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  • The Case of the Missing Date/Time Stamp: Reporting Services 2008 R2 Snapshots

    - by smisner
    This week I stumbled upon an undocumented “feature” in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services as I was preparing a demonstration on how to set up and use report snapshots. If you’re familiar with the main changes in this latest release of Reporting Services, you probably already know that Report Manager got a facelift this time around. Although this facelift was generally a good thing, one of the casualties – in my opinion – is the loss of the snapshot label that served two purposes… First, it flagged the report as a snapshot. Second, it let you know when that snapshot was created. As part of my standard operating procedure when demonstrating report snapshots, I point out this label, so I was rather taken aback when I didn’t see it in the demonstration I was preparing. It sort of upset my routine, and I’m rather partial to my routines. I thought perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right place and changed Report Manager from Tile View to Detail View, but no – that label was still missing. In the grand scheme of life, it’s not an earth-shattering change, but you’ll have to look at the Modified Date in Details View to know when the snapshot was run. Or hope that the report developer included a textbox to show the execution time in the report. (Hint: this is a good time to add this to your list of report development best practices, whether a report gets set up as a report snapshot or not!) A snapshot from the past In case you don’t remember how a snapshot appeared in Report Manager back in the old days (of SQL Server 2008 and earlier), here’s an image I snagged from my Reporting Services 2008 Step by Step manuscript: A snapshot in the present A report server running in SharePoint integrated mode had no such label. There you had to rely on the Report Modified date-time stamp to know the snapshot execution time. So I guess all platforms are now consistent. Here’s a screenshot of Report Manager in the 2008 R2 version. One of these is a snapshot and the rest execute on demand. Can you tell which is the snapshot? Consider descriptions as an alternative So my report snapshot demonstration has one less step, and I’ll need to edit the Denali version of the Step by Step book. Things are simpler this way, but I sure wish we had an easier way to identify the execution methods of the reports. Consider using the description field to alert users that the report is a snapshot. It might save you a few questions about why the data isn’t up-to-date if the users know that something changed in the source of the report. Notice that the full description doesn’t display in Tile View, so keep it short and sweet or instruct users to open Details View to see the entire description.

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  • How Microsoft Market DotNet?

    - by Fendy
    I just read an Joel's article about Microsoft's breaking change (non-backwards compatibility) with dot net's introduction. It is interesting and explicitly reflected the condition during that time. But now almost 10 years has passed. The breaking change It is mainly on how bad is Microsoft introducing non-backwards compatibility development tools, such as dot net, instead of improving the already-widely used asp classic or VB6. As much have known, dot net is not natively embedded in windows XP (yes in vista or 7), so in order to use the .net apps, you need to install the .net framework of over 300mb (it's big that day). However, as we see that nowadays many business use .net as their main development tools, with asp.net or mvc as their web-based applications. C# nowadays be one of tops programming languages (the most questions in stackoverflow). The more interesing part is, win32api still alive even there is newer technology out there (and still widely used). Imagine if microsoft does not introduce the breaking change, there will many corporates still uses asp classic or vb-based applications (there still is, but not that much). There are many corporates use additional services such as azure or sharepoint (beside how expensive is it). Please note that I also know there are many flagships applications (maybe adobe's and blizzard's) still use C-based or older language and not porting to newer high-level language. The question How can Microsoft persuade the users to migrate their old applications into dot net? As we have known it is very hard and give no immediate value when rewrite the applications (netscape story), and it is very risky. I am more interested in Microsoft's way and not opinion such as "because dot net is OOP, or dot net is dll-embedable, etc". This question may be constructive, as the technology is vastly changes over times lately. As we can see, Microsoft changes Asp.Net webform to MVC, winform is legacy now, it is starting to change to use windows store rather than basic-installment, touchscreen and later on we will have see-through applications such as google class. And that will be breaking changes. We will need to account portability as an issue nowadays. We will need other than just mere technology choice, but also migration plans. Even maybe as critical as we might need multiplatform language compiler, as approached by Joel's Wasabi. (hey, I read his articles too much!)

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  • Render To Texture Using OpenGL is not working but normal rendering works just fine

