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• SSAS Compare: an intern’s journey

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  About a month ago, David mentioned an intern working in the BI Tools Team. That intern happens to be me! In five weeks’ time, I’ll start my second year of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and be a full-time student again, but for the past eight weeks, I’ve been living a completely different life. As Jon mentioned before, the teams here at Red Gate are small and everyone (including the interns!) is responsible for the product as a whole. I’ve attended planning sessions, UX tests, daily meetings, and everything else a full-time member of the team would; I had as much say in where we would go next with the product as anyone; I was able to see that what I was doing was an important part of the product from the feedback we got in the UX tests. All these things almost made me forget that this is just an internship and not my full-time job. First steps at Red Gate Being based in Cambridge, Red Gate has many Cambridge university graduates working for them. They also hire some Cambridge undergraduates for internships each summer. With its popularity with university graduates and its great working environment, Red Gate has managed to build up a great reputation. When I thought of doing an internship here in Cambridge, Red Gate just seemed to be the obvious choice for my first real work experience. On my first day at Red Gate, David, the lead developer for SSAS Compare, helped me settle in and explained what I’d be doing. My task was to improve the user experience of displaying differences between MDX scripts by syntax highlighting, script formatting, and improving the difference identification in the first place. David suggested how I should approach the problem, but left all the details and design decisions to me. That was when I realised how much independence and responsibility I’d have. What I’ve done If you launch the latest version of SSAS Compare and drill down to an MDX script difference, you can see the changes that have been made. In earlier versions, you could only see the scripts in plain text on both sides — either in black or grey, depending on whether they were the same or not. However, you couldn’t see exactly where the scripts were different, which was especially annoying when the two scripts were large – as they often are. Furthermore, if parts of the two scripts were formatted differently, they seemed to be different but were actually the same, which caused even more confusion and made it difficult to see where the differences were. All these issues have been fixed now. The two scripts are automatically formatted by the tool so that if two things are syntactically equivalent, they look the same – including case differences in keywords! The actual difference is highlighted in grey, which makes them easy to spot. The difference identification has been improved as well, so two scripts aren’t identified as different if there’s just a difference in meaningless whitespace characters, or when you have “select” on one side and “SELECT” on the other. We also have syntax highlighting, which makes it easier to read the scripts. How I did it In order to do the formatting properly, we decided to parse the MDX scripts. After some investigation into parser builders, I decided to go with the GOLD Parser builder and the bsn-goldparser .NET engine. GOLD Parser builder provides a fairly nice GUI to write, build, and test grammar in. We also liked the idea of separating the grammar building from parsing a text. The bsn-goldparser is one of many .NET engines for GOLD, and although it doesn’t support the newest features of GOLD Parser, it has “the ability to map semantic action classes to terminals or reduction rules, so that a completely functional semantic AST can be created directly without intermediate token AST representation, and without the need for glue code.” That makes it much easier for us to change the implementation in our program when we change the grammar. As bsn-goldparser is open source, and I wanted some more features in it, I contributed two new features which have now been merged to the project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an MDX grammar written for GOLD already, so I had to write it myself. I was referencing MSDN to get the formal grammar specification, but the specification was all over the place, so it wasn’t that easy to implement and find. We’re aware that we don’t yet fully support all valid MDX, so sometimes you’ll just see the MDX script difference displayed the old way. In that case, there is some grammar construct we don’t yet recognise. If you come across something SSAS Compare doesn’t recognise, we’d love to hear about it so we can add it to our grammar. When some MDX script gets parsed, a tree is produced. That tree can then be processed into a list of inlines which deal with the correct formatting and can be outputted to the screen. Doing all this has led me to many new technologies and projects I haven’t worked with before. This was my first experience with C# and Visual Studio, although I have done things in Java before. I have learnt how to unit test with NUnit, how to do dependency injection with Ninject, how to source-control code with SVN and Mercurial, how to build with TeamCity, how to use GOLD, and many other things. What’s coming next Sadly, my internship comes to an end this week, so there will be less development on MDX difference view for a while. But the team is going to work on marking the differences better and making it consistent with difference indication in the top part of comparison window, and will keep adding support for more MDX grammar so you can see the differences easily in every comparison you make. So long! And maybe I’ll see you next summer!

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• Tweaking a few URL validation settings on ASP.NET v4.0

  - by Carlyle Dacosta

  ASP.NET has a few default settings for URLs out of the box. These can be configured quite easily in the web.config file within the  <system.web>/<httpRuntime> configuration section. Some of these are: <httpRuntime maxUrlLength=”<number here>” This number should be an integer value (defaults to 260 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. This attribute gates the length of the Url without query string. <httpRuntime maxQueryStringLength=”<number here>”. This number should be an integer value (defaults to 2048 characters). The value must be greater than or equal to zero, though obviously small values will lead to an un-useable website. <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”List of characters you need included in ASP.NETs validation checks” /> By default the characters are “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?”. However once can easily change this by setting by modifying web.config. Remember, these characters can be specified in a variety of formats. For example, I want the character ‘!’ to be included in ASP.NETs URL validation logic. So I set the following: <httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,!”. A character could also be specified in its xml encoded form. ‘&lt;;’ would mean the ‘<’ sign). I could specify the ‘!’ in its xml encoded unicode format such as requestPathInvalidCharacters=”<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,$#x0021;” or I could specify it in its unicode encoded form or in the “<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?,%u0021” format. The following settings can be applied at Root Web.Config level, App Web.config level, Folder level or within a location tag: <location path="some path here"> <system.web> <httpRuntime maxUrlLength="" maxQueryStringLength="" requestPathInvalidChars="" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If any of the above settings fail request validation, an Http 400 “Bad Request” HttpException is thrown. These can be easily handled on the Application_Error handler on Global.asax.   Also, a new attribute in <httpRuntime /> called “relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping” has been added with a default of false. <httpRuntime … relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true|false" /> When the relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping attribute is set to false inbound Urls still need to be valid NTFS file paths. For example Urls (sans query string) need to be less than 260 characters; no path segment within a Url can use old-style DOS device names (LPT1, COM1, etc…); Urls must be valid Windows file paths. A url like “http://digg.com/http://cnn.com” should work with this attribute set to true (of course a few characters will need to be unblocked by removing them from requestPathInvalidCharacters="" above). Managed configuration for non-NTFS-compliant Urls is determined from the first valid configuration path found when walking up the path segments of the Url. For example, if the request Url is "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", and there is a web.config in the "/foo/bar" directory, then the managed configuration for the request comes from merging the configuration hierarchy to include the web.config from "/foo/bar". The value of the public property HttpRequest.PhysicalPath is set to [physical file path of the application root] + "REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH". For example, given a request Url like "/foo/bar/baz/<blah>data</blah>", where the application root is "/foo/bar" and the physical file path for that root is "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar", then PhysicalPath would be "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\foo\bar\ REQUEST_URL_IS_NOT_A_VALID_FILESYSTEM_PATH".

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 8, PLINQ’s ForAll Method

  - by Reed

  Parallel LINQ extends LINQ to Objects, and is typically very similar.  However, as I previously discussed, there are some differences.  Although the standard way to handle simple Data Parellelism is via Parallel.ForEach, it’s possible to do the same thing via PLINQ. PLINQ adds a new method unavailable in standard LINQ which provides new functionality… LINQ is designed to provide a much simpler way of handling querying, including filtering, ordering, grouping, and many other benefits.  Reading the description in LINQ to Objects on MSDN, it becomes clear that the thinking behind LINQ deals with retrieval of data.  LINQ works by adding a functional programming style on top of .NET, allowing us to express filters in terms of predicate functions, for example. PLINQ is, generally, very similar.  Typically, when using PLINQ, we write declarative statements to filter a dataset or perform an aggregation.  However, PLINQ adds one new method, which provides a very different purpose: ForAll. The ForAll method is defined on ParallelEnumerable, and will work upon any ParallelQuery<T>.  Unlike the sequence operators in LINQ and PLINQ, ForAll is intended to cause side effects.  It does not filter a collection, but rather invokes an action on each element of the collection. At first glance, this seems like a bad idea.  For example, Eric Lippert clearly explained two philosophical objections to providing an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method, one of which still applies when parallelized.  The sole purpose of this method is to cause side effects, and as such, I agree that the ForAll method “violates the functional programming principles that all the other sequence operators are based upon”, in exactly the same manner an IEnumerable<T>.ForEach extension method would violate these principles.  Eric Lippert’s second reason for disliking a ForEach extension method does not necessarily apply to ForAll – replacing ForAll with a call to Parallel.ForEach has the same closure semantics, so there is no loss there. Although ForAll may have philosophical issues, there is a pragmatic reason to include this method.  Without ForAll, we would take a fairly serious performance hit in many situations.  Often, we need to perform some filtering or grouping, then perform an action using the results of our filter.  Using a standard foreach statement to perform our action would avoid this philosophical issue: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action foreach (var item in filteredItems) { // These will now run serially item.DoSomething(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This would cause a loss in performance, since we lose any parallelism in place, and cause all of our actions to be run serially. We could easily use a Parallel.ForEach instead, which adds parallelism to the actions: // Filter our collection var filteredItems = collection.AsParallel().Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ); // Now perform an action once the filter completes Parallel.ForEach(filteredItems, item => { // These will now run in parallel item.DoSomething(); }); This is a noticeable improvement, since both our filtering and our actions run parallelized.  However, there is still a large bottleneck in place here.  The problem lies with my comment “perform an action once the filter completes”.  Here, we’re parallelizing the filter, then collecting all of the results, blocking until the filter completes.  Once the filtering of every element is completed, we then repartition the results of the filter, reschedule into multiple threads, and perform the action on each element.  By moving this into two separate statements, we potentially double our parallelization overhead, since we’re forcing the work to be partitioned and scheduled twice as many times. This is where the pragmatism comes into play.  By violating our functional principles, we gain the ability to avoid the overhead and cost of rescheduling the work: // Perform an action on the results of our filter collection .AsParallel() .Where( i => i.SomePredicate() ) .ForAll( i => i.DoSomething() ); The ability to avoid the scheduling overhead is a compelling reason to use ForAll.  This really goes back to one of the key points I discussed in data parallelism: Partition your problem in a way to place the most work possible into each task.  Here, this means leaving the statement attached to the expression, even though it causes side effects and is not standard usage for LINQ. This leads to my one guideline for using ForAll: The ForAll extension method should only be used to process the results of a parallel query, as returned by a PLINQ expression. Any other usage scenario should use Parallel.ForEach, instead.

