject container using a method called from a PreApplicationStartMethod attribute, and at that time registers a module (what Ninject uses to map interfaces to implementations) that maps all of the core dependencies. It also creates an instance of an HttpModule that originally hosted the "services" (search indexing, mailer, etc.), but now just records errors. That's all well and good, but the actual repository mapping, where data is actually read or persisted, happens in Application_Start() in global.asax. The idea there is that you can swap out the SqlSingleWebServer repos for something tuned for multiple servers, Oracle or something else. Of course, if I used something like StructureMap, which does convention-based mapping for dependency injection (a class implementing ISettingsRepository called SettingsRepository is automagically mapped), I wouldn't have to worry about it. In any case, the HttpModule, being instantiated before Application_Start() gets to run, would throw because there was no repo mapped where it could get settings from the database. This makes total sense. The fix is sort of a hack, where I don't setup the innards of the HttpModule until a call to its BeginRequest is made. I say it's a hack, because its primary function, logging exceptions, won't work until the app has warmed up. Still, this brings up an interesting question about the race condition, and what changed in 4.5 when it's running in IIS. In ASP.NET 4, it would appear that the code called via the PreApplicationStartMethod was either failing silently, and running again later, or it was getting to that code after Application_Start was called. In any case, weird thing. The real pain point I'm experiencing now is a bug in MVC 4 that is extremely serious because it renders the mobile/alternate view functionality very much broken.

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• Enhanced Dynamic Filtering

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Remember my last post on dynamic filtering? Well, this time I'm extending the code in order to allow two levels of querying: Match type, represented by the following options: public enum MatchType { StartsWith = 0, Contains = 1 } And word match: public enum WordMatch { AnyWord = 0, AllWords = 1, ExactPhrase = 2 } You can combine the two levels in order to achieve the following combinations: MatchType.StartsWith + WordMatch.AnyWord Matches any record that starts with any of the words specified MatchType.StartsWith + WordMatch.AllWords Not available: does not make sense, throws an exception MatchType.StartsWith + WordMatch.ExactPhrase Matches any record that starts with the exact specified phrase MatchType.Contains + WordMatch.AnyWord Matches any record that contains any of the specified words MatchType.Contains + WordMatch.AllWords Matches any record that contains all of the specified words MatchType.Contains + WordMatch.ExactPhrase Matches any record that contains the exact specified phrase Here is the code: public static IList Search(IQueryable query, Type entityType, String dataTextField, String phrase, MatchType matchType, WordMatch wordMatch, Int32 maxCount) { String [] terms = phrase.Split(' ').Distinct().ToArray(); StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder(); PropertyInfo displayProperty = entityType.GetProperty(dataTextField); IList searchList = null; MethodInfo orderByMethod = typeof(Queryable).GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static).Where(m = m.Name == "OrderBy").ToArray() [ 0 ].MakeGenericMethod(entityType, displayProperty.PropertyType); MethodInfo takeMethod = typeof(Queryable).GetMethod("Take", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static).MakeGenericMethod(entityType); MethodInfo whereMethod = typeof(Queryable).GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static).Where(m = m.Name == "Where").ToArray() [ 0 ].MakeGenericMethod(entityType); MethodInfo distinctMethod = typeof(Queryable).GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static).Where(m = m.Name == "Distinct" && m.GetParameters().Length == 1).Single().MakeGenericMethod(entityType); MethodInfo toListMethod = typeof(Enumerable).GetMethod("ToList", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public).MakeGenericMethod(entityType); MethodInfo matchMethod = typeof(String).GetMethod ( (matchType == MatchType.StartsWith) ? "StartsWith" : "Contains", new Type [] { typeof(String) } ); MemberExpression member = Expression.MakeMemberAccess ( Expression.Parameter(entityType, "n"), displayProperty ); MethodCallExpression call = null; LambdaExpression where = null; LambdaExpression orderBy = Expression.Lambda ( member, member.Expression as ParameterExpression ); switch (matchType) { case MatchType.StartsWith: switch (wordMatch) { case WordMatch.AnyWord: call = Expression.Call ( member, matchMethod, Expression.Constant(terms [ 0 ]) ); where = Expression.Lambda ( call, member.Expression as ParameterExpression ); for (Int32 i = 1; i ()); where = Expression.Lambda ( Expression.Or ( where.Body, exp ), where.Parameters.ToArray() ); } break; case WordMatch.ExactPhrase: call = Expression.Call ( member, matchMethod, Expression.Constant(phrase) ); where = Expression.Lambda ( call, member.Expression as ParameterExpression ); break; case WordMatch.AllWords: throw (new Exception("The match type StartsWith is not supported with word match AllWords")); } break; case MatchType.Contains: switch (wordMatch) { case WordMatch.AnyWord: call = Expression.Call ( member, matchMethod, Expression.Constant(terms [ 0 ]) ); where = Expression.Lambda ( call, member.Expression as ParameterExpression ); for (Int32 i = 1; i ()); where = Expression.Lambda ( Expression.Or ( where.Body, exp ), where.Parameters.ToArray() ); } break; case WordMatch.ExactPhrase: call = Expression.Call ( member, matchMethod, Expression.Constant(phrase) ); where = Expression.Lambda ( call, member.Expression as ParameterExpression ); break; case WordMatch.AllWords: call = Expression.Call ( member, matchMethod, Expression.Constant(terms [ 0 ]) ); where = Expression.Lambda ( call, member.Expression as ParameterExpression ); for (Int32 i = 1; i ()); where = Expression.Lambda ( Expression.AndAlso ( where.Body, exp ), where.Parameters.ToArray() ); } break; } break; } query = orderByMethod.Invoke(null, new Object [] { query, orderBy }) as IQueryable; query = whereMethod.Invoke(null, new Object [] { query, where }) as IQueryable; if (maxCount != 0) { query = takeMethod.Invoke(null, new Object [] { query, maxCount }) as IQueryable; } searchList = toListMethod.Invoke(null, new Object [] { query }) as IList; return (searchList); } And this is how you'd use it: IQueryable query = ctx.MyEntities; IList list = Search(query, typeof(MyEntity), "Name", "Ricardo Peres", MatchType.Contains, WordMatch.ExactPhrase, 10 /*0 for all*/); SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/clipboard.swf'; SyntaxHighlighter.brushes.CSharp.aliases = ['c#', 'c-sharp', 'csharp']; SyntaxHighlighter.all();