    - by Franky Rivera
    things I initialize at the beginning of the program I realize not all of these pertain to my issue I just copy and pasted what I had //overall initialized //things openGL related I initialize earlier on in the project glClearColor( 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f ); glClearDepth( 1.0f ); glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST); glEnable( GL_STENCIL_TEST ); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc( GL_LEQUAL ); glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); glFrontFace( GL_CCW ); glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glHint( GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL_NICEST ); //we also initialize our shader programs //(i added some shader program functions for definitions) //this enum list is else where in code //i figured it would help show you guys more about my //shader compile creation function right under this enum list VVVVVV /*enum eSHADER_ATTRIB_LOCATION { VERTEX_ATTRIB = 0, NORMAL_ATTRIB = 2, COLOR_ATTRIB, COLOR2_ATTRIB, FOG_COORD, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB0 = 8, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB1, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB2, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB3, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB4, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB5, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB6, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB7 }; */ //if we fail making our shader leave if( !testShader.CreateShader( "SimpleShader.vp", "SimpleShader.fp", 3, VERTEX_ATTRIB, "vVertexPos", NORMAL_ATTRIB, "vNormal", TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB0, "vTexCoord" ) ) return false; if( !testScreenShader.CreateShader( "ScreenShader.vp", "ScreenShader.fp", 3, VERTEX_ATTRIB, "vVertexPos", NORMAL_ATTRIB, "vNormal", TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB0, "vTexCoord" ) ) return false; SHADER PROGRAM FUNCTIONS bool CShaderProgram::CreateShader( const char* szVertexShaderName, const char* szFragmentShaderName, ... ) { //here are our handles for the openGL shaders int iGLVertexShaderHandle = -1, iGLFragmentShaderHandle = -1; //get our shader data char *vData = 0, *fData = 0; int vLength = 0, fLength = 0; LoadShaderFile( szVertexShaderName, &vData, &vLength ); LoadShaderFile( szFragmentShaderName, &fData, &fLength ); //data if( !vData ) return false; //data if( !fData ) { delete[] vData; return false; } //create both our shader objects iGLVertexShaderHandle = glCreateShader( GL_VERTEX_SHADER ); iGLFragmentShaderHandle = glCreateShader( GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER ); //well we got this far so we have dynamic data to clean up //load vertex shader glShaderSource( iGLVertexShaderHandle, 1, (const char**)(&vData), &vLength ); //load fragment shader glShaderSource( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, 1, (const char**)(&fData), &fLength ); //we are done with our data delete it delete[] vData; delete[] fData; //compile them both glCompileShader( iGLVertexShaderHandle ); //get shader status int iShaderOk; glGetShaderiv( iGLVertexShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iShaderOk ); if( iShaderOk == GL_FALSE ) { char* buffer; //get what happend with our shader glGetShaderiv( iGLVertexShaderHandle, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &iShaderOk ); buffer = new char[iShaderOk]; glGetShaderInfoLog( iGLVertexShaderHandle, iShaderOk, NULL, buffer ); //sprintf_s( buffer, "Failure Our Object For %s was not created", szFileName ); MessageBoxA( NULL, buffer, szVertexShaderName, MB_OK ); //delete our dynamic data free( buffer ); glDeleteShader(iGLVertexShaderHandle); return false; } glCompileShader( iGLFragmentShaderHandle ); //get shader status glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iShaderOk ); if( iShaderOk == GL_FALSE ) { char* buffer; //get what happend with our shader glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &iShaderOk ); buffer = new char[iShaderOk]; glGetShaderInfoLog( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, iShaderOk, NULL, buffer ); //sprintf_s( buffer, "Failure Our Object For %s was not created", szFileName ); MessageBoxA( NULL, buffer, szFragmentShaderName, MB_OK ); //delete our dynamic data free( buffer ); glDeleteShader(iGLFragmentShaderHandle); return false; } //lets check to see if the fragment shader compiled int iCompiled = 0; glGetShaderiv( iGLVertexShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iCompiled ); if( !iCompiled ) { //this shader did not compile leave return false; } //lets check to see if the fragment shader compiled glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iCompiled ); if( !iCompiled ) { char* buffer; //get what happend with our shader glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &iShaderOk ); buffer = new char[iShaderOk]; glGetShaderInfoLog( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, iShaderOk, NULL, buffer ); //sprintf_s( buffer, "Failure Our Object For %s was not created", szFileName ); MessageBoxA( NULL, buffer, szFragmentShaderName, MB_OK ); //delete our dynamic data free( buffer ); glDeleteShader(iGLFragmentShaderHandle); return false; } //make our new shader program m_iShaderProgramHandle = glCreateProgram(); glAttachShader( m_iShaderProgramHandle, iGLVertexShaderHandle ); glAttachShader( m_iShaderProgramHandle, iGLFragmentShaderHandle ); glLinkProgram( m_iShaderProgramHandle ); int iLinked = 0; glGetProgramiv( m_iShaderProgramHandle, GL_LINK_STATUS, &iLinked ); if( !iLinked ) { //we didn't link return false; } //NOW LETS CREATE ALL OUR HANDLES TO OUR PROPER LIKING //start from this parameter va_list parseList; va_start( parseList, szFragmentShaderName ); //read in number of variables if any unsigned uiNum = 0; uiNum = va_arg( parseList, unsigned ); //for loop through our attribute pairs int enumType = 0; for( unsigned x = 0; x < uiNum; ++x ) { //specify our attribute locations enumType = va_arg( parseList, int ); char* name = va_arg( parseList, char* ); glBindAttribLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, enumType, name ); } //end our list parsing va_end( parseList ); //relink specify //we have custom specified our attribute locations glLinkProgram( m_iShaderProgramHandle ); //fill our handles InitializeHandles( ); //everything went great return true; } void CShaderProgram::InitializeHandles( void ) { m_uihMVP = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mMVP" ); m_uihWorld = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mWorld" ); m_uihView = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mView" ); m_uihProjection = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mProjection" ); ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //texture handles m_uihDiffuseMap = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "diffuseMap" ); if( m_uihDiffuseMap != -1 ) { //store what texture index this handle will be in the shader glUniform1i( m_uihDiffuseMap, RM_DIFFUSE+GL_TEXTURE0 ); (0)+ } m_uihNormalMap = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "normalMap" ); if( m_uihNormalMap != -1 ) { //store what texture index this handle will be in the shader glUniform1i( m_uihNormalMap, RM_NORMAL+GL_TEXTURE0 ); (1)+ } } void CShaderProgram::SetDiffuseMap( const unsigned& uihDiffuseMap ) { (0)+ glActiveTexture( RM_DIFFUSE+GL_TEXTURE0 ); glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, uihDiffuseMap ); } void CShaderProgram::SetNormalMap( const unsigned& uihNormalMap ) { (1)+ glActiveTexture( RM_NORMAL+GL_TEXTURE0 ); glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, uihNormalMap ); } //MY 2 TEST SHADERS also my math order is correct it pertains to my matrix ordering in my math library once again i've tested the basic rendering. rendering to the screen works fine ----------------------------------------SIMPLE SHADER------------------------------------- //vertex shader looks like this #version 330 in vec3 vVertexPos; in vec3 vNormal; in vec2 vTexCoord; uniform mat4 mWorld; // Model Matrix uniform mat4 mView; // Camera View Matrix uniform mat4 mProjection;// Camera Projection Matrix out vec2 vTexCoordVary; // Texture coord to the fragment program out vec3 vNormalColor; void main( void ) { //pass the texture coordinate vTexCoordVary = vTexCoord; vNormalColor = vNormal; //calculate our model view projection matrix mat4 mMVP = (( mWorld * mView ) * mProjection ); //result our position gl_Position = vec4( vVertexPos, 1 ) * mMVP; } //fragment shader looks like this #version 330 in vec2 vTexCoordVary; in vec3 vNormalColor; uniform sampler2D diffuseMap; uniform sampler2D normalMap; out vec4 fragColor[2]; void main( void ) { //CORRECT fragColor[0] = texture( normalMap, vTexCoordVary ); fragColor[1] = vec4( vNormalColor, 1.0 ); }; ----------------------------------------SCREEN SHADER------------------------------------- //vertext shader looks like this #version 330 in vec3 vVertexPos; // This is the position of the vertex coming in in vec2 vTexCoord; // This is the texture coordinate.... out vec2 vTexCoordVary; // Texture coord to the fragment program void main( void ) { vTexCoordVary = vTexCoord; //set our position gl_Position = vec4( vVertexPos.xyz, 1.0f ); } //fragment shader looks like this #version 330 in vec2 vTexCoordVary; // Incoming "varying" texture coordinate uniform sampler2D diffuseMap;//the tile detail texture uniform sampler2D normalMap; //the normal map from earlier out vec4 vTheColorOfThePixel; void main( void ) { //CORRECT vTheColorOfThePixel = texture( normalMap, vTexCoordVary ); }; .Class RenderTarget Main Functions //here is my render targets create function bool CRenderTarget::Create( const unsigned uiNumTextures, unsigned uiWidth, unsigned uiHeight, int iInternalFormat, bool bDepthWanted ) { if( uiNumTextures <= 0 ) return false; //generate our variables glGenFramebuffers(1, &m_uifboHandle); // Initialize FBO glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, m_uifboHandle); m_uiNumTextures = uiNumTextures; if( bDepthWanted ) m_uiNumTextures += 1; m_uiTextureHandle = new unsigned int[uiNumTextures]; glGenTextures( uiNumTextures, m_uiTextureHandle ); for( unsigned x = 0; x < uiNumTextures-1; ++x ) { glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[x]); // Reserve space for our 2D render target glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, iInternalFormat, uiWidth, uiHeight, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, NULL); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0 + x, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[x], 0); } //if we need one for depth testing if( bDepthWanted ) { glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1], 0); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1], 0);*/ // Must attach texture to framebuffer. Has Stencil and depth glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1]); glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, /*GL_DEPTH_STENCIL*/GL_DEPTH24_STENCIL8, TEXTURE_WIDTH, TEXTURE_HEIGHT ); glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_RENDERBUFFER, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1]); glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, GL_RENDERBUFFER, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1]); } glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); //everything went fine return true; } void CRenderTarget::Bind( const int& iTargetAttachmentLoc, const unsigned& uiWhichTexture, const bool bBindFrameBuffer ) { if( bBindFrameBuffer ) glBindFramebuffer( GL_FRAMEBUFFER, m_uifboHandle ); if( uiWhichTexture < m_uiNumTextures ) glFramebufferTexture(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0 + iTargetAttachmentLoc, m_uiTextureHandle[uiWhichTexture], 0); } void CRenderTarget::UnBind( void ) { //default our binding glBindFramebuffer( GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0 ); } //this is all in a test project so here's my straight forward rendering function for testing this render function does basic rendering steps keep in mind i have already tested my textures i have already tested my box thats being rendered all basic rendering works fine its just when i try to render to a texture then display it in a render surface that it does not work. Also I have tested my render surface it is bound exactly to the screen coordinate space void TestRenderSteps( void ) { //Clear the color and the depth glClearColor( 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f ); glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT ); //bind the shader program glUseProgram( testShader.m_iShaderProgramHandle ); //1) grab the vertex buffer related to our rendering glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionNormalTexBuffer().GetBufferHandle() ); //2) how our stream will be split here ( 4 bytes position, ..ext ) CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionNormalTexBuffer().MapVertexStride(); //3) set the index buffer if needed glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, CIndexBuffer::GetInstance()->GetBufferHandle() ); //send the needed information into the shader testShader.SetWorldMatrix( boxPosition ); testShader.SetViewMatrix( Static_Camera.GetView( ) ); testShader.SetProjectionMatrix( Static_Camera.GetProjection( ) ); testShader.SetDiffuseMap( iTextureID ); testShader.SetNormalMap( iTextureID2 ); GLenum buffers[] = { GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1 }; glDrawBuffers(2, buffers); //bind to our render target //RM_DIFFUSE, RM_NORMAL are enums (0 && 1) renderTarget.Bind( RM_DIFFUSE, 1, true ); renderTarget.Bind( RM_NORMAL, 1, false); //false because buffer is already bound //i clear here just to clear the texture to make it a default value of white //by doing this i can see if what im rendering to my screen is just drawing to the screen //or if its my render target defaulted glClearColor( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f ); glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT ); //i have this box object which i draw testBox.Draw(); //the draw call looks like this //my normal rendering works just fine so i know this draw is fine // glDrawElementsBaseVertex( m_sides[x].GetPrimitiveType(), // m_sides[x].GetPrimitiveCount() * 3, // GL_UNSIGNED_INT, // BUFFER_OFFSET(sizeof(unsigned int) * m_sides[x].GetStartIndex()), // m_sides[x].GetStartVertex( ) ); //we unbind the target back to default renderTarget.UnBind(); //i stop mapping my vertex format CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionNormalTexBuffer().UnMapVertexStride(); //i go back to default in using no shader program glUseProgram( 0 ); //now that everything is drawn to the textures //lets draw our screen surface and pass it our 2 filled out textures //NOW RENDER THE TEXTURES WE COLLECTED TO THE SCREEN QUAD //bind the shader program glUseProgram( testScreenShader.m_iShaderProgramHandle ); //1) grab the vertex buffer related to our rendering glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionTexBuffer().GetBufferHandle() ); //2) how our stream will be split here CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionTexBuffer().MapVertexStride(); //3) set the index buffer if needed glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, CIndexBuffer::GetInstance()->GetBufferHandle() ); //pass our 2 filled out textures (in the shader im just using the diffuse //i wanted to see if i was rendering anything before i started getting into other techniques testScreenShader.SetDiffuseMap( renderTarget.GetTextureHandle(0) ); //SetDiffuseMap definitions in shader program class testScreenShader.SetNormalMap( renderTarget.GetTextureHandle(1) ); //SetNormalMap definitions in shader program class //DO the draw call drawing our screen rectangle glDrawElementsBaseVertex( m_ScreenRect.GetPrimitiveType(), m_ScreenRect.GetPrimitiveCount() * 3, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, BUFFER_OFFSET(sizeof(unsigned int) * m_ScreenRect.GetStartIndex()), m_ScreenRect.GetStartVertex( ) );*/ //unbind our vertex mapping CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionTexBuffer().UnMapVertexStride(); //default to no shader program glUseProgram( 0 ); } Last words: 1) I can render my box just fine 2) i can render my screen rect just fine 3) I cannot render my box into a texture then display it into my screen rect 4) This entire project is just a test project I made to test different rendering practices. So excuse any "ugly-ish" unclean code. This was made just on a fly run through when I was trying new test cases.