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• Windows Phone 7 development: first impressions

  - by DigiMortal

  After hard week in work I got some free time to play with Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools. Although my first test application is still unfinished I think it is good moment to share my first experiences to you. In this posting I will give you quick overview of Windows Phone 7 developer tools from developer perspective. If you are familiar with Visual Studio 2010 then you will feel comfortable because Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools base on Visual Studio 2010 Express. Project templates There are five project templates available. Three of them are based on Silverlight and two on XNA Game Studio: Windows Phone Application (Silverlight) Windows Phone List Application (Silverlight) Windows Phone Class Library (Silverlight) Windows Phone Game (XNA Game Studio) Windows Phone Game Library (XNA Game Studio) Currently I am writing to test applications. One of them is based on Windows Phone Application and the other on Windows Phone List Application project template. After creating these projects you see the following views in Visual Studio. Windows Phone Application. Click on image to enlarge. Windows Phone List Application. Click on image to enlarge.  I suggest you to use some of these templates to get started more easily. Windows Phone 7 emulator You can run your Windows Phone 7 applications on Windows Phone 7 emulator that comes with developer tools CTP. If you run your application then emulator is started automatically and you can try out how your application works in phone-like emulator. You can see screenshot of emulator on right. Currently there is opened Windows Phone List Application as it is created by default. Click on image to enlarge it. Emulator is a little bit slow and uncomfortable but it works pretty well. This far I have caused only couple of crashes during my experiments. In these cases emulator works but Visual Studio gets stuck because it cannot communicate with emulator. One important note. Emulator is based on virtual machine although you can see only phone screen and options toolbar. If you want to run emulator you must close all virtual machines running on your machine and run Visual Studio 2010 as administrator. Once you run emulator you can keep it open because you can stop your application in Visual Studio, modify, compile and re-deploy it without restarting emulator. Designing user interfaces You can design user interface of your application in Visual Studio. When you open XAML-files it is displayed in window with two panels. Left panel shows you device screen and works as visual design environment while right panel shows you XAML mark-up and let’s you modify XML if you need it. As it is one of my very first Silverlight applications I felt more comfortable with XAML editor because property names in property boxes of visual designer confused me a little bit. Designer panel is not very good because it is visually hard to follow. It has black background that makes dark borders of controls very hard to see. If you have monitor with very high contrast then it is may be not a real problem. I have usual monitor and I have problem. :) Putting controls on design surface, dragging and resizing them is also pretty painful. Some controls are drawn correctly but for some controls you have to set width and height in XML so they can be resized. After some practicing it is not so annoying anymore. On the right you can see toolbox with some controllers. This is all you get out of the box. But it is sufficient to get started. After getting some experiences you can create your own controls or use existing ones from other vendors or developers. If it is your first time to do stuff with Silverlight then keep Google open – you need it hard. After getting over the first shock you get the point very quickly and start developing at normal speed. :) Writing source code Writing source code is the most familiar part of this action. Good old Visual Studio code editor with all nice features it has. But here you get also some surprises: The anatomy of Silverlight controls is a little bit different than the one of user controls in web and forms projects. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t run on full version of Windows (I bet it is some version of Windows CE or something like this) then there is less system classes you can use. Some familiar classes have less methods that in full version of .NET Framework and in these cases you have to write all the code by yourself or find libraries or source code from somewhere. These problems are really not so much problems than limitations and you get easily over them. Conclusion Windows Phone 7 CTP developer tools help you do a lot of things on Windows Phone 7. Although I expected better performance from tools I think that current performance is not a problem. This far my first test project is going very well and Google has answer for almost every question. Windows Phone 7 is mobile device and therefore it has less hardware resources than desktop computers. This is why toolset is so limited. The more you need memory the more slower is device and as you may guess it needs the more battery. If you are writing apps for mobile devices then make your best to get your application use as few resources as possible and act as fast as possible.

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 17, Think Continuations, not Callbacks

  - by Reed

  In traditional asynchronous programming, we’d often use a callback to handle notification of a background task’s completion.  The Task class in the Task Parallel Library introduces a cleaner alternative to the traditional callback: continuation tasks. Asynchronous programming methods typically required callback functions.  For example, MSDN’s Asynchronous Delegates Programming Sample shows a class that factorizes a number.  The original method in the example has the following signature: public static bool Factorize(int number, ref int primefactor1, ref int primefactor2) { //... .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } However, calling this is quite “tricky”, even if we modernize the sample to use lambda expressions via C# 3.0.  Normally, we could call this method like so: int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool answer = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", primeFactor1, primeFactor2, answer); If we want to make this operation run in the background, and report to the console via a callback, things get tricker.  First, we need a delegate definition: public delegate bool AsyncFactorCaller( int number, ref int primefactor1, ref int primefactor2); Then we need to use BeginInvoke to run this method asynchronously: int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; AsyncFactorCaller caller = new AsyncFactorCaller(Factorize); caller.BeginInvoke(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2, result => { int factor1 = 0; int factor2 = 0; bool answer = caller.EndInvoke(ref factor1, ref factor2, result); Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", factor1, factor2, answer); }, null); This works, but is quite difficult to understand from a conceptual standpoint.  To combat this, the framework added the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern, but it isn’t much easier to understand or author. Using .NET 4’s new Task<T> class and a continuation, we can dramatically simplify the implementation of the above code, as well as make it much more understandable.  We do this via the Task.ContinueWith method.  This method will schedule a new Task upon completion of the original task, and provide the original Task (including its Result if it’s a Task<T>) as an argument.  Using Task, we can eliminate the delegate, and rewrite this code like so: var background = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }); background.ContinueWith(task => Console.WriteLine("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result)); This is much simpler to understand, in my opinion.  Here, we’re explicitly asking to start a new task, then continue the task with a resulting task.  In our case, our method used ref parameters (this was from the MSDN Sample), so there is a little bit of extra boiler plate involved, but the code is at least easy to understand. That being said, this isn’t dramatically shorter when compared with our C# 3 port of the MSDN code above.  However, if we were to extend our requirements a bit, we can start to see more advantages to the Task based approach.  For example, supposed we need to report the results in a user interface control instead of reporting it to the Console.  This would be a common operation, but now, we have to think about marshaling our calls back to the user interface.  This is probably going to require calling Control.Invoke or Dispatcher.Invoke within our callback, forcing us to specify a delegate within the delegate.  The maintainability and ease of understanding drops.  However, just as a standard Task can be created with a TaskScheduler that uses the UI synchronization context, so too can we continue a task with a specific context.  There are Task.ContinueWith method overloads which allow you to provide a TaskScheduler.  This means you can schedule the continuation to run on the UI thread, by simply doing: Task.Factory.StartNew( () => { int primeFactor1 = 0; int primeFactor2 = 0; bool result = Factorize(10298312, ref primeFactor1, ref primeFactor2); return new { Result = result, Factor1 = primeFactor1, Factor2 = primeFactor2 }; }).ContinueWith(task => textBox1.Text = string.Format("{0}/{1} [Succeeded {2}]", task.Result.Factor1, task.Result.Factor2, task.Result.Result), TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext()); This is far more understandable than the alternative.  By using Task.ContinueWith in conjunction with TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(), we get a simple way to push any work onto a background thread, and update the user interface on the proper UI thread.  This technique works with Windows Presentation Foundation as well as Windows Forms, with no change in methodology.

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• 10 Great Free Icon Packs To Theme Your Android Phone

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android allows you to customize your home screen, adding widgets, arranging shortcuts and folders, choosing a background, and even replacing the included launcher entirely. You can install icon packs to theme your app icons, too. Third-party launchers use standard app icons by default, but they don’t have to. You can install icon packs that third-party launchers will use in place of standard app icons. How to Use Icon Packs To use icon packs, you’ll need to use a third-party launcher that supports them, such as Nova, Apex, ADW, Go Launcher, Holo Launcher, or Action Launcher Pro. Once you’re using a third-party launcher, you can install an icon pack and go into your launcher’s settings. You’ll find an option that allows you to choose between the icon packs you’ve installed. Many of these icon packs also include wallpapers, which you can set in the normal way. MIUI 5 Icons This icon pack offers over 1900 free icons that are similar to the icons used by the MIUi ROM developed by China’s Xiaomi Tech. The large list of icons is a big plus — this pack will give the majority of your app icons a very slick, consistent look. DCikonZ Theme DCikonZ is a free icon theme that includes a whopping 4000+ icons with a consistent look. This icon theme stands out not just because it’s huge, but also for offering for going in its own direction and avoiding the super-simple, flat look many icon packs use. Holo Icons Holo Icons replaces many app icons with simple, consistent-looking that match Google’s Holo style. If you’re a fan of Android’s Holo look, give it a try. It even tweaks many of the icons from Google’s own apps to make them look more consistent. Square Icon Pack Square Icon Pack turns your icons into simple squares. Even Google Chrome becomes an orb instead of a square. This makes every icon a consistent size and offers a unique look. The icons here almost look a bit like the small-size tiles available on Windows Phone and Windows 8.1. The free version doesn’t offer as many icons as the paid version, but it does offer icons for many popular apps. Rounded Want rounded icons instead? Try the Rounded icon theme, which offers simple rounded icons. The developer says they’re inspired by the consistently round icons used on Mozilla’s Firefox OS. Crumbled Icon Pack Crumbled Icon Pack applies an effect that makes icons look as if they’r crumbling. Rather than theming individual icons, Crumbled Icon Pack adds an effect to every app icon on your device. This means that all your app icons will be themed and consistent. Dainty Icon Pack Is your Android home screen too colorful? Dainty Icon Pack offers simple, gray-on-white icons for over 1200 apps. It’d be ideal over a simple background. The contrast may be a bit low here with the gray-on-white, but it’s otherwise very slick. Simplex Icons Simplex Icons offers more contrast, with black-on-gray icons. This icon pack could simplify busy home screens, allowing photographic wallpapers to come through. Min Icon Set Min attempts to go as minimal as possible, offering simple white icons for over 570 apps. It would be ideal over a simple wallpaper with app names hidden in your launcher, offering a calming, minimal home screen. For apps it doesn’t recognize, it will enclose part of the app’s icon in a white circle. Elegance Elegance goes in another direction entirely, offering icons that incorporate more details and gradients rather than going for minimalism. Its over 1200 icons offer another good option for people who aren’t into the minimal, flat look. Icon pack designers generally have to create and include their own icons to replace icons associated with specific apps, so you’ll probably find a few of your app icons aren’t replaced with most of these themes. Of course, a standard Android phone without an icon pack doesn’t have consistent icons, either. Even if all the icons in your app drawer aren’t themed, the few app icons you have on your home screen will be if you use widely used apps.     