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• Reconciling the Boy Scout Rule and Opportunistic Refactoring with code reviews

  - by t0x1n

  I am a great believer in the Boy Scout Rule: Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out." No matter who the original author was, what if we always made some effort, no matter how small, to improve the module. What would be the result? I think if we all followed that simple rule, we'd see the end of the relentless deterioration of our software systems. Instead, our systems would gradually get better and better as they evolved. We'd also see teams caring for the system as a whole, rather than just individuals caring for their own small little part. I am also a great believer in the related idea of Opportunistic Refactoring: Although there are places for some scheduled refactoring efforts, I prefer to encourage refactoring as an opportunistic activity, done whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever. What this means is that at any time someone sees some code that isn't as clear as it should be, they should take the opportunity to fix it right there and then - or at least within a few minutes Particularly note the following excerpt from the refactoring article: I'm wary of any development practices that cause friction for opportunistic refactoring ... My sense is that most teams don't do enough refactoring, so it's important to pay attention to anything that is discouraging people from doing it. To help flush this out be aware of any time you feel discouraged from doing a small refactoring, one that you're sure will only take a minute or two. Any such barrier is a smell that should prompt a conversation. So make a note of the discouragement and bring it up with the team. At the very least it should be discussed during your next retrospective. Where I work, there is one development practice that causes heavy friction - Code Review (CR). Whenever I change anything that's not in the scope of my "assignment" I'm being rebuked by my reviewers that I'm making the change harder to review. This is especially true when refactoring is involved, since it makes "line by line" diff comparison difficult. This approach is the standard here, which means opportunistic refactoring is seldom done, and only "planned" refactoring (which is usually too little, too late) takes place, if at all. I claim that the benefits are worth it, and that 3 reviewers will work a little harder (to actually understand the code before and after, rather than look at the narrow scope of which lines changed - the review itself would be better due to that alone) so that the next 100 developers reading and maintaining the code will benefit. When I present this argument my reviewers, they say they have no problem with my refactoring, as long as it's not in the same CR. However I claim this is a myth: (1) Most of the times you only realize what and how you want to refactor when you're in the midst of your assignment. As Martin Fowler puts it: As you add the functionality, you realize that some code you're adding contains some duplication with some existing code, so you need to refactor the existing code to clean things up... You may get something working, but realize that it would be better if the interaction with existing classes was changed. Take that opportunity to do that before you consider yourself done. (2) Nobody is going to look favorably at you releasing "refactoring" CRs you were not supposed to do. A CR has a certain overhead and your manager doesn't want you to "waste your time" on refactoring. When it's bundled with the change you're supposed to do, this issue is minimized. The issue is exacerbated by Resharper, as each new file I add to the change (and I can't know in advance exactly which files would end up changed) is usually littered with errors and suggestions - most of which are spot on and totally deserve fixing. The end result is that I see horrible code, and I just leave it there. Ironically, I feel that fixing such code not only will not improve my standings, but actually lower them and paint me as the "unfocused" guy who wastes time fixing things nobody cares about instead of doing his job. I feel bad about it because I truly despise bad code and can't stand watching it, let alone call it from my methods! Any thoughts on how I can remedy this situation ?

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