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  • Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook book review

    - by Chris Muir
    I recently received a free copy of Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook published by Packt Publishing for review. Readers of technical cookbooks would know this genre of text includes problems that developers will hit and the prescribed solutions, in this case for Oracle's Application Development Framework (ADF).  Books like this excel themselves on excellent coverage, a logical progress of solutions through out the book, and providing a readable narrative around the numerous steps and code. This book progresses well through ADF application assembly, ADF Business Components, the view layer, security, deployment and tuning.  Each recipe had a clear introduction and I especially enjoyed the "There's more" follow up sections for some recipes that leads the reader onto related ideas and issues the reader really needs to be aware of. Also worthy of comment having worked with ADF for over 5 years, there certainly was recipes and solutions I hadn't encountered before, this book gets bonus points for that. As a reviewer what negatives can I give this text? The book has cast it's net too wide by trying to cover "everything from design and construction, to deployment, testing, debugging and optimization."  ADF is such a large and sophistication technology, this book with 100 recipes barely scrapes the surface.  Don't expect all your ADF problems to be solved here. In turn there is inconsistency in the level of problems and solutions.  I felt at the beginning the book was pitching itself at advanced problems to solve (that's great for me), but then it introduces topics like building a static View Object or train.  These topics in my opinion are fairly simple and are covered by the Oracle documentation just as well, they shouldn't have been included here.  In conclusion, ADF beginners will find this book worthwhile as it will open your eyes to the wider problems and solutions required for ADF, and experts for just the fact they can point junior programmers at the book for certain problems and say "get on with it". Is there scope for more ADF tombs like this?  Yes!  I'd love to see a cookbook specializing on ADF Business Components (hint hint to budding authors).

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  • Is anyone doing "real" TDD with Visual-C++, and if yes, how do they do it?

    - by Martin
    Test Driven Development implies writing the test before the code and following a certain cycle: Write Test Check Test (run) Write Production Code Check Test (run) Clean up Production Code Check test (run) As far as I'm concerned, this is only possible if your development solution allows you to very quickly switch between the production and test code, and to execute the test for a certain production code part extremely quickly. Now, while there exist lots of Unit Testing Frameworks for C++ (I'm using Bost.Test atm.) it does seem that there doesn't really exist any decent (for native C++) Visual Studio (Plugin) solution that makes the TDD cycle bearable regardless of framework used. "Bearable" means that it's a one-click action to run a test for a certain cpp file without having to manually set up a separate testing project etc. "Bearable" also means that a simple test starts (linking!) and runs very quickly. So, what tools (plugins) and techniques are out there that make the TDD cycle possible for native C++ development with Visual Studio? Note: I'm fine with free or "commercial" tools. Please: No framework recommendations. (Unless the framework has a dedicated Visual Studio plugin and you want to recommend the plugin.) Edit Note: The answers so far have provided links on how to integrate a Unit Testing framework into Visual Studio. The resources more or less describe how to get the UT framework to compile and get your first Tests running. This is not what this question is about. I'm of the opinion that to really work productively, having the Unit Tests in a manually maintained(!), separate vcproj from your production classes will add so much overhead that TDD "isn't possible". As far as I am aware, you do not add extra "projects" to a Java or C# thing to enable Unit Tests and TDD, and for a good reason. This should be possible with C++ given the right tools, but it seems (this question is about) that there are very little tools for TDD/C++/VS. Googling around, I've found one tool, VisualAssert, that seems to aim in the right direction. However, afaiks, it doesn't seem to be in widespread use (compared to CppUnit, Boost.Test etc.). Edit: I would like to add a comment to the context for this question. I think it does a good summary of outlining (part of) the problem: (comment by Billy ONeal) Visual Studio does not use "build scripts" that are reasonably editable by the user. One project produces one binary. Moreover, Java has the property that Java never builds a complete binary -- the binary you build is just a ZIP of the class files. Therefore it's possible to compile separately then JAR together manually (using e.g. 7z). C++ and C# both actually link their binaries, so generally speaking you can't write a script like that. The closest you can get is to compile everything separately and then do two linkings (one for production, one for testing).

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  • Configuring keyboard input to eliminate unused diacritics

    - by David Cesarino
    I'd like to change the way diacritics work under Xubuntu. My problem My native language is pt-BR and my notebook has an american keyboard. Thus, I use ' and " followed by keys like u and c to achieve things like ú, ç and ü. It all works well. However, in the case of apostrophes and quotes, that creates a problem when I use ' followed by: letters that won't accept the acute accent ( ´ , ACUTE ACCENT -- 0x00B4) at all, like t; and letters that won't accept the acute in pt-BR, like r. In 1, ' with t does absolutely nothing. In 2, ' with r creates r (LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH ACUTE -- 0x0155), which is used, afaik, for some eastern european languages like slovak. It isn't used in portuguese, just like ?, s, z, ?, ?, ?, n and all consonants (portuguese do not take diacritics in consonants). Question That said, is there a way to better support the portuguese-brazilian language using an american keyboard? It is very common here --- I actually prefer the american keyboard to our own, known as “ABNT”. Desired solution I'd like to deactivate unused diacritics, so case 2 would behave just like case 1. Additionally, if possible, I'd like case 1 to behave like it does under Windows. As an example, typing ' followed by t should write 't (acute followed by T) instead of doing nothing. About 2, in my humble opinion, doing nothing is counterproductive. I realize the behavior is reasonable according to logic ("there isn't t-acute, so please tell the computer to typeset apostrophe --- ', SPACE --- instead of acute). But from a human, practical point of view, I think it makes more sense (to me, at least). Additional comments I believe this also applies to spanish, french, italian and other western european latin languages. On the console (Ctrl+Alt+F?), case 1 is not a problem. I don't need to press space as apostrophes are automatically added. However, there, I'm unable to access cedilla (ç). Two completely different behaviors. If it's just a matter of customizing text config files (possibly creating a custom layout or whatever), I'd be glad to share my efforts. I just need guide on the "howto" part. Somehow Google only points me to the "enough" people (those who cope with the situation and think that it works "well enough"). And since I have definitely migrated to Linux/Xubuntu after years, I'd like to leave just as I like it (and I'm sure others as well). For example, if there is some kind of scripting or definition to tell the computer to do what I described, so be it.

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  • How to deal with malicious domain redirections?

    - by user359650
    It is possible for anybody to buy a domain name containing negative terms and point it to someone's website in order to damage their reputation. For instance someone could buy the domain child-pornography.com and point it to the address 64.34.119.12 which is the address behind stackoverflow.com and people navigating to the domain in question would end up visualizing content from StackExchange which would be detrimental to StackExchange's image. To illustrate this, I added the entry 64.34.119.12 child-pornography.com to my /etc/hosts file and tested. Here is what I obtained: I personally found this user experience terrible as someone could think that Stack Exchange are in favor of child pornography and awaiting support from the community to create a Q&A site about it. I tested with other websites and experienced other behaviors that I would categorize as follows: 1 - Useful 404 page (happens with stackoverflow.com): For me the worst way of handling this as the image of the targeted website is directly associated with the offending domain. The more useful the 404 page, the bigger the impression that the targeted website would be willing to help with child pornography. 2 - Redirection (happens with microsoft.com): For instance when accessing child-pornography.com you get redirected to www.microsoft.com. It isn't as bad as above as the offending domain name never appears alongside the targeted website's content, but still bad in my opinion as it gives the impression the targeted website bought the offending domain and redirected it to their website to get more traffic. 3 - Server error (happens with lemonde.fr): You get an error from the webserver which page doesn't contain any content that can be associated with the targeted website (e.g. default Apache 404 page, completely blank page). I believe that is good as the identify of the targeted website isn't revealed. Above are the various behaviors I experienced, but I also thought about a fourth way of dealing with this which is described below. 4 - Disclaimer page (haven't found any website implementing that technique): Display a message such as : "You ended here because someone bought and linked the child-pornography.com domain to our website. We do not own this domain and do not associate ourselves with it. This request has been logged by our servers and we will raise this issue with the competent authorities to have this domain taken down. If you want to access our website, please click here." The good thing about this method is that it can be implemented at application layer (good if you don't have control over web server which happens with some hosting solutions), allows you to protect yourself from any liability, and offer the visitor to be redirected to your own website. Which of the above options would you implement to deal with malicious domain linking (IMO only options 3 and 4 are worth considering) ?