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• HTG Explains: Why is Printer Ink So Expensive?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Printer ink is expensive, more expensive per drop than fine champagne or even human blood. If you haven’t gone paperless, you’ll notice that you’re paying a lot for new ink cartridges — more than seems reasonable. Purchasing the cheapest inkjet printer and buying official ink cartridge replacements is the most expensive thing you can do. There are ways to save money on ink if you must continue to print documents. Cheap Printers, Expensive Ink Ink jet printers are often very cheap. That’s because they’re sold at cost, or even at a loss — the manufacturer either makes no profit from the printer itself or loses money. The manufacturer will make most of its money from the printer cartridges you buy later. Even if the company does make a bit of money from each printer sold, it makes a much larger profit margin on ink. Rather than selling you a printer that may be rather expensive, they want to sell you a cheap printer and make money on an ongoing basis by providing expensive printer ink. It’s been compared to the razor model — sell a razor cheaply and mark up the razor blades. Rather than making a one-time profit on the razor, you’ll make continuing profit as the customer keeps buying razor blade replacements — or ink, in this case. Many printer manufacturers go out of their way to make it difficult for you to use unofficial ink cartridges, building microchips into their official ink cartridges. If you use an unofficial cartridge or refill an official cartridge, the printer may refuse to use it. Lexmark once argued in court that unofficial microchips that enable third-party ink cartridges would violate their copyright and Lexmark has argued that creating an unofficial microchip to bypass this restriction on third-party ink would violate Lexmark’s copyright and be illegal under the US DMCA. Luckily, they lost this argument. What Printer Companies Say Printer companies have put forth their own arguments in the past, attempting to justify the high cost of official ink cartridges and microchips that block any competition. In a Computer World story from 2010, HP argued that they spend a billion dollars each year on “ink research and development.” They point out that printer ink “must be formulated to withstand heating to 300 degrees, vaporization, and being squirted at 30 miles per hour, at a rate of 36,000 drops per second, through a nozzle one third the size of a human hair. After all that it must dry almost instantly on the paper.” They also argue that printers have become more efficient and use less ink to print, while third-party cartridges are less reliable. Companies that use microchips in their ink cartridges argue that only the microchip has the ability to enforce an expiration date, preventing consumers from using old ink cartridges. There’s something to all these arguments, sure — but they don’t seem to justify the sky-high cost of printer ink or the restriction on using third-party or refilled cartridges. Saving Money on Printing Ultimately, the price of something is what people are willing to pay and printer companies have found that most consumers are willing to pay this much for ink cartridge replacements. Try not to fall for it: Don’t buy the cheapest inkjet printer. Consider your needs when buying a printer and do some research. You’ll save more money in the long run. Consider these basic tips to save money on printing: Buy Refilled Cartridges: Refilled cartridges from third parties are generally much cheaper. Printer companies warn us away from these, but they often work very well. Refill Your Own Cartridges: You can get do-it-yourself kits for refilling your own printer ink cartridges, but this can be messy. Your printer may refuse to accept a refilled cartridge if the cartridge contains a microchip. Switch to a Laser Printer: Laser printers use toner, not ink cartridges. If you print a lot of black and white documents, a laser printer can be cheaper. Buy XL Cartridges: If you are buying official printer ink cartridges, spend more money each time. The cheapest ink cartridges won’t contain much ink at all, while larger “XL” ink cartridges will contain much more ink for only a bit more money. It’s often cheaper to buy in bulk. Avoid Printers With Tri-Color Ink Cartridges: If you’re printing color documents, you’ll want to get a printer that uses separate ink cartridges for all its colors. For example, let’s say your printer has a “Color” cartridge that contains blue, green, and red ink. If you print a lot of blue documents and use up all your blue ink, the Color cartridge will refuse to function — now all you can do is throw away your cartridge and buy a new one, even if the green and red ink chambers are full. If you had a printer with separate color cartridges, you’d just have to replace the blue cartridge. If you’ll be buying official ink cartridges, be sure to compare the cost of cartridges when buying a printer. The cheapest printer may be more expensive in the long run. Of course, you’ll save the most money if you stop printing entirely and go paperless, keeping digital copies of your documents instead of paper ones. Image Credit: Cliva Darra on Flickr     

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• An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

  - by Brian Schroer

  Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

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• Messaging Systems – Handshaking, Reconciliation and Tracking for Data Transparency

  - by Ahsan Alam

  As many corporations build business partnerships with other organizations, the need to share information becomes necessary. Large amount of data sharing using snail mail, email and/or fax are quickly becoming a thing of the past. More and more organizations are relying heavily on Ftp and/or Web Service to exchange data. Corporations apply wide range of technologies and techniques based on available resources and data transfer needs. Sometimes, it involves simple home-grown applications. Other times, large investments are made on products like BizTalk, TIBCO etc. Complexity of information management also varies significantly from one organizations to another. Some may deal with handful of simple steps to process and manage shared data; whereas others may rely on fairly complex processes with heavy interaction with internal and external systems in order to serve the business needs. It is not surprising that many of these systems end up becoming black boxes over a period of time. Consequently, people and business start to rely more and more on developers and support personnel just to extract simple information adding to the loss of productivity. One of the most important factor in any business is transparency to data irrespective of technology preferences and the complexity of business processes. Not knowing the state of data could become very costly to the business. Being involved in messaging systems for some time now, I have heard the same type of questions over and over again. Did we transmit messages successfully? Did we get responses back? What is the expected turn-around-time? Did the system experience any errors? When one company transmits data to one or more company, it may invoke a set of processes that could complete in matter of seconds, or it could days. As data travels from one organizations to another, the uncertainty grows, and the longer it takes to track uncertain state of the data the costlier it gets for the business, So, in every business scenario, it's extremely important to be aware of the state of the data.   Architects of messaging systems can take several steps to aid with data transparency. Some forms of data handshaking and reconciliation mechanism as well as extensive data tracking can be incorporated into the system to provide clear visibility to the data. What do I mean by handshaking and reconciliation? Some might consider these to be a single concept; however, I like to consider them in two unique categories. Handshaking serves as message receipts or acknowledgment. When one transmits messages to another, the receiver must acknowledge each message by sending immediate responses for each transaction. Whenever we use Web Services, handshaking is often achieved utilizing request/reply pattern. Similarly, if Ftp is used, a receiver can acknowledge by dropping messages for the sender as soon as the files are picked up. These forms of handshaking or acknowledgment informs the message sender and receiver that a successful transaction has occurred. I have mentioned earlier that it could take anywhere from a few seconds to a number of days before shared data is completely processed. In addition, whenever a batched transaction is used, processing time for each data element inside the batch could also vary significantly. So, in order to successfully manage data processing, reconciliation becomes extremely important; otherwise it may result into data loss or in some cases hefty penalty. Reconciliation can be done in many ways. Partner organizations can share and compare ad hoc reports to achieve reconciliation. On the other hand, partners can agree on some type of systematic reconciliation messages. Systems within responsible parties can trigger messages to partners as soon as the data process completes.   Next step in the data transparency is extensive data tracking. Some products such as BizTalk and TIBCO provide built-in functionality for data tracking; however, built-in functionality may not always be adequate. Sometimes additional tracking system (or databases) needs to be built in order monitor all types of data flow including, message transactions, handshaking, reconciliation, system errors and many more. If these types of data are captured, then these can be presented to business users in any forms or fashion. When business users are empowered with such information, then the reliance on developers and support teams decreases dramatically.   In today's collaborative world of information sharing, data transparency is key to the success of every business. The state of business data will constantly change. However, when people have easier access to various states of data, it allows them to make better and quicker decisions. Therefore, I feel that data handshaking, reconciliation and tracking is very important aspect of messaging systems.

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• Weekend With #iPad

  - by andrewbrust

  Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad.  This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day  and a rough neighborhood at night.  So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad.  Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices.  They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left.  The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon.  Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order.  Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago.  Who knew?  Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated.  By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone.  The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice.  the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth.  I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing.  The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing.  Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed.  It still looks amazing.  And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning.  The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing.  The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps.  Truly.  The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device.  That doesn’t mean it’s useless though.  It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey.  More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly.  Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID.  My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up.  Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad.  And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen.  And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work.  Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try.  And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints.  The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions.  I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy.  I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of.  This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft.  Exciting times.