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  • Multiple country-specific domains or one global domain [closed]

    - by CJM
    Possible Duplicate: How should I structure my urls for both SEO and localization? My company currently has its main (English) site on a .com domain with a .co.uk alias. In addition, we have separate sites for certain other countries - these are also hosted in the UK but are distinct sites with a country-specific domain names (.de, .fr, .se, .es), and the sites have differing amounts of distinct but overlapping content, For example, the .es site is entirely in Spanish and has a page for every section of the UK site but little else. Whereas the .de site has much more content (but still less than the UK site), in German, and geared towards our business focus in that country. The main point is that the content in the additional sites is a subset of the UK, is translated into the local language, and although sometimes is simply only a translated version of UK content, it is usually 'tweaked' for the local market, and in certain areas, contains unique content. The other sites get a fraction of the traffic of the UK site. This is perfectly understandable since the biggest chunk of work comes from the UK, and we've been established here for over 30 years. However, we are wanting to build up our overseas business and part of that is building up our websites to support this. The Question: I posed a suggestion to the business that we might consider consolidating all our websites onto the .com domain but with /en/de/fr/se/etc sections, as plenty of other companies seem to do. The theory was that the non-english sites would benefit from the greater reputation of the parent .com domain, and that all the content would be mutually supporting - my fear is that the child domains on their own are too small to compete on their own compared to competitors who are established in these countries. Speaking to an SEO consultant from my hosting company, he feels that this move would have some benefit (for the reasons mentioned), but they would likely be significantly outweighed by the loss of the benefits of localised domains. Specifically, he said that since the Panda update, and particularly the two sets of changes this year, that we would lose more than we would gain. Having done some Panda research since, I've had my eyes opened on many issues, but curiously I haven't come across much that mentions localised domain names, though I do question whether Google would see it as duplicated content. It's not that I disagree with the consultant, I just want to know more before I make recommendations to my company. What is the prevailing opinion in this case? Would I gain anything from consolidating country-specific content onto one domain? Would Google see this as duplicate content? Would there be an even greater penalty from the loss of country-specific domains? And is there anything else I can do to help support the smaller, country-specific domains?

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  • .NET Code Evolution

    - by Alois Kraus
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/07/24/153504.aspxAt my day job I do look at a lot of code written by other people. Most of the code is quite good and some is even a masterpiece. And there is also code which makes you think WTF… oh it was written by me. Hm not so bad after all. There are many excuses reasons for bad code. Most often it is time pressure followed by not enough ambition (who cares) or insufficient training. Normally I do care about code quality quite a lot which makes me a (perceived) slow worker who does write many tests and refines the code quite a lot because of the design deficiencies. Most of the deficiencies I do find by putting my design under stress while checking for invariants. It does also help a lot to step into the code with a debugger (sometimes also Windbg). I do this much more often when my tests are red. That way I do get a much better understanding what my code really does and not what I think it should be doing. This time I do want to show you how code can evolve over the years with different .NET Framework versions. Once there was  time where .NET 1.1 was new and many C++ programmers did switch over to get rid of not initialized pointers and memory leaks. There were also nice new data structures available such as the Hashtable which is fast lookup table with O(1) time complexity. All was good and much code was written since then. At 2005 a new version of the .NET Framework did arrive which did bring many new things like generics and new data structures. The “old” fashioned way of Hashtable were coming to an end and everyone used the new Dictionary<xx,xx> type instead which was type safe and faster because the object to type conversion (aka boxing) was no longer necessary. I think 95% of all Hashtables and dictionaries use string as key. Often it is convenient to ignore casing to make it easy to look up values which the user did enter. An often followed route is to convert the string to upper case before putting it into the Hashtable. Hashtable Table = new Hashtable(); void Add(string key, string value) { Table.Add(key.ToUpper(), value); } This is valid and working code but it has problems. First we can pass to the Hashtable a custom IEqualityComparer to do the string matching case insensitive. Second we can switch over to the now also old Dictionary type to become a little faster and we can keep the the original keys (not upper cased) in the dictionary. Dictionary<string, string> DictTable = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase); void AddDict(string key, string value) { DictTable.Add(key, value); } Many people do not user the other ctors of Dictionary because they do shy away from the overhead of writing their own comparer. They do not know that .NET has for strings already predefined comparers at hand which you can directly use. Today in the many core area we do use threads all over the place. Sometimes things break in subtle ways but most of the time it is sufficient to place a lock around the offender. Threading has become so mainstream that it may sound weird that in the year 2000 some guy got a huge incentive for the idea to reduce the time to process calibration data from 12 hours to 6 hours by using two threads on a dual core machine. Threading does make it easy to become faster at the expense of correctness. Correct and scalable multithreading can be arbitrarily hard to achieve depending on the problem you are trying to solve. Lets suppose we want to process millions of items with two threads and count the processed items processed by all threads. A typical beginners code might look like this: int Counter; void IJustLearnedToUseThreads() { var t1 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t1.Start(); var t2 = new Thread(ThreadWorkMethod); t2.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception("Hmm " + Counter + " != " + 2 * Increments); } const int Increments = 10 * 1000 * 1000; void ThreadWorkMethod() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counter++; } } It does throw an exception with the message e.g. “Hmm 10.222.287 != 20.000.000” and does never finish. The code does fail because the assumption that Counter++ is an atomic operation is wrong. The ++ operator is just a shortcut for Counter = Counter + 1 This does involve reading the counter from a memory location into the CPU, incrementing value on the CPU and writing the new value back to the memory location. When we do look at the generated assembly code we will see only inc dword ptr [ecx+10h] which is only one instruction. Yes it is one instruction but it is not atomic. All modern CPUs have several layers of caches (L1,L2,L3) which try to hide the fact how slow actual main memory accesses are. Since cache is just another word for redundant copy it can happen that one CPU does read a value from main memory into the cache, modifies it and write it back to the main memory. The problem is that at least the L1 cache is not shared between CPUs so it can happen that one CPU does make changes to values which did change in meantime in the main memory. From the exception you can see we did increment the value 20 million times but half of the changes were lost because we did overwrite the already changed value from the other thread. This is a very common case and people do learn to protect their  data with proper locking.   void Intermediate() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Action acc = ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate; var ar1 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); var ar2 = acc.BeginInvoke(null, null); ar1.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); ar2.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Intermediate did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Intermediate() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { lock (this) { Counter++; } } } This is better and does use the .NET Threadpool to get rid of manual thread management. It does give the expected result but it can result in deadlocks because you do lock on this. This is in general a bad idea since it can lead to deadlocks when other threads use your class instance as lock object. It is therefore recommended to create a private object as lock object to ensure that nobody else can lock your lock object. When you read more about threading you will read about lock free algorithms. They are nice and can improve performance quite a lot but you need to pay close attention to the CLR memory model. It does make quite weak guarantees in general but it can still work because your CPU architecture does give you more invariants than the CLR memory model. For a simple counter there is an easy lock free alternative present with the Interlocked class in .NET. As a general rule you should not try to write lock free algos since most likely you will fail to get it right on all CPU architectures. void Experienced() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Experienced did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Experienced() { for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Interlocked.Increment(ref Counter); } } Since time does move forward we do not use threads explicitly anymore but the much nicer Task abstraction which was introduced with .NET 4 at 2010. It is educational to look at the generated assembly code. The Interlocked.Increment method must be called which does wondrous things right? Lets see: lock inc dword ptr [eax] The first thing to note that there is no method call at all. Why? Because the JIT compiler does know very well about CPU intrinsic functions. Atomic operations which do lock the memory bus to prevent other processors to read stale values are such things. Second: This is the same increment call prefixed with a lock instruction. The only reason for the existence of the Interlocked class is that the JIT compiler can compile it to the matching CPU intrinsic functions which can not only increment by one but can also do an add, exchange and a combined compare and exchange operation. But be warned that the correct usage of its methods can be tricky. If you try to be clever and look a the generated IL code and try to reason about its efficiency you will fail. Only the generated machine code counts. Is this the best code we can write? Perhaps. It is nice and clean. But can we make it any faster? Lets see how good we are doing currently. Level Time in s IJustLearnedToUseThreads Flawed Code Intermediate 1,5 (lock) Experienced 0,3 (Interlocked.Increment) Master 0,1 (1,0 for int[2]) That lock free thing is really a nice thing. But if you read more about CPU cache, cache coherency, false sharing you can do even better. int[] Counters = new int[12]; // Cache line size is 64 bytes on my machine with an 8 way associative cache try for yourself e.g. 64 on more modern CPUs void Master() { var time = Stopwatch.StartNew(); Task t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, 0); Task t2 = Task.Factory.StartNew(ThreadWorkMethod_Master, Counters.Length - 1); t1.Wait(); t2.Wait(); Counter = Counters[0] + Counters[Counters.Length - 1]; if (Counter != 2 * Increments) throw new Exception(String.Format("Hmm {0:N0} != {1:N0}", Counter, 2 * Increments)); Console.WriteLine("Master did take: {0:F1}s", time.Elapsed.TotalSeconds); } void ThreadWorkMethod_Master(object number) { int index = (int) number; for (int i = 0; i < Increments; i++) { Counters[index]++; } } The key insight here is to use for each core its own value. But if you simply use simply an integer array of two items, one for each core and add the items at the end you will be much slower than the lock free version (factor 3). Each CPU core has its own cache line size which is something in the range of 16-256 bytes. When you do access a value from one location the CPU does not only fetch one value from main memory but a complete cache line (e.g. 16 bytes). This means that you do not pay for the next 15 bytes when you access them. This can lead to dramatic performance improvements and non obvious code which is faster although it does have many more memory reads than another algorithm. So what have we done here? We have started with correct code but it was lacking knowledge how to use the .NET Base Class Libraries optimally. Then we did try to get fancy and used threads for the first time and failed. Our next try was better but it still had non obvious issues (lock object exposed to the outside). Knowledge has increased further and we have found a lock free version of our counter which is a nice and clean way which is a perfectly valid solution. The last example is only here to show you how you can get most out of threading by paying close attention to your used data structures and CPU cache coherency. Although we are working in a virtual execution environment in a high level language with automatic memory management it does pay off to know the details down to the assembly level. Only if you continue to learn and to dig deeper you can come up with solutions no one else was even considering. I have studied particle physics which does help at the digging deeper part. Have you ever tried to solve Quantum Chromodynamics equations? Compared to that the rest must be easy ;-). Although I am no longer working in the Science field I take pride in discovering non obvious things. This can be a very hard to find bug or a new way to restructure data to make something 10 times faster. Now I need to get some sleep ….

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  • 4.8M wasn't enough so we went for 5.055M tpmc with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel r2 :-)

    - by wcoekaer
    We released a new set of benchmarks today. One is an updated tpc-c from a few months ago where we had just over 4.8M tpmc at $0.98 and we just updated it to go to 5.05M and $0.89. The other one is related to Java Middleware performance. You can find the press release here. Now, I don't want to talk about the actual relevance of the benchmark numbers, as I am not in the benchmark team. I want to talk about why these numbers and these efforts, unrelated to what they mean to your workload, matter to customers. The actual benchmark effort is a very big, long, expensive undertaking where many groups work together as a big virtual team. Having the virtual team be within a single company of course helps tremendously... We already start with a very big server setup with tons of storage, many disks, lots of ram, lots of cpu's, cores, threads, large database setups. Getting the whole setup going to start tuning, by itself, is no easy task, but then the real fun starts with tuning the system for optimal performance -and- stability. A benchmark is not just revving an engine at high rpm, it's actually hitting the circuit. The tests require long runs, require surviving availability tests, such as surviving crashes -and- recovery under load. In the TPC-C example, the x4800 system had 4TB ram, 160 threads (8 sockets, hyperthreaded, 10 cores/socket), tons of storage attached, tons of luns visible to the OS. flash storage, non flash storage... many things at high scale that all have to be perfectly synchronized. During this process, we find bugs, we fix bugs, we find performance issues, we fix performance issues, we find interesting potential features to investigate for the future, we start new development projects for future releases and all this goes back into the products. As more and more customers, for Oracle Linux, are running larger and larger, faster and faster, more mission critical, higher available databases..., these things are just absolutely critical. Unrelated to what anyone's specific opinion is about tpc-c or tpc-h or specjenterprise etc, there is a ton of effort that the customer benefits from. All this work makes Oracle Linux and/or Oracle Solaris better platforms. Whether it's faster, more stable, more scalable, more resilient. It helps. Another point that I always like to re-iterate around UEK and UEK2 : we have our kernel source git repository online. Complete changelog of the mainline kernel, and our changes, easy to pull, easy to dissect, easy to know what went in when, why and where. No need to go log into a website and manually click through pages to hopefully discover changes or patches. No need to untar 2 tar balls and run a diff.

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  • How granular should a command be in a CQ[R]S model?

    - by Aaronaught
    I'm considering a project to migrate part of our WCF-based SOA over to a service bus model (probably nServiceBus) and using some basic pub-sub to achieve Command-Query Separation. I'm not new to SOA, or even to service bus models, but I confess that until recently my concept of "separation" was limited to run-of-the-mill database mirroring and replication. Still, I'm attracted to the idea because it seems to provide all the benefits of an eventually-consistent system while sidestepping many of the obvious drawbacks (most notably the lack of proper transactional support). I've read a lot on the subject from Udi Dahan who is basically the guru on ESB architectures (at least in the Microsoft world), but one thing he says really puzzles me: As we get larger entities with more fields on them, we also get more actors working with those same entities, and the higher the likelihood that something will touch some attribute of them at any given time, increasing the number of concurrency conflicts. [...] A core element of CQRS is rethinking the design of the user interface to enable us to capture our users’ intent such that making a customer preferred is a different unit of work for the user than indicating that the customer has moved or that they’ve gotten married. Using an Excel-like UI for data changes doesn’t capture intent, as we saw above. -- Udi Dahan, Clarified CQRS From the perspective described in the quotation, it's hard to argue with that logic. But it seems to go against the grain with respect to SOAs. An SOA (and really services in general) are supposed to deal with coarse-grained messages so as to minimize network chatter - among many other benefits. I realize that network chatter is less of an issue when you've got highly-distributed systems with good message queuing and none of the baggage of RPC, but it doesn't seem wise to dismiss the issue entirely. Udi almost seems to be saying that every attribute change (i.e. field update) ought to be its own command, which is hard to imagine in the context of one user potentially updating hundreds or thousands of combined entities and attributes as it often is with a traditional web service. One batch update in SQL Server may take a fraction of a second given a good highly-parameterized query, table-valued parameter or bulk insert to a staging table; processing all of these updates one at a time is slow, slow, slow, and OLTP database hardware is the most expensive of all to scale up/out. Is there some way to reconcile these competing concerns? Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Does this problem have a well-known solution in the CQS/ESB world? If not, then how does one decide what the "right level" of granularity in a Command should be? Is there some "standard" one can use as a starting point - sort of like 3NF in databases - and only deviate when careful profiling suggests a potentially significant performance benefit? Or is this possibly one of those things that, despite several strong opinions being expressed by various experts, is really just a matter of opinion?

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  • Writing or extending existing emacs packages: is it worth or should I move to Netbeans/Eclipse?

    - by Andrea
    I'm finishing my master degree course in CS and I've almost become addicted to Emacs. I've used it to write in C, Latex, Java, JSP,XML, CommonLisp, Ada and other languages no other editor supported, like AMPL. I'd like to improve the packages I've been using the most or create new ones, but, in practice, I find that the implementation of Emacs leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of poorly-featured/poorly-maintained packages with either overlapping functionalities or obscure incompatibilities, and Elisp just seems to foster the situation by lacking the common features modern lisps have. In contrast Eclipse and Netbeans are actively improved and it does seem they can be effective for non-mainstream languages. I tried Hibachi for Ada in Eclipse and it worked well, there's CUPS for Lisp in Eclipse and LambdaBeans built using NetBeans components. On the other hand those plugins seem to be less active than their Emacs' counterparts, for example Hibachi was archived last year. What's your opinion on this? Which editor should I write extension for? EDIT: To answer Larry Coleman (see comment below): I like Emacs as a user because it is efficient both for me and the computer I'm using. It's fast and the textual interface (i.e. minibuffer) allows for quick interaction. It's solid and packages are usually small and easy to manage. If I need to correct or remove something I usually just have to change a row in my .emacs or an elisp file, or delete a directory. Eclipse plugins rely on a more complicated process that screwed my Eclipse configuration a couple of times, forcing me to do a clean reinstall. Emacs works as long as I use the basic packages. If I need something more complicated the situation gets pretty hairy. As a "power user" I think that the best I can hope for is to write a severely crippled version of the extensions I'd actually like to have; in other words, that it's not worth the trouble. I'd like to write extensions for the things I'd like to have automated in Emacs, for example project support with automated tag-table update on file writing. There are a few projects on this that lack integration, documentation, extensibility and so forth. The best one is probably CEDET, for which I believe the Greenspun's 10th rule can be applied. EDIT: To comment Larry Coleman's answer I'm pretty sure I can pick elisp programming but the extensions I have in mind don't exist yet despite their relative simplicity and the effort more knowledgeable people poured into related projects.This makes me wonder whether it is so because of the way emacs is developed, i.e. people tend to write their own little extensions without coordination, or its implementation, its extension language not being able to keep up with the growing complexity.

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  • Will Online Learning Save Higher Education (and does it need saving)?