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• Slide Creation Checklist

  - by Daniel Moth

  PowerPoint is a great tool for conference (large audience) presentations, which is the context for the advice below. The #1 thing to keep in mind when you create slides (at least for conference sessions), is that they are there to help you remember what you were going to say (the flow and key messages) and for the audience to get a visual reminder of the key points. Slides are not there for the audience to read what you are going to say anyway. If they were, what is the point of you being there? Slides are not holders for complete sentences (unless you are quoting) – use Microsoft Word for that purpose either as a physical handout or as a URL link that you share with the audience. When you dry run your presentation, if you find yourself reading the bullets on your slide, you have missed the point. You have a message to deliver that can be done regardless of your slides – remember that. The focus of your audience should be on you, not the screen. Based on that premise, I have created a checklist that I go over before I start a new deck and also once I think my slides are ready. Turn AutoFit OFF. I cannot stress this enough. For each slide, explicitly pick a slide layout. In my presentations, I only use one Title Slide, Section Header per demo slide, and for the rest of my slides one of the three: Title and Content, Title Only, Blank. Most people that are newbies to PowerPoint, get whatever default layout the New Slide creates for them and then start deleting and adding placeholders to that. You can do better than that (and you'll be glad you did if you also follow item #11 below). Every slide must have an image. Remove all punctuation (e.g. periods, commas) other than exclamation points and question marks (! ?). Don't use color or other formatting (e.g. italics, bold) for text on the slide. Check your animations. Avoid animations that hide elements that were on the slide (instead use a new slide and transition). Ensure that animations that bring new elements in, bring them into white space instead of over other existing elements. A good test is to print the slide and see that it still makes sense even without the animation. Print the deck in black and white choosing the "6 slides per page" option. Can I still read each slide without losing any information? If the answer is "no", go back and fix the slides so the answer becomes "yes". Don't have more than 3 bullet levels/indents. In other words: you type some text on the slide, hit 'Enter', hit 'Tab', type some more text and repeat at most one final time that sequence. Ideally your outer bullets have only level of sub-bullets (i.e. one level of indentation beneath them). Don't have more than 3-5 outer bullets per slide. Space them evenly horizontally, e.g. with blank lines in between. Don't wrap. For each bullet on all slides check: does the text for that bullet wrap to a second line? If it does, change the wording so it doesn't. Or create a terser bullet and make the original long text a sub-bullet of that one (thus decreasing the font size, but still being consistent) and have no wrapping. Use the same consistent fonts (i.e. Font Face, Font Size etc) throughout the deck for each level of bullet. In other words, don't deviate form the PowerPoint template you chose (or that was chosen for you). Go on each slide and hit 'Reset'. 'Reset' is a button on the 'Home' tab of the ribbon or you can find the 'Reset Slide' menu when you right click on a slide on the left 'Slides' list. If your slides can survive doing that without you "fixing" things after the Reset action, you are golden! For each slide ask yourself: if I had to replace this slide with a single sentence that conveys the key message, what would that sentence be? This exercise leads you to merge slides (where the key message is split) or split a slide into many, if there were too many key messages on the slide in the first place. It can also lead you to redesign a slide so the text on it really is just explanation or evidence for the key message you are trying to convey. Get the length right. Is the length of this deck suitable for the time you have been given to present? If not, cut content! It is far better to deliver less in a relaxed, polished engaging, memorable way than to deliver in great haste more content. As a rule of thumb, multiply 2 minutes by the number of slides you have, add the time you need for each demo and check if that add to more than the time you have allotted. If it does, start cutting content – we've all been there and it has to be done. As always, rules and guidelines are there to be bent and even broken some times. Start with the above and on a slide-by-slide basis decide which rules you want to bend. That is smarter than throwing all the rules out from the start, right? Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Installing Catalyst 11.6 for an ATI HD 6970

  - by David Oliver

  Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is displaying the desktop okay (though limited to 1600x1200) after my having installed my new HD 6970 card, so I'm now trying to install the proprietary driver (I understand the open source one requires a more recent kernel than that in Maverick). The proprietary driver under 'Additional Drivers' resulted in a black screen on boot, so I deactivated and am trying to follow the manual install instructions at the cchtml Ubuntu Maverick Installation Guide. When I try to create the .deb packages with: sh ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/maverick I get: david@skipper:~/catalyst11.6$ sh ati-driver-installer-11-6-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/maverick Created directory fglrx-install.oLN3ux Verifying archive integrity... All good. Uncompressing ATI Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver-8.861......................... ===================================================================== ATI Technologies Catalyst(TM) Proprietary Driver Installer/Packager ===================================================================== Generating package: Ubuntu/maverick Package build failed! Package build utility output: ./packages/Ubuntu/ati-packager.sh: 396: debclean: not found dpkg-buildpackage: export CFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export CPPFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): dpkg-buildpackage: export CXXFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export FFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export LDFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions dpkg-buildpackage: source package fglrx-installer dpkg-buildpackage: source version 2:8.861-0ubuntu1 dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by ATI Technologies Inc. <http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html> dpkg-source --before-build fglrx.64Vzxk dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture amd64 debian/rules build Can't exec "debian/rules": Permission denied at /usr/bin/dpkg-buildpackage line 507. dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules build failed with unknown exit code -1 Cleaning in directory . /usr/bin/fakeroot: line 176: debian/rules: Permission denied debuild: fatal error at line 1319: couldn't exec fakeroot debian/rules: dpkg-buildpackage: export CFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export CPPFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): dpkg-buildpackage: export CXXFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export FFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export LDFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions dpkg-buildpackage: source package fglrx-installer dpkg-buildpackage: source version 2:8.861-0ubuntu1 dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by ATI Technologies Inc. <http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html> dpkg-source --before-build fglrx.QEmIld dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture amd64 debian/rules build Can't exec "debian/rules": Permission denied at /usr/bin/dpkg-buildpackage line 507. dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules build failed with unknown exit code -1 Cleaning in directory . Can't exec "debian/rules": Permission denied at /usr/bin/debuild line 1314. debuild: fatal error at line 1313: couldn't exec debian/rules: Permission denied dpkg-buildpackage: export CFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export CPPFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): dpkg-buildpackage: export CXXFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export FFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export LDFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions dpkg-buildpackage: source package fglrx-installer dpkg-buildpackage: source version 2:8.861-0ubuntu1 dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by ATI Technologies Inc. <http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html> dpkg-source --before-build fglrx.xtY6vC dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture amd64 debian/rules build Can't exec "debian/rules": Permission denied at /usr/bin/dpkg-buildpackage line 507. dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules build failed with unknown exit code -1 Cleaning in directory . /usr/bin/fakeroot: line 176: debian/rules: Permission denied debuild: fatal error at line 1319: couldn't exec fakeroot debian/rules: dpkg-buildpackage: export CFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export CPPFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): dpkg-buildpackage: export CXXFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export FFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -g -O2 dpkg-buildpackage: export LDFLAGS from dpkg-buildflags (origin: vendor): -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions dpkg-buildpackage: source package fglrx-installer dpkg-buildpackage: source version 2:8.861-0ubuntu1 dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by ATI Technologies Inc. <http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html> dpkg-source --before-build fglrx.oYWICI dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture amd64 debian/rules build Can't exec "debian/rules": Permission denied at /usr/bin/dpkg-buildpackage line 507. dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules build failed with unknown exit code -1 Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.oLN3ux I've installed devscripts which has debclean in it. I've tried running the command with and without sudo. I'm not experienced with installing from downloads/source, but it seems like the file debian/source isn't being set to be executable when it needs to be. If I extract only, without using the package builder command, debian/rules is 744. As to what to do next, I'm stumped. Many thanks.

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• Atmospheric Scattering

  - by Lawrence Kok

  I'm trying to implement atmospheric scattering based on Sean O`Neil algorithm that was published in GPU Gems 2. But I have some trouble getting the shader to work. My latest attempts resulted in: http://img253.imageshack.us/g/scattering01.png/ I've downloaded sample code of O`Neil from: http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems_2/CD/Index.html. Made minor adjustments to the shader 'SkyFromAtmosphere' that would allow it to run in AMD RenderMonkey. In the images it is see-able a form of banding occurs, getting an blueish tone. However it is only applied to one half of the sphere, the other half is completely black. Also the banding appears to occur at Zenith instead of Horizon, and for a reason I managed to get pac-man shape. I would appreciate it if somebody could show me what I'm doing wrong. Vertex Shader: uniform mat4 matView; uniform vec4 view_position; uniform vec3 v3LightPos; const int nSamples = 3; const float fSamples = 3.0; const vec3 Wavelength = vec3(0.650,0.570,0.475); const vec3 v3InvWavelength = 1.0f / vec3( Wavelength.x * Wavelength.x * Wavelength.x * Wavelength.x, Wavelength.y * Wavelength.y * Wavelength.y * Wavelength.y, Wavelength.z * Wavelength.z * Wavelength.z * Wavelength.z); const float fInnerRadius = 10; const float fOuterRadius = fInnerRadius * 1.025; const float fInnerRadius2 = fInnerRadius * fInnerRadius; const float fOuterRadius2 = fOuterRadius * fOuterRadius; const float fScale = 1.0 / (fOuterRadius - fInnerRadius); const float fScaleDepth = 0.25; const float fScaleOverScaleDepth = fScale / fScaleDepth; const vec3 v3CameraPos = vec3(0.0, fInnerRadius * 1.015, 0.0); const float fCameraHeight = length(v3CameraPos); const float fCameraHeight2 = fCameraHeight * fCameraHeight; const float fm_ESun = 150.0; const float fm_Kr = 0.0025; const float fm_Km = 0.0010; const float fKrESun = fm_Kr * fm_ESun; const float fKmESun = fm_Km * fm_ESun; const float fKr4PI = fm_Kr * 4 * 3.141592653; const float fKm4PI = fm_Km * 4 * 3.141592653; varying vec3 v3Direction; varying vec4 c0, c1; float scale(float fCos) { float x = 1.0 - fCos; return fScaleDepth * exp(-0.00287 + x*(0.459 + x*(3.83 + x*(-6.80 + x*5.25)))); } void main( void ) { // Get the ray from the camera to the vertex, and its length (which is the far point of the ray passing through the atmosphere) vec3 v3FrontColor = vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec3 v3Pos = normalize(gl_Vertex.xyz) * fOuterRadius; vec3 v3Ray = v3CameraPos - v3Pos; float fFar = length(v3Ray); v3Ray = normalize(v3Ray); // Calculate the ray's starting position, then calculate its scattering offset vec3 v3Start = v3CameraPos; float fHeight = length(v3Start); float fDepth = exp(fScaleOverScaleDepth * (fInnerRadius - fCameraHeight)); float fStartAngle = dot(v3Ray, v3Start) / fHeight; float fStartOffset = fDepth*scale(fStartAngle); // Initialize the scattering loop variables float fSampleLength = fFar / fSamples; float fScaledLength = fSampleLength * fScale; vec3 v3SampleRay = v3Ray * fSampleLength; vec3 v3SamplePoint = v3Start + v3SampleRay * 0.5; // Now loop through the sample rays for(int i=0; i<nSamples; i++) { float fHeight = length(v3SamplePoint); float fDepth = exp(fScaleOverScaleDepth * (fInnerRadius - fHeight)); float fLightAngle = dot(normalize(v3LightPos), v3SamplePoint) / fHeight; float fCameraAngle = dot(normalize(v3Ray), v3SamplePoint) / fHeight; float fScatter = (-fStartOffset + fDepth*( scale(fLightAngle) - scale(fCameraAngle)))/* 0.25f*/; vec3 v3Attenuate = exp(-fScatter * (v3InvWavelength * fKr4PI + fKm4PI)); v3FrontColor += v3Attenuate * (fDepth * fScaledLength); v3SamplePoint += v3SampleRay; } // Finally, scale the Mie and Rayleigh colors and set up the varying variables for the pixel shader vec4 newPos = vec4( (gl_Vertex.xyz + view_position.xyz), 1.0); gl_Position = gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix * vec4(newPos.xyz, 1.0); gl_Position.z = gl_Position.w * 0.99999; c1 = vec4(v3FrontColor * fKmESun, 1.0); c0 = vec4(v3FrontColor * (v3InvWavelength * fKrESun), 1.0); v3Direction = v3CameraPos - v3Pos; } Fragment Shader: uniform vec3 v3LightPos; varying vec3 v3Direction; varying vec4 c0; varying vec4 c1; const float g =-0.90f; const float g2 = g * g; const float Exposure =2; void main(void){ float fCos = dot(normalize(v3LightPos), v3Direction) / length(v3Direction); float fMiePhase = 1.5 * ((1.0 - g2) / (2.0 + g2)) * (1.0 + fCos*fCos) / pow(1.0 + g2 - 2.0*g*fCos, 1.5); gl_FragColor = c0 + fMiePhase * c1; gl_FragColor.a = 1.0; }