    - by user739873
    A lot (an awful lot) of education industry rag real estate has been devoted to the topics of online learning, MOOC’s, Udacity, edX, etc., etc. and to the uninitiated you’d think that the education equivalent of the cure for cancer had been discovered. There are certainly skeptics (whose voice is usually swiftly trampled upon by the masses) who feel we could over steer and damage or destroy something vital to teaching and learning (i.e. the classroom experience and direct interaction with human beings known as instructors), but for the most part prevailing opinion seems to be that online learning will take over the world and that higher education will never be the same. Now I’m sure that since you all know I work for a technology company you think I’m going to come down hard on the side of online learning proselytizers. Yes, I do believe that this revolution can and will provide access to massive numbers of individuals that either couldn’t afford (from a fiscal or time perspective) a traditional education, and that in some cases the online modality will actually be an improvement over certain traditional forms (such as courses taught by an adjunct or teaching assistant that has no business being a teacher). But I think several things need immediate attention or we’re likely to get so caught up in the delivery that we miss some of the real issues (and opportunities) around online learning. First and foremost, we’ve got to give some thought to how traditional information systems are going to accommodate thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of individual students each taking courses from many, many different “deliverers” with an expectation that successful completion of these courses will result in credit at many or most institutions. There’s also a huge opportunity to refine the delivery platform (no, LMS is not a commodity when you are talking about online delivery being your sole mode of operation) as well as the course itself by mining all kinds of data from the interactions that the students have with the material each time they take it. Social data analytics tools will be key in achieving this goal. What about accreditation (badging or competencies vs. traditional degrees)? And again, will the information systems in place today adapt to changes in this area fast enough? The type of scale that this shift in learning could drive has the potential to abruptly overwhelm just about every system in place today in higher education. I would like to (with a not so gentle reminder) refer you back to a blog entry I wrote when I first stepped into my current role at Oracle in which I talked about how higher ed needs an “Oracle” more than at any other time in it’s evolution (despite the somewhat mercantilist reputation it has in some circles). There just aren’t that many organizations that can deliver the kinds of solutions “at scale” that this brave new world of online education will demand. The future may be closer than we think. Cole

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  • Help needed on an SQL configuration problem.

    - by user321048
    I have been banging my head with this one more the two weeks, and still don't know what the problem is ( I can't narrow it down). The problem is the following. I have a solution with 3 project in it all written in c# and I with LINQ. One project is the main web site, the other is the data layer (communication with the database) and the third one is a custom little CMS. The problem is the following: On a hosting provider when I publish the site it all works perfectly, but this site was needed to be hosted on the client server so I needed to do that. But the problem is that I also needed to configure the client server, because they don't have an Administrator employed (I know, I know ;) ). For the first time I some how managed, to set it up but a problem appear. My main web site is working just as it suppose to be - it reads (communicates with) the database, but My CMS is not. It shows the first log in page, but after that when I try to log in it throws the following error: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.) Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [SqlException (0x80131904): A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)] System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) +4846887 System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj) +194 System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Connect(ServerInfo serverInfo, SqlInternalConnectionTds connHandler, Boolean ignoreSniOpenTimeout, Int64 timerExpire, Boolean encrypt, Boolean trustServerCert, Boolean integratedSecurity, SqlConnection owningObject) +4860189 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.AttemptOneLogin(ServerInfo serverInfo, String newPassword, Boolean ignoreSniOpenTimeout, Int64 timerExpire, SqlConnection owningObject) +90 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.LoginNoFailover(String host, String newPassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance, SqlConnection owningObject, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, Int64 timerStart) +342 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.OpenLoginEnlist(SqlConnection owningObject, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, String newPassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance) +221 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds..ctor(DbConnectionPoolIdentity identity, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, Object providerInfo, String newPassword, SqlConnection owningObject, Boolean redirectedUserInstance) +189 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningConnection) +185 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreatePooledConnection(DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnectionOptions options) +31 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.CreateObject(DbConnection owningObject) +433 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.UserCreateRequest(DbConnection owningObject) +66 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.GetConnection(DbConnection owningObject) +499 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.GetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection) +65 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.OpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory) +117 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.Open() +122 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlConnectionManager.UseConnection(IConnectionUser user) +44 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlProvider.get_IsSqlCe() +45 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlProvider.InitializeProviderMode() +20 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlProvider.System.Data.Linq.Provider.IProvider.Execute(Expression query) +57 System.Data.Linq.DataQuery`1.System.Linq.IQueryProvider.Execute(Expression expression) +23 System.Linq.Queryable.Count(IQueryable`1 source) +240 CMS.Security.UserProfile.LoginUser() in C:\Documents and Settings\Dimitar\Desktop\New Mepso Final 08_04\CMS\Classes\UserProfile.cs:132 CMS.Default.Login1_Authenticate(Object sender, AuthenticateEventArgs e) in C:\Documents and Settings\Dimitar\Desktop\New Mepso Final 08_04\CMS\Default.aspx.cs:37 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.OnAuthenticate(AuthenticateEventArgs e) +108 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.AttemptLogin() +115 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.OnBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs e) +101 System.Web.UI.Control.RaiseBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs args) +37 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnCommand(CommandEventArgs e) +118 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +166 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +10 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +13 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +36 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1565 Maybe this is a dumb question, but I cannot find the root of the problem, let alone the solution. So far I have tried the following: -setting time out on connection string to a higher value -configuration and after that turning off server firewall -checking the connection string over and over again (they are the same for all three projects and are saved in web.config) Important notes: I have tried executing the project from VS2008 with a connection string to the same database and the results are the same. That's why I think the problem is the SQL Server 2005 and not the IIS7. Any bit of information is more then welcomed.

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  • How to handle encryption key conflicts when synchronizing data?

    - by Rafael
    Assume that there is data that gets synchronized between several devices. The data is protected with a symmetric encryption algorithm and a key. The key is stored on each device and encrypted with a password. When a user changes the password only the key gets re-encrypted. Under normal circumstances, when there is a good network connection to other peers, the current key gets synchronized and all data on the new device gets encrypted with the same key. But how to handle situations where a new device doesn’t have a network connection and e.g. creates its own new, but incompatible key? How to keep the usability as high as possible under such circumstances? The application could detect that there is no network and hence refuse to start. That’s very bad usability in my opinion, because the application isn’t functional at all in this case. I don’t consider this a solution. The application could ignore the missing network connection and create a new key. But what to do when the application gains a network connection? There will be several incompatible keys and some parts of the underlying data could only be encrypted with one key and other parts with another key. The situation would get worse if there would be more keys than just two and the application would’ve to ask every time for a password when another object that should get decrypted with another key would be needed. It is very messy and time consuming to try to re-encrypt all data that is encrypted with another key with a main key. What should be the main key at all in this case? The oldest key? The key with the most encrypted objects? What if the key got synchronized but not all objects that got encrypted with this particular key? How should the user know for which particular password the application asks and why it takes probably very long to re-encrypt the data? It’s very hard to describe encryption “issues” to users. So far I didn’t find an acceptable solution, nor some kind of generic strategy. Do you have some hints about a concrete strategy or some books / papers that describe synchronization of symmetrically encrypted data with keys that could cause conflicts?

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  • Should a server "be lenient" in what it accepts and "discard faulty input silently"?

    - by romkyns
    I was under the impression that by now everyone agrees this maxim was a mistake. But I recently saw this answer which has a "be lenient" comment upvoted 137 times (as of today). In my opinion, the leniency in what browsers accept was the direct cause of the utter mess that HTML and some other web standards were a few years ago, and have only recently begun to properly crystallize out of that mess. The way I see it, being lenient in what you accept will lead to this. The second part of the maxim is "discard faulty input silently, without returning an error message unless this is required by the specification", and this feels borderline offensive. Any programmer who has banged their head on the wall when something fails silently will know what I mean. So, am I completely wrong about this? Should my program be lenient in what it accepts and swallow errors silently? Or am I mis-interpreting what this is supposed to mean? The original question said "program", and I take everyone's point about that. It can make sense for programs to be lenient. What I really meant, however, is APIs: interfaces exposed to other programs, rather than people. HTTP is an example. The protocol is an interface that only other programs use. People never directly provide the dates that go into headers like "If-Modified-Since". So, the question is: should the server implementing a standard be lenient and allow dates in several other formats, in addition to the one that's actually required by the standard? I believe the "be lenient" is supposed to apply to this situation, rather than human interfaces. If the server is lenient, it might seem like an overall improvement, but I think in practice it only leads to client implementations that end up relying on the leniency and thus failing to work with another server that's lenient in slightly different ways. So, should a server exposing some API be lenient or is that a very bad idea? Now onto lenient handling of user input. Consider YouTrack (a bug tracking software). It uses a language for text entry that is reminiscent of Markdown. Except that it's "lenient". For example, writing - foo - bar - baz is not a documented way of creating a bulleted list, and yet it worked. Consequently, it ended up being used a lot throughout our internal bugtracker. Next version comes out, and this lenient feature starts working slightly differently, breaking a bunch of lists that (mis)used this (non)feature. The documented way to create bulleted lists still works, of course. So, should my software be lenient in what user inputs it accepts?