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• Design a T-shirt for .NET Reflector Pro

  - by Laila

  Win a .NET Reflector Pro license, a box of Red Gate goodies, and a t-shirt printed with your design! Red Gate likes t-shirts. Each of our teams has one. In fact, each individual person has one, numbered according to when they joined the company: Red Gate's 1st, 2nd, and so on right up to Red Gate's 170th, with the slogan "More than just a number". Those t-shirts are important, chiefly because they remind the people wearing them that they are important. But that isn't enough. What really makes us great are the people who choose to use our tools. So we'd like to extend our tradition of t-shirts to include you and put the design of our next shirt entirely in your hands. We'd like you to come up with a witty slogan or create an inventive or simply beautiful t-shirt design for .NET Reflector Pro, our add-in for Visual Studio, which allows you to step into decompiled assemblies whilst debugging in Visual Studio. When you're done, post your masterpiece to Twitter with the hash tag #reflectortees, and @redgate will take a look! We'll pick the best design, and the winner will get a licensed copy of .NET Reflector Pro and a box of Red Gate goodies - not to mention a copy of their t-shirt. The winning design will go into production and be worn and given out at tradeshows, conferences, and user group events across the world, proudly bearing the name of their designer. We'll also pick three runners-up who will receive licenses for .NET Reflector Pro. Red Gate goodie box Interested? If you're up for the challenge, then we've got some resources to get you started. Inside the .zip file you'll find high-quality versions of the following: T-shirt templates: don't forget to design the front and the back! Different versions of the .NET Reflector Pro logo and Red Gate logo. Colour sheets to give you an easy reference to the Red Gate colours, including hex and RGB values. You can create and send us as many designs as you like, and each of them will be considered for the prize. To submit your designs, simply tweet including the competition hash tag, #reflectortees, and a link to somewhere we can see your design: either an image hosting site such as Twitpic, Flickr or Picasa, or a personal blog. You will need to create a Twitter account (which is free), if you don't already have one. You only have three limits: The background colour of the t-shirt should be one of our brand colours (red, light/dark grey or black), though you're welcome to use other colours in the rest of the design. You need to make use of either the .NET Reflector Pro logo OR the Red Gate logo (please keep them as they are) If you include any text or slogan, stick with just one or two colors for it. Apart from that, go wild. Go and do whatever it is you do when you get creative: whether you walk barefoot on the grass with a pencil and paper, sit cross-legged on a pile of cushions with a laptop, or simply close your eyes and float through a mist of ideas, now is your chance. Make sure you enjoy it. We're looking forward to seeing your creations. Terms and conditions 1. The closing date for entries is June 11th, 2010 (4 p.m. UK time). Red Gate Software Ltd reserves the right to extend the competition deadline at its discretion. If there is a revision, the revised date will be published on this blog and the date for announcing the results will be postponed accordingly. 2. The winning designer will be notified on June 14th, 2010 through Twitter. The winner must claim his/her prize by sending us a high-resolution image of their design via email (i.e. Illustrator EPS files or appropriate format, ideally at 300dpi). If the winner does not come forward within 3 days of the announcement, they will forfeit their prize and another winner will be selected from the runners-up. The names of the winner and runners-up will be posted on this blog by June 18th.  3. Entry is completed on the designer posting a link to their entry in a tweet with the correct hash tag, #reflectortees. 4. Red Gate Software needs to hold the rights to using the winning design in order to put the t-shirt into production. We will make sure that this is fine with the winner before we do so, but if you do not want us holding the rights to your design, please do not submit your designs. We reserve the right to slightly alter or adjust any artwork we decide to use (mainly to make it easier to print), but we will make sure we contact the winner for approval first. The winner will also need to allow us the use of his/her name for purposes of promoting your design. 5. Entries must be entirely your own original work and must not breach any copyright or third party rights. Red Gate Software Ltd will not be made partially or fully liable for any non-original work submitted by you. 6. This competition is free: you do not need to buy anything or be an existing customer to enter. 7. This competition is not open to employees of Red Gate Software Ltd, their families, or any other company directly connected with the administration of this promotion.

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• RTS Voxel Engine using LWJGL - Textures glitching

  - by Dieter Hubau

  I'm currently working on an RTS game engine using voxels. I have implemented a basic chunk manager using an Octree of Octrees which contains my voxels (simple square blocks, as in Minecraft). I'm using a Voronoi-based terrain generation to get a simplistic yet relatively realistic heightmap. I have no problem showing a 256*256*256 grid of voxels with a decent framerate (250), because of frustum culling, face culling and only rendering visible blocks. For example, in a random voxel grid of 256*256*256 I generally only render 100k-120k faces, not counting frustum culling. Frustum culling is only called every 100ms, since calling it every frame seemed a bit overkill. Now I have reached the stage of texturing and I'm experiencing some problems: Some experienced people might already see the problem, but if we zoom in, you can see the glitches more clearly: All the seams between my blocks are glitching and kind of 'overlapping' or something. It's much more visible when you're moving around. I'm using a single, simple texture map to draw on my cubes, where each texture is 16*16 pixels big: I have added black edges around the textures to get a kind of cellshaded look, I think it's cool. The texture map has 256 textures of each 16*16 pixels, meaning the total size of my texture map is 256*256 pixels. The code to update the ChunkManager: public void update(ChunkManager chunkManager) { for (Octree<Cube> chunk : chunks) { if (chunk.getId() < 0) { // generate an id for the chunk to be able to call it later chunk.setId(glGenLists(1)); } glNewList(chunk.getId(), GL_COMPILE); glBegin(GL_QUADS); faces += renderChunk(chunk); glEnd(); glEndList(); } } Where my renderChunk method is: private int renderChunk(Octree<Cube> node) { // keep track of the number of visible faces in this chunk int faces = 0; if (!node.isEmpty()) { if (node.isLeaf()) { faces += renderItem(node); } List<Octree<Cube>> children = node.getChildren(); if (children != null && !children.isEmpty()) { for (Octree<Cube> child : children) { faces += renderChunk(child); } } return faces; } Where my renderItem method is the following: private int renderItem(Octree<Cube> node) { Cube cube = node.getItem(-1, -1, -1); int faces = 0; float x = node.getPosition().x; float y = node.getPosition().y; float z = node.getPosition().z; float size = cube.getSize(); Vector3f point1 = new Vector3f(-size + x, -size + y, size + z); Vector3f point2 = new Vector3f(-size + x, size + y, size + z); Vector3f point3 = new Vector3f(size + x, size + y, size + z); Vector3f point4 = new Vector3f(size + x, -size + y, size + z); Vector3f point5 = new Vector3f(-size + x, -size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point6 = new Vector3f(-size + x, size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point7 = new Vector3f(size + x, size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point8 = new Vector3f(size + x, -size + y, -size + z); TextureCoordinates tc = textureManager.getTextureCoordinates(cube.getCubeType()); // front face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.FRONT)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point1.x, point1.y, point1.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point4.x, point4.y, point4.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point3.x, point3.y, point3.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point2.x, point2.y, point2.z); } // back face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.BACK)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point5.x, point5.y, point5.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point6.x, point6.y, point6.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point7.x, point7.y, point7.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point8.x, point8.y, point8.z); } // left face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.SIDE_LEFT)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point5.x, point5.y, point5.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point1.x, point1.y, point1.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point2.x, point2.y, point2.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point6.x, point6.y, point6.z); } // ETC ETC return faces; } When all this is done, I simply render my lists every frame, like this: public void render(ChunkManager chunkManager) { glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureManager.getCubeTextureId()); // load all chunks from the tree List<Octree<Cube>> chunks = chunkManager.getTree().getAllItems(); for (Octree<Cube> chunk : chunks) { if (frustum.cubeInFrustum(chunk.getPosition(), chunk.getSize() / 2)) { glCallList(chunk.getId()); } } } I don't know if anyone is willing to go through all of this code or maybe you can spot the problem right away, but that is basically the problem, and I can't find a solution :-) Thanks for reading and any help is appreciated!