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  • Dual-boot computer won't boot without external hard drive

    - by FrankP
    I have Ubuntu loaded on my external HDD. I tried to unplug the external drive so that this way I could run Windows as the default OS to boot when the computer turns on, but it gives me an error. I need to know how I can make it so that when my computers boots it stops saying Error: no such device: (a whole bunch of numbers and letters) then it says grub rescue>_. If I plug the external HDD in, and I let Ubuntu run the boot process, then it gives me a list of OS's/ HDD's to choose from and Windows 7 is there. The only problem is that I want Windows be my default OS, not the other way around. P.S. I have found that I dislike Ubuntu because I can't even figure out how to install the necessary programs to learn how to start writing Ruby On Rails. So installing it was a waste of my time, in my opinion. Now that I have it on the external hard drive, I will leave it installed though. I just dont want to have to keep that external drive plugged in to my computer all the time. Thank you a ton to whoever can help me! Thank you for the detail'd instructions. I am doing my best to follow you and it makes sense when I read it but, Rescatux is not doing what you said it would. None of the options you said would appear are not there. On my screen there is 4 options when MBR run's none look familiar and when I picked the best possible option based on my educated guesses it said success. I tried to restart my computer and it said Please insert windows recovery disc and hit enter. Problem being I don't have the windows recovery disc. I bought my computer from a local Computer tec and he loads windows on it for you. I have no time to run my compute over to him as sunday is my only day free. I think that I just wrecked my computer in the process of this attempted fix windows refuses to boot now WITH or WITHOUT the HDD. Please help this is getting out of hand

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  • Looking for an ultra portable laptop for Ubuntu

    - by prule
    Hi, I'm in the market for a new laptop, and portability is important since I really only use it when I'm travelling to and from work - primarily for programming. I've been searching high and low for something like this: less than 2kg hopefully Intel i5 (but negotiable) NO dvd drive - just don't need it 4G ram either 7200rpm disk or SSD (ssd preferable) 13 inch screen not too pricey (MacBook Air is about $1700 AUD) available in Australia The Dell Inspiron 13z and Lenovo Edge 13 look close, but I've not found anything that says I'm not going to have a fight with compatibility. The MacBook Air 13 looks like the PERFECT hardware, but I'm afraid it will just be easier to run MacOS than Ubuntu. I want to stay with Ubuntu, but the MacBook Air is only $1700 so I'm in danger of becoming another apple fanboi if I can't find anything competitive. Going through all the sites looking for stuff has been a huge waste of time System 76 doesn't deliver to Australia http://www.linux-laptop.net/ and http://www.linlap.com/ are hard work and not confidence inspiring http://www.vgcomputing.com.au/nsintro.html is hard work again, searching for every laptop they say has excellent compatibility on the web to find out what spec it is http://zareason.com/shop/Strata-Pro-13.html (at $1345 USD) looks interesting, but I've got no idea how much I'll get stung by customs importing Dell Inspiron 13z with i5, 4G, 320 7200rpm disk, ATI Mobility Radeon HD5430 - 1GB, Dell Wireless 1501 802.11b/g/n @ $1200 AUD seems like the only competitor but is it compatible? (Dell support offer no opinion - as far as they are concerned they only have 2 models that are certified for ubuntu) Am I worrying too much about the compatibility? Should I just go with Dell? Or switch to MacOS? (It would be good to have a searchable database that had the full machine specs, and compatibility - I'm thinking about building something... but I don't have much time right now...) Thanks. UPDATE I went with a MacBook Air. The price/weight/power was just right. Everything else was either too pricy (i5) or too heavy, or underpowered (SU7300 1.3GHz). Its a pity, because I didn't really want to leave Ubuntu. I'll still run it on my media center and spare (heavy) laptop.

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  • Server Error in '/' Application (ASP.NET)

    - by baeltazor
    Hi All I just setup up member ship roles and registration on my website with visual web developer using the tutorial on msdn. It works perfectly locally, but when i uploaded it to my server, I get the following page: "Server Error in '/' Application. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Configuration Error Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately. Parser Error Message: The connection name 'LocalSqlServer' was not found in the applications configuration or the connection string is empty. Source Error: [No relevant source lines] Source File: machine.config Line: 160 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.4200; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.4016 " Does anybody know why I'm seeing this and how I may go about fixinf this? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you Bael. EDIT: I have just looked at my web.config file after reading the following line in the error message: "The connection name 'LocalSqlServer' was not found in the applications configuration or the connection string is empty." ... And have noticed that the following element is completely empty: <connectionStrings/> // Is this one supposed to be empty? if not what should go here? In the error it implies it shouldn't be empty. Also, I don't know where I should place LocalSqlServer LATEST EDIT After changing DataSource to LocalHost i get the following error: Server Error in '/JTS' Application. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server) Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [SqlException (0x80131904): A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)] System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) +4849015 System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj) +194 System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Connect(ServerInfo serverInfo, SqlInternalConnectionTds connHandler, Boolean ignoreSniOpenTimeout, Int64 timerExpire, Boolean encrypt, Boolean trustServerCert, Boolean integratedSecurity, SqlConnection owningObject) +4862333 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.AttemptOneLogin(ServerInfo serverInfo, String newPassword, Boolean ignoreSniOpenTimeout, Int64 timerExpire, SqlConnection owningObject) +90 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.LoginNoFailover(String host, String newPassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance, SqlConnection owningObject, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, Int64 timerStart) +342 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.OpenLoginEnlist(SqlConnection owningObject, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, String newPassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance) +221 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds..ctor(DbConnectionPoolIdentity identity, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, Object providerInfo, String newPassword, SqlConnection owningObject, Boolean redirectedUserInstance) +189 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningConnection) +185 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreatePooledConnection(DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnectionOptions options) +31 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.CreateObject(DbConnection owningObject) +433 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.UserCreateRequest(DbConnection owningObject) +66 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.GetConnection(DbConnection owningObject) +499 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.GetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection) +65 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.OpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory) +117 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.Open() +122 System.Web.DataAccess.SqlConnectionHolder.Open(HttpContext context, Boolean revertImpersonate) +87 System.Web.DataAccess.SqlConnectionHelper.GetConnection(String connectionString, Boolean revertImpersonation) +221 System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider.GetPasswordWithFormat(String username, Boolean updateLastLoginActivityDate, Int32& status, String& password, Int32& passwordFormat, String& passwordSalt, Int32& failedPasswordAttemptCount, Int32& failedPasswordAnswerAttemptCount, Boolean& isApproved, DateTime& lastLoginDate, DateTime& lastActivityDate) +815 System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider.CheckPassword(String username, String password, Boolean updateLastLoginActivityDate, Boolean failIfNotApproved, String& salt, Int32& passwordFormat) +105 System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider.CheckPassword(String username, String password, Boolean updateLastLoginActivityDate, Boolean failIfNotApproved) +42 System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider.ValidateUser(String username, String password) +78 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.AuthenticateUsingMembershipProvider(AuthenticateEventArgs e) +60 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.OnAuthenticate(AuthenticateEventArgs e) +119 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.AttemptLogin() +115 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.OnBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs e) +101 System.Web.UI.Control.RaiseBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs args) +37 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnCommand(CommandEventArgs e) +118 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +166 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +10 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +13 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +36 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1565 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.4927; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.4927

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  • Why do I always think I know much less than others? [closed]

    - by John Kenedy
    I have been in programming since primary 6. Since the time DOS comes, I have been doing programming in quickbasic 4.5, then to VB 6, then to C#. In between I also do programming in C++. But every time I open Stack Overflow and trying to help others answering their problems, it seems that I know nothing. I feel that I am so stupid even I have been in programming for so long. I would shock reading all the questions and unable to find any clue. Is technology moving too fast that left out me? I feel that technology changes too fast and I can't keep up, when I know ASP.NET web form, MVC is out, when I know MVC, android/iphone/HTML5 app is popular. It seems that I am chasing something and never reach 'it'. I don't know whether this is correct place for me to talk about this. I just wish to listen to opinion like you, how do you think technology should grow instead of recreating language, adding bug here and there to let programmer figure it out, while big company share the solution among themselves. This is exactly how I feel. The simple example is how do you think why doesn't Dictionary<> in .NET provide iterating the object using index? Why must we use Key or GetEnumerator(). Developer has to google and read wasted hour of hour of time to find pieces of hack code to use reflection to achieve reading from index. Where developer will keep it as collection and valuable code. HOwever when times come, everything changes again, developer has to find answer for new silly problems again! Yes, I really hate it! I hate how many big companies are playing with the developer by cutting a big picture into small puzzle and messing it up and asking developer to place it together themselves. As if they are creating problems for us to solve it, so we are unable to grow upfront, we are being manipulated by those silly problems they have created. Another sample would how difficult to collect Cookies from CookieContainer without passing the URL, yes without the URL and I WANT to get all cookie in the cookiecontainer without knowing the URL, I want to iterate all. Why does micros0ft have to limit me from doing that?

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  • It's possible to fulfill the social necessity of a human being through a social game in 3D like IMVU?