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• Switching the layout in Orchard CMS

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  The UI composition in Orchard is extremely flexible, thanks in no small part to the usage of dynamic Clay shapes. Every notable UI construct in Orchard is built as a shape that other parts of the system can then party on and modify any way they want. Case in point today: modifying the layout (which is a shape) on the fly to provide custom page structures for different parts of the site. This might actually end up being built-in Orchard 1.0 but for the moment it’s not in there. Plus, it’s quite interesting to see how it’s done. We are going to build a little extension that allows for specialized layouts in addition to the default layout.cshtml that Orchard understands out of the box. The extension will add the possibility to add the module name (or, in MVC terms, area name) to the template name, or module and controller names, or module, controller and action names. For example, the home page is served by the HomePage module, so with this extension you’ll be able to add an optional layout-homepage.cshtml file to your theme to specialize the look of the home page while leaving all other pages using the regular layout.cshtml. I decided to implement this sample as a theme with code. This way, the new overrides are only enabled as the theme is activated, which makes a lot of sense as this is going to be where you’ll be creating those additional layouts. The first thing I did was to create my own theme, derived from the default TheThemeMachine with this command: codegen theme CustomLayoutMachine /CreateProject:true /IncludeInSolution:true /BasedOn:TheThemeMachine .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: 12px; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Once that was done, I worked around a known bug and moved the new project from the Modules solution folder into Themes (the code was already physically in the right place, this is just about Visual Studio editing). The CreateProject flag in the command-line created a project file for us in the theme’s folder. This is only necessary if you want to run code outside of views from that theme. The code that we want to add is the following LayoutFilter.cs: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Routing; using Orchard; using Orchard.Mvc.Filters; namespace CustomLayoutMachine.Filters { public class LayoutFilter : FilterProvider, IResultFilter { private readonly IWorkContextAccessor _wca; public LayoutFilter(IWorkContextAccessor wca) { _wca = wca; } public void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext) { var workContext = _wca.GetContext(); var routeValues = filterContext.RouteData.Values; workContext.Layout.Metadata.Alternates.Add( BuildShapeName(routeValues, "area")); workContext.Layout.Metadata.Alternates.Add( BuildShapeName(routeValues, "area", "controller")); workContext.Layout.Metadata.Alternates.Add( BuildShapeName(routeValues, "area", "controller", "action")); } public void OnResultExecuted(ResultExecutedContext filterContext) { } private static string BuildShapeName( RouteValueDictionary values, params string[] names) { return "Layout__" + string.Join("__", names.Select(s => ((string)values[s] ?? "").Replace(".", "_"))); } } } This filter is intercepting ResultExecuting, which is going to provide a context object out of which we can extract the route data. We are also injecting an IWorkContextAccessor dependency that will give us access to the current Layout object, so that we can add alternate shape names to its metadata. We are adding three possible shape names to the default, with different combinations of area, controller and action names. For example, a request to a blog post is going to be routed to the “Orchard.Blogs” module’s “BlogPost” controller’s “Item” action. Our filters will then add the following shape names to the default “Layout”: Layout__Orchard_Blogs Layout__Orchard_Blogs__BlogPost Layout__Orchard_Blogs__BlogPost__Item Those template names get mapped into the following file names by the system (assuming the Razor view engine): Layout-Orchard_Blogs.cshtml Layout-Orchard_Blogs-BlogPost.cshtml Layout-Orchard_Blogs-BlogPost-Item.cshtml This works for any module/controller/action of course, but in the sample I created Layout-HomePage.cshtml (a specific layout for the home page), Layout-Orchard_Blogs.cshtml (a layout for all the blog views) and Layout-Orchard_Blogs-BlogPost-Item.cshtml (a layout that is specific to blog posts). Of course, this is just an example, and this kind of dynamic extension of shapes that you didn’t even create in the first place is highly encouraged in Orchard. You don’t have to do it from a filter, we only did it this way because that was a good place where we could get the context that we needed. And of course, you can base your alternate shape names on something completely different from route values if you want. For example, you might want to create your own part that modifies the layout for a specific content item, or you might want to do it based on the raw URL (like it’s done in widget rules) or who knows what crazy custom rule. The point of all this is to show that extending or modifying shapes is easy, and the layout just happens to be a shape. In other words, you can do whatever you want. Ain’t that nice? The custom theme can be found here: Orchard.Theme.CustomLayoutMachine.1.0.nupkg Many thanks to Louis, who showed me how to do this.

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• The Oracle Retail Week Awards - in review

  - by user801960

  The Oracle Retail Week Awards 2012 were another great success, building on the legacy of previous award ceremonies. Over 1,600 of the UK's top retailers gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel and many of Europe's top retail leaders attended the prestigious Oracle Retail VIP Reception in the Grosvenor House Hotel's Red Bar. Over the years the Oracle Retail Week Awards have become a rallying point for the morale of the retail industry, and each nominated retailer served as a demonstration that the industry is fighting fit. It was an honour to speak to so many figureheads of UK - and global - retail. All of us at Oracle Retail would like to congratulate both the winners and the nominees for the awards. Retail is a cornerstone of the economy and it was inspiring to see so many outstanding demonstrations of innovation and dedication in the entries. Winners 2012   The Market Force Customer Service Initiative of the Year Winner: Dixons Retail: Knowhow Highly Commended: Hughes Electrical: Digital Switchover     The Deloitte Employer of the Year Winner: Morrisons     Growing Retailer of the Year Winner: Hallett Retail - The Concessions People Highly Commended: Blue Inc     The TCC Marketing/Advertising Campaign of the Year Winner: Sainsbury's: Feed your Family for £50     The Brandbank Multichannel Retailer of the Year Winner: Debenhams Highly Commended: Halfords     The Ashton Partnership Product Innovation of the Year Winner: Argos: Chad Valley Highly Commended: Halfords: Private label bikes     The RR Donnelley Pure-play Online Retailer of the Year Winner: Wiggle     The Hitachi Consulting Responsible Retailer of the Year Winner: B&Q: One Planet Home     The CA Technologies Retail Technology Initiative of the Year Winner: Oasis: Argyll Street flagship launch with iPad PoS     The Premier Tax Free Speciality Retailer of the Year Winner: Holland & Barrett     Store Design of the Year Winner: Next Home and Garden, Shoreham, Sussex Highly Commended: Dixons Retail, Black concept store, Birmingham Bullring     Store Manager of the Year Winner: Ian Allcock, Homebase, Aylesford Highly Commended: Darren Parfitt, Boots UK, Melton Mowbray Health Centre     The Wates Retail Destination of the Year Winner: Westfield, Stratford     The AlixPartners Emerging Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Catriona Marshall, HobbyCraft, Chief Executive     The Wipro Retail International Retailer of the Year Winner: Apple     The Clarity Search Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher     The Oracle Retailer of the Year Winner: Burberry     Outstanding Contribution to Retail Winner: Lord Harris of Peckham     Oracle Retail and "Your Experience Platform" Technology is the key to providing that differentiated retail experience. More specifically, it is what we at Oracle call ‘the experience platform’ - a set of integrated, cross-channel business technology solutions, selected and operated by a retail business and IT team, and deployed in accordance with that organisation’s individual strategy and processes. This business systems architecture simultaneously: Connects customer interactions across all channels and touchpoints, and every customer lifecycle phase to provide a differentiated customer experience that meets consumers’ needs and expectations. Delivers actionable insight that enables smarter decisions in planning, forecasting, merchandising, supply chain management, marketing, etc; Optimises operations to align every aspect of the retail business to gain efficiencies and economies, to align KPIs to eliminate strategic conflicts, and at the same time be working in support of customer priorities.   Working in unison, these three goals not only help retailers to successfully navigate the challenges of today but also to focus on delivering that personalised customer experience based on differentiated products, pricing, services and interactions that will help you to gain market share and grow sales.  

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• Driver error when using multiple shaders

  - by Jinxi

  I'm using 3 different shaders: a tessellation shader to use the tessellation feature of DirectX11 :) a regular shader to show how it would look without tessellation and a text shader to display debug-info such as FPS, model count etc. All of these shaders are initialized at the beginning. Using the keyboard, I can switch between the tessellation shader and regular shader to render the scene. Additionally, I also want to be able toggle the display of debug-info using the text shader. Since implementing the tessellation shader the text shader doesn't work anymore. When I activate the DebugText (rendered using the text-shader) my screens go black for a while, and Windows displays the following message: Display Driver stopped responding and has recovered This happens with either of the two shaders used to render the scene. Additionally: I can start the application using the regular shader to render the scene and then switch to the tessellation shader. If I try to switch back to the regular shader I get the same error as with the text shader. What am I doing wrong when switching between shaders? What am I doing wrong when displaying text at the same time? What file can I post to help you help me? :) thx P.S. I already checked if my keyinputs interrupt at the wrong time (during render or so..), but that seems to be ok Testing Procedure Regular Shader without text shader Add text shader to Regular Shader by keyinput (works now, I built the text shader back to only vertex and pixel shader) (somthing with the z buffer is stil wrong...) Remove text shader, then change shader to Tessellation Shader by key input Then if I add the Text Shader or switch back to the Regular Shader Switching/Render Shader Here the code snipet from the Renderer.cpp where I choose the Shader according to the boolean "m_useTessellationShader": if(m_useTessellationShader) { // Render the model using the tesselation shader ecResult = m_ShaderManager->renderTessellationShader(m_D3D->getDeviceContext(), meshes[lod_level]->getIndexCount(), worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix, textures, texturecount, m_Light->getDirection(), m_Light->getAmbientColor(), m_Light->getDiffuseColor(), (D3DXVECTOR3)m_Camera->getPosition(), TESSELLATION_AMOUNT); } else { // todo: loaded model depends on distance to camera // Render the model using the light shader. ecResult = m_ShaderManager->renderShader(m_D3D->getDeviceContext(), meshes[lod_level]->getIndexCount(), lod_level, textures, texturecount, m_Light->getDirection(), m_Light->getAmbientColor(), m_Light->getDiffuseColor(), worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix); } And here the code snipet from the Mesh.cpp where I choose the Typology according to the boolean "useTessellationShader": // RenderBuffers is called from the Render function. The purpose of this function is to set the vertex buffer and index buffer as active on the input assembler in the GPU. Once the GPU has an active vertex buffer it can then use the shader to render that buffer. void Mesh::renderBuffers(ID3D11DeviceContext* deviceContext, bool useTessellationShader) { unsigned int stride; unsigned int offset; // Set vertex buffer stride and offset. stride = sizeof(VertexType); offset = 0; // Set the vertex buffer to active in the input assembler so it can be rendered. deviceContext->IASetVertexBuffers(0, 1, &m_vertexBuffer, &stride, &offset); // Set the index buffer to active in the input assembler so it can be rendered. deviceContext->IASetIndexBuffer(m_indexBuffer, DXGI_FORMAT_R32_UINT, 0); // Check which Shader is used to set the appropriate Topology // Set the type of primitive that should be rendered from this vertex buffer, in this case triangles. if(useTessellationShader) { deviceContext->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_3_CONTROL_POINT_PATCHLIST); }else{ deviceContext->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLELIST); } return; } RenderShader Could there be a problem using sometimes only vertex and pixel shader and after switching using vertex, hull, domain and pixel shader? Here a little overview of my architecture: TextClass: uses font.vs and font.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); RegularShader: uses vertex.vs and pixel.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); TessellationShader: uses tessellation.vs, tessellation.hs, tessellation.ds, tessellation.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-HSSetShader(m_hullShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-DSSetShader(m_domainShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); ClearState I'd like to switch between 2 shaders and it seems they have different context parameters, right? In clearstate methode it says it resets following params to NULL: I found following in my Direct3D Class: depth-stencil state - m_deviceContext-OMSetDepthStencilState rasterizer state - m_deviceContext-RSSetState(m_rasterState); blend state - m_device-CreateBlendState viewports - m_deviceContext-RSSetViewports(1, &viewport); I found following in every Shader Class: input/output resource slots - deviceContext-PSSetShaderResources shaders - deviceContext-VSSetShader to - deviceContext-PSSetShader input layouts - device-CreateInputLayout sampler state - device-CreateSamplerState These two I didn't understand, where can I find them? predications - ? scissor rectangles - ? Do I need to store them all localy so I can switch between them, because it doesn't feel right to reinitialize the Direct3d and the Shaders by every switch (key input)?!

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• Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

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• How to UEFI install Ubuntu 12.10?

  - by Geezanansa

  Running a newer FM1 motherboard which is using an AMD 3870k APU with a new 1TB HDD. Following the advice in the motherboard manual and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI have now got to grub option screen for UEFI install. see http://imgur.com/VW5vz The dvd.iso being used is Ubuntu 12.10 desktop amd64 from ubuntu .com. The hdd has had a gpt partition table made for, by using gparted when in a live desktop session when booted in bios mode. (*edit/update: Although the old cd updates on running it is an old kernel and it did make a gpt but that version of gparted uses fdisk whereas gdisk is required to make gpt. Think am going to have to spend more time here http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html lol Using the gparted from 12.10 live session to make partitions; following the guidance regarding this at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Creating_an_EFI_partition, but can only boot to grub option screen http://imgur.com/VW5vz when 12.10 options to "try ubuntu" or "install ubuntu" are selected they give errors as described below*) but after making the gpt decided to leave it unformatted/unallocated space with the intention of using installer to set up partitions. update-originally but gparted now sees hdd as http://imgur.com/hFIvm as described above. *Booting live dvd in EFI mode gives "Secure Boot not installed" just before grub kernel option list with the option to "install ubuntu" but get "can not read cd/0" and "the kernel must be loaded first" errors; when that option is selected. Any pointers on how to get installer going for UEFI install would be good. Thanks in advance. update: Hopefully these screenshots can help better highlight where i am going wrong or if there is something else going on http://imgur.com/g30RB, http://imgur.com/VW5vz, http://imgur.com/31E0q, http://imgur.com/bnuaG, http://imgur.com/y4KGu, http://imgur.com/3u2QE, http://imgur.com/n9lN3, http://imgur.com/FEKvz, http://imgur.com/hFIvm, update: Thank you fernando garcia for pointing me in the right direction to start the process of elimantion. What i have done since asking question is a little home work starting here http://askubuntu.com/faq#bounty and here http://askubuntu.com/questions/how-to-ask. Looking at other similar questions was good fun and found this 12.10 UEFI Secure Boot install the most relative in helping getting ubuntu to uefi install on my system. In response to wolverine's question this article was referred to http://web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog/SecureBoot_in_Ubuntu_12.10/ This article in the first sentence gives a link to http://www.ubuntu.com/download which is where i downloaded the 12.10 desktop amd64 .iso(and others) but have been unable to do a efi install of ubuntu on this system and as this is a new system have ended up just going with bios installer running which at least puts my mind at ease that i have not bricked my new mobo.(had to do a clrcmos and flash to latest bios version) So it possibly could be the bios settings or the bios version being used that is problem. To try and eliminate bios version i can not get to post screen in order to id bios version being used. Pressing tab to show post instead of logo and trying to pausebreak to catch post is proving difficult. If logo screen in bios is disabled just get black screen no post shown and pressing tab does not show post. Appreciate using appropriate bios settings and latest 12.10 release should simply get uefi installer running when selected from the grub list (nice graphic details in Identifying if computer boots the cd in efi mode section at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Identifying_if_the_computer_boots_the_CD_in_EFI_mode) And to confirm the hdd is booting in efi mode https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Identifying_if_the_computer_boots_the_HDD_in_EFI_mode running the command [ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo "EFI boot on HDD" || echo "Legacy boot on HDD" gave Legacy boot on HDD This is as expected because i allowed the bios installer (which was 12.04 desktop amd64 after trying 12.10 desktop amd64 in efi mode) to run to get a working installation. Which is not what was intended or wished for but wanted to get a working os to bench test new mobo i.e. prove it is working. There are other options as in installing other bootmanagers/loaders but do not wish to do so as shim should get grub2 going that is after secure boot has been signed.(Now got rough idea what should happen just it aint happening. Is it possible ahci drivers are required?) Will post boot info script url of the updated config/setup. The original question asked seems irrelevant to what is being said in this update but as the problem is not resolved will keep on trying efi installing! i.e the problem is same as when question asked just trying to update. Have tried to edit and update the best i can!

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• How to rotate a set of points on z = 0 plane in 3-D, preserving pairwise distances?

  - by cagirici

  I have a set of points double n[] on the plane z = 0. And I have another set of points double[] m on the plane ax + by + cz + d = 0. Length of n is equal to length of m. Also, euclidean distance between n[i] and n[j] is equal to euclidean distance between m[i] and m[j]. I want to rotate n[] in 3-D, such that for all i, n[i] = m[i] would be true. In other words, I want to turn a plane into another plane, preserving the pairwise distances. Here's my code in java. But it does not help so much: double[] rotate(double[] point, double[] currentEquation, double[] targetEquation) { double[] currentNormal = new double[]{currentEquation[0], currentEquation[1], currentEquation[2]}; double[] targetNormal = new double[]{targetEquation[0], targetEquation[1], targetEquation[2]}; targetNormal = normalize(targetNormal); double angle = angleBetween(currentNormal, targetNormal); double[] axis = cross(targetNormal, currentNormal); double[][] R = getRotationMatrix(axis, angle); return rotated; } double[][] getRotationMatrix(double[] axis, double angle) { axis = normalize(axis); double cA = (float)Math.cos(angle); double sA = (float)Math.sin(angle); Matrix I = Matrix.identity(3, 3); Matrix a = new Matrix(axis, 3); Matrix aT = a.transpose(); Matrix a2 = a.times(aT); double[][] B = { {0, axis[2], -1*axis[1]}, {-1*axis[2], 0, axis[0]}, {axis[1], -1*axis[0], 0} }; Matrix A = new Matrix(B); Matrix R = I.minus(a2); R = R.times(cA); R = R.plus(a2); R = R.plus(A.times(sA)); return R.getArray(); } This is what I get. The point set on the right side is actually part of a point set on the left side. But they are on another plane. Here's a 2-D representation of what I try to do: There are two lines. The line on the bottom is the line I have. The line on the top is the target line. The distances are preserved (a, b and c). Edit: I have tried both methods written in answers. They both fail (I guess). Method of Martijn Courteaux public static double[][] getRotationMatrix(double[] v0, double[] v1, double[] v2, double[] u0, double[] u1, double[] u2) { RealMatrix M1 = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(new double[][]{ {1,0,0,-1*v0[0]}, {0,1,0,-1*v0[1]}, {0,0,1,0}, {0,0,0,1} }); RealMatrix M2 = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(new double[][]{ {1,0,0,-1*u0[0]}, {0,1,0,-1*u0[1]}, {0,0,1,-1*u0[2]}, {0,0,0,1} }); Vector3D imX = new Vector3D((v0[1] - v1[1])*(u2[0] - u0[0]) - (v0[1] - v2[1])*(u1[0] - u0[0]), (v0[1] - v1[1])*(u2[1] - u0[1]) - (v0[1] - v2[1])*(u1[1] - u0[1]), (v0[1] - v1[1])*(u2[2] - u0[2]) - (v0[1] - v2[1])*(u1[2] - u0[2]) ).scalarMultiply(1/((v0[0]*v1[1])-(v0[0]*v2[1])-(v1[0]*v0[1])+(v1[0]*v2[1])+(v2[0]*v0[1])-(v2[0]*v1[1]))); Vector3D imZ = new Vector3D(findEquation(u0, u1, u2)); Vector3D imY = Vector3D.crossProduct(imZ, imX); double[] imXn = imX.normalize().toArray(); double[] imYn = imY.normalize().toArray(); double[] imZn = imZ.normalize().toArray(); RealMatrix M = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(new double[][]{ {imXn[0], imXn[1], imXn[2], 0}, {imYn[0], imYn[1], imYn[2], 0}, {imZn[0], imZn[1], imZn[2], 0}, {0, 0, 0, 1} }); RealMatrix rotationMatrix = MatrixUtils.inverse(M2).multiply(M).multiply(M1); return rotationMatrix.getData(); } Method of Sam Hocevar static double[][] makeMatrix(double[] p1, double[] p2, double[] p3) { double[] v1 = normalize(difference(p2,p1)); double[] v2 = normalize(cross(difference(p3,p1), difference(p2,p1))); double[] v3 = cross(v1, v2); double[][] M = { { v1[0], v2[0], v3[0], p1[0] }, { v1[1], v2[1], v3[1], p1[1] }, { v1[2], v2[2], v3[2], p1[2] }, { 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0 } }; return M; } static double[][] createTransform(double[] A, double[] B, double[] C, double[] P, double[] Q, double[] R) { RealMatrix c = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(makeMatrix(A,B,C)); RealMatrix t = new Array2DRowRealMatrix(makeMatrix(P,Q,R)); return MatrixUtils.inverse(c).multiply(t).getData(); } The blue points are the calculated points. The black lines indicate the offset from the real position.