    - by Totty
    (I'm not advertising nor promoting this game, as it's just an example of my experience and I would like to have your opinion about the matter if possible) I've been started researching "things" about games and I've decided to begin to play IMVU as a friend of mine said it's cool. At first it seemed just another 3d social game, not so cool.. But I've "tried to like" and after 1 day I can say I'm addicted to it! Yes; I will explain better: About the game: You can go in chat-rooms, move to positions. Some positions are like sitting in a sofa, floor, dancing alone or with a partner, kissing and more in this way. In the free version of the game there is no nudity. You can even listen to music, view youtube... The 3d graphics are quite low end, so it's not as real as the paid PC games of today. About my experience: At first I was going with my friend in chat-rooms, they seemed very nice. There were people talking about general stuff, quite like in a real life. Well, I begin to know some girls (yes, virtual girls commanded by a real girl, I hope!). Things happened: Some girls are just crazy, not like in real life, they make out in before even talking; Other girls you can speak a little bit, then they add you to their friend-list. Sometimes they invite to their virtual places. Some girls have really IMVU boyfriends only (but not in reality) and most of them don't even make up in the game, so it's really a level of commitment involved here! But from what my friend told they last for him, at least, about 3 days... Some others have real and IMVU boyfriends that are the same. Until now I haven't find a girl with different boyfriend in the IMVU and reality. Nor multiple boyfriends. There are rooms where the same people find each selves every day and speak about general stuff, relationships and so on... They are nice with you, they "feel" you and show careness. This is what amazes me, they treat you like a real human being and as being their friend in the real world. (of course it's not always like this) There are jealous girls too and competitiveness between females lol, I know you loled! This is kind of social. So today I closed my door in my room and I've played it all day long and guess what, I didn't feel a need to stay with a real person at all. Normally, If I would stay a full day alone I would get quite crazy... So the question is: It's just me that seemed to be able to fulfill my social needs or there is something more? thanks for your precious time for reading my full question,

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  • Self-Executing Anonymous Function vs Prototype

    - by Robotsushi
    In Javascript there are a few clearly prominent techniques for create and manage classes/namespaces in javascript. I am curious what situations warrant using one technique vs. the other. I want to pick one and stick with it moving forward. I write enterprise code that is maintained and shared across multiple teams, and I want to know what is the best practice when writing maintainable javascript ? I tend to prefer Self-Executing Anonymous Functions however I am curious what the community vote is on these techniques. Prototype : function obj() { } obj.prototype.test = function() { alert('Hello?'); }; var obj2 = new obj(); obj2.test(); Self-Closing Anonymous Function : //Self-Executing Anonymous Function (function( skillet, $, undefined ) { //Private Property var isHot = true; //Public Property skillet.ingredient = "Bacon Strips"; //Public Method skillet.fry = function() { var oliveOil; addItem( "\t\n Butter \n\t" ); addItem( oliveOil ); console.log( "Frying " + skillet.ingredient ); }; //Private Method function addItem( item ) { if ( item !== undefined ) { console.log( "Adding " + $.trim(item) ); } } }( window.skillet = window.skillet || {}, jQuery )); //Public Properties console.log( skillet.ingredient ); //Bacon Strips //Public Methods skillet.fry(); //Adding Butter & Fraying Bacon Strips //Adding a Public Property skillet.quantity = "12"; console.log( skillet.quantity ); //12 //Adding New Functionality to the Skillet (function( skillet, $, undefined ) { //Private Property var amountOfGrease = "1 Cup"; //Public Method skillet.toString = function() { console.log( skillet.quantity + " " + skillet.ingredient + " & " + amountOfGrease + " of Grease" ); console.log( isHot ? "Hot" : "Cold" ); }; }( window.skillet = window.skillet || {}, jQuery )); //end of skillet definition try { //12 Bacon Strips & 1 Cup of Grease skillet.toString(); //Throws Exception } catch( e ) { console.log( e.message ); //isHot is not defined } I feel that I should mention that the Self-Executing Anonymous Function is the pattern used by the jQuery team. Update When I asked this question I didn't truly see the importance of what I was trying to understand. The real issue at hand is whether or not to use new to create instances of your objects or to use patterns which do not require constructors of the use of the new keyword. I added my own answer, because in my opinion we should make use of patterns which don't use the new keyword. For more information please see my answer.

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  • Alternatives to multiple inheritance for my architecture (NPCs in a Realtime Strategy game)?

    - by Brettetete
    Coding isn't that hard actually. The hard part is to write code that makes sense, is readable and understandable. So I want to get a better developer and create some solid architecture. So I want to do create an architecture for NPCs in a video-game. It is a Realtime Strategy game like Starcraft, Age of Empires, Command & Conquers, etc etc.. So I'll have different kinds of NPCs. A NPC can have one to many abilities (methods) of these: Build(), Farm() and Attack(). Examples: Worker can Build() and Farm() Warrior can Attack() Citizen can Build(), Farm() and Attack() Fisherman can Farm() and Attack() I hope everything is clear so far. So now I do have my NPC Types and their abilities. But lets come to the technical / programmatical aspect. What would be a good programmatic architecture for my different kinds of NPCs? Okay I could have a base class. Actually I think this is a good way to stick with the DRY principle. So I can have methods like WalkTo(x,y) in my base class since every NPC will be able to move. But now lets come to the real problem. Where do I implement my abilities? (remember: Build(), Farm() and Attack()) Since the abilities will consists of the same logic it would be annoying / break DRY principle to implement them for each NPC (Worker,Warrior, ..). Okay I could implement the abilities within the base class. This would require some kind of logic that verifies if a NPC can use ability X. IsBuilder, CanBuild, .. I think it is clear what I want to express. But I don't feel very well with this idea. This sounds like a bloated base class with too much functionality. I do use C# as programming language. So multiple inheritance isn't an opinion here. Means: Having extra base classes like Fisherman : Farmer, Attacker won't work.

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  • Why do old programming languages continue to be revised?

    - by SunAvatar
    This question is not, "Why do people still use old programming languages?" I understand that quite well. In fact the two programming languages I know best are C and Scheme, both of which date back to the 70s. Recently I was reading about the changes in C99 and C11 versus C89 (which seems to still be the most-used version of C in practice and the version I learned from K&R). Looking around, it seems like every programming language in heavy use gets a new specification at least once per decade or so. Even Fortran is still getting new revisions, despite the fact that most people using it are still using FORTRAN 77. Contrast this with the approach of, say, the typesetting system TeX. In 1989, with the release of TeX 3.0, Donald Knuth declared that TeX was feature-complete and future releases would contain only bug fixes. Even beyond this, he has stated that upon his death, "all remaining bugs will become features" and absolutely no further updates will be made. Others are free to fork TeX and have done so, but the resulting systems are renamed to indicate that they are different from the official TeX. This is not because Knuth thinks TeX is perfect, but because he understands the value of a stable, predictable system that will do the same thing in fifty years that it does now. Why do most programming language designers not follow the same principle? Of course, when a language is relatively new, it makes sense that it will go through a period of rapid change before settling down. And no one can really object to minor changes that don't do much more than codify existing pseudo-standards or correct unintended readings. But when a language still seems to need improvement after ten or twenty years, why not just fork it or start over, rather than try to change what is already in use? If some people really want to do object-oriented programming in Fortran, why not create "Objective Fortran" for that purpose, and leave Fortran itself alone? I suppose one could say that, regardless of future revisions, C89 is already a standard and nothing stops people from continuing to use it. This is sort of true, but connotations do have consequences. GCC will, in pedantic mode, warn about syntax that is either deprecated or has a subtly different meaning in C99, which means C89 programmers can't just totally ignore the new standard. So there must be some benefit in C99 that is sufficient to impose this overhead on everyone who uses the language. This is a real question, not an invitation to argue. Obviously I do have an opinion on this, but at the moment I'm just trying to understand why this isn't just how things are done already. I suppose the question is: What are the (real or perceived) advantages of updating a language standard, as opposed to creating a new language based on the old?

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  • Does the method of adjustment matter, or just the final calibration?

    - by Steve
    A company produces software (and hardware) that is used to both perform automatic adjustments on electronic test equipment as well as perform calibrations of the same equipment. The results of the calibrations are put onto a certificate of calibration that is sent to the customer along with the equipment. This calibration certificate states various conditions of the calibration, such as what hardware (models/serial numbers) and software (version) was used to perform the calibration, as well as things like environmental conditions, etc. Making the assumption that the software used to produce the data (and listed on the calibration certificate) used on the certificate of calibration must have gone through a "test/release" process and must be considered "released" software - does this also mean that the software used for adjustment must also be released? I believe that the method (software/environmental conditions/etc) used or present during adjustment doesn't matter, all that really matters is the end result of the calibration, the conditions present during the calibration, and whether or not the equipment was within the specifications. The real question I'm hoping to get answered: Is there a reputable source (e.g. NIST or somewhere similar) that addresses this question? (I have searched...) The thinking is that during high volume production runs, the "unreleased" system can be used to perform adjustments, as long as a released system is used to perform the calibrations, since the time required to perform the adjustments is much longer than the calibration. This unreleased system will eventually become released for use, but currently is not. Also, please not that there is a distinction between "adjustment" and "calibration". The definition from BIPM International vocabulary of metrology, 2.39: Operation that, under specified conditions, in a first step, establishes a relation between the quantity values with measurement uncertainties provided by measurement standards and corresponding indications with associated measurement uncertainties (of the calibrated instrument or secondary standard) and, in a second step, uses this information to establish a relation for obtaining a measurement result from an indication. Followed by NOTE 2 (emphasis in original text): Calibration should not be confused with adjustment of a measuring system, often mistakenly called "self-calibration", nor with verification of calibration As a side note, I'm not sure why this got down voted. It's regarding software and it's use before and after release for use. I believe there is a best practice that can be applied and this is (hopefully) not primarily opinion based.

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