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• BizTalk Envelopes explained

  - by Robert Kokuti

  Recently I've been trying to get some order into an ESB-BizTalk pub/sub scenario, and decided to wrap the payload into standardized envelopes. I have used envelopes before in a 'light weight' fashion, and I found that they can be quite useful and powerful if used systematically. Here is what I learned. The Theory In my experience, Envelopes are often underutilised in a BizTalk solution, and quite often their full potential is not well understood. Here I try to simplify the theory behind the Envelopes within BizTalk.   Envelopes can be used to attach additional data to the ‘real’ data (payload). This additional data can contain all routing and processing information, and allows treating the business data as a ‘black box’, possibly compressed and/or encrypted etc. The point here is that the infrastructure does not need to know anything about the business data content, just as a post man does not need to know the letter within the envelope. BizTalk has built-in support for envelopes through the XMLDisassembler and XMLAssembler pipeline components (these are part of the XMLReceive and XMLSend default pipelines). These components, among other things, perform the following: XMLDisassembler Extracts the payload from the envelope into the Message Body Copies data from the envelope into the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Typically, once the envelope is through the XMLDisassembler, the payload is submitted into the Messagebox, and the rest of the envelope data are copied into the context of the submitted message. The XMLDisassembler uses the Property Schemas, referenced by the Envelope Schema, to determine the name of the promoted Message Context element.   XMLAssembler Wraps the Message Body inside the specified envelope schema Populates the envelope values from the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Notice that there are no requirements to use the receiving envelope schema when sending. The sent message can be wrapped within any suitable envelope, regardless whether the message was originally received within an envelope or not. However, by sharing Property Schemas between Envelopes, it is possible to pass values from the incoming envelope to the outgoing envelope via the Message Context. The Practice Creating the Envelope Add a new Schema to the BizTalk project:   Envelopes are defined as schemas, with the <Schema> Envelope property set to Yes, and the root node’s Body XPath property pointing to the node which contains the payload. Typically, you’d create an envelope structure similar to this: Click on the <Schema> node and set the Envelope property to Yes. Then, click on the Envelope node, and set the Body XPath property pointing to the ‘Body’ node:   The ‘Body’ node is a Child Element, and its Data Structure Type is set to xs:anyType.  This allows the Body node to carry any payload data. The XMLReceive pipeline will submit the data found in the Body node, while the XMLSend pipeline will copy the message into the Body node, before sending to the destination. Promoting Properties Once you defined the envelope, you may want to promote the envelope data (anything other than the Body) as Property Fields, in order to preserve their value in the message context. Anything not promoted will be lost when the XMLDisassembler extracts the payload from the Body. Typically, this means you promote everything in the Header node. Property promotion uses associated Property Schemas. These are special BizTalk schemas which have a flat field structure. Property Schemas define the name of the promoted values in the Message Context, by combining the Property Schema’s Namespace and the individual Field names. It is worth being systematic when it comes to naming your schemas, their namespace and type name. A coherent method will make your life easier when it comes to referencing the schemas during development, and managing subscriptions (filters) in BizTalk Administration. I developed a fairly coherent naming convention which I’ll probably share in another article. Because the property schema must be flat, I recommend creating one for each level in the envelope header hierarchy. Property schemas are very useful in passing data between incoming as outgoing envelopes. As I mentioned earlier, in/out envelopes do not have to be the same, but you can use the same property schema when you promote the outgoing envelope fields as you used for the incoming schema.  As you can reference many property schemas for field promotion, you can pick data from a variety of sources when you define your outgoing envelope. For example, the outgoing envelope can carry some of the incoming envelope’s promoted values, plus some values from the standard BizTalk message context, like the AdapterReceiveCompleteTime property from the BizTalk message-tracking properties. The values you promote for the outgoing envelope will be automatically populated from the Message Context by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. Using the Envelope Receiving Enveloped messages are automatically recognized by the XMLReceive pipeline, or any other custom pipeline which includes the XMLDisassembler component. The Body Path node will become the Message Body, while the rest of the envelope values will be added to the Message context, as defined by the Property Shemas referenced by the Envelope Schema. Sending The Send Port’s filter expression can use the promoted properties from the incoming envelope. If you want to enclose the sent message within an envelope, the Send Port XMLAssembler component must be configured with the fully qualified envelope name:   One way of obtaining the fully qualified envelope name is copy it off from the envelope schema property page: The full envelope schema name is constructed as <Name>, <Assembly> The outgoing envelope is populated by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. The Message Body is copied to the specified envelope’s Body Path node, while the rest of the envelope fields are populated from the Message Context, according to the Property Schemas associated with the Envelope Schema. That’s all for now, happy enveloping!

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• Lessons learned from Word 2007 automation with c# 2008

  - by robertphyatt

  My organization has an ongoing project to take documents produced for internal regulations and such, change some of the formatting and then export it as PDF. Our requirements were that only one person would be doing this, but it has been painfully tedious and sometimes error-prone to do by hand. Enter the fearless developer to automate the situation! Since I am one of those guys that just plain does not like VB, I wanted to do the automation in the ever-so-much-more-familiar C#. While Microsoft had made a dll that makes such a task easier, documentation on MSDN is pretty lame and most of the forumns and posts on the internet had little to do with my task. So, I feel like I can give back to the community and make a post here of the things I have learned so far. I hope this is helpful to whoever stumbles upon it. Steps to do this: 1) First of all, make some sort of a project and use some sort of a means to get the filename of the word document you are trying to open. I got the filename the user wanted with an openFileDialog tied to a button that I labeled 'Browse':        private void btnBrowse_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)        {            try            {                DialogResult myResult = openFileDialog1.ShowDialog();                if (myResult.Equals(DialogResult.OK))                {                    if (openFileDialog1.SafeFileName.EndsWith(".doc"))                    {                        txtFileName.Text = openFileDialog1.SafeFileName;                        paramSourceDocPath = openFileDialog1.FileName;                        paramExportFilePath = openFileDialog1.FileName.Replace(".doc", ".pdf");                    }                    else                    {                        txtFileName.Text = "only something that end with .doc, please";                    }                }            }            catch (Exception err)            {                lblError.Text = err.Message;            }        }   2) Add in "using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;" after setting your project to reference Microsoft.Office.Core and Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word so that you don't have to add "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word" to the front of everything. 3) Now you are ready to play. You will need to have a copy of word open and a copy of your word document that you want to modify open to be able to make the changes that are needed. The word interop dll likes using ref on all the parameters passed in, and likes to have them as objects. If you don't want to specify the parameter, you have to give it a "Type.Missing". I suggest creating some objects that you reuse all over the place to maintain sanity. object paramMissing = Type.Missing; ApplicationClass wordApplication = new ApplicationClass(); Document wordDocument = wordApplication.Documents.Open(                ref paramSourceDocPath, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,                ref paramMissing); 4) There are many ways to modify the text of the inside of the word document. One of the ways that was most effective for me was to break it down by paragraph and then do things on each paragraph by what style the particular paragraph had.            foreach (Paragraph thisParagraph in wordDocument.Content.Paragraphs)            {                string strStyleName = ((Style)thisParagraph.get_Style()).NameLocal;                string strText = thisParagraph.Range.Text;                //Do whatever you need to do            } 5) Sometimes you want to insert a new line character somewhere in the text or insert text into the document, etc.  There are a few ways you can do this: you can either modify the text of a paragraph by doing something like this ('\r' makes a new paragraph, '\v' will make a newline without making a new paragraph. If you remove a '\r' from the text, it will eliminate the paragraph you removed it from): thisParagraph.Range.Text = "A\vNew Paragraph!\r" + thisParagraph.Range.Text; OR you could select where you want to insert it and have it act like you were typing in Word like any normal user (note: if you do not collapse the range first, you will overwrite the thing you got the range from) object oCollapseDirectionEnd = WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseEnd; object oCollapseDirectionStart = WdCollapseDirection.wdCollapseStart; Range rangeInsertAtBeginning = thisParagraph.Range; Range rangeInsertAtEnd = thisParagraph.Range; rangeInsertAtBeginning.Collapse(ref oCollapseDirectionStart); rangeInsertAtEnd.Collapse(ref oCollapseDirectionEnd); rangeInsertAtBeginning.Select(); wordApplication.Selection.TypeText("Blah Blah Blah"); rangeInsertAtEnd.Select(); wordApplication.Selection.TypeParagraph(); 6) If you want to make text columns, like a newspaper or newsletter, you have to modify the page layout of the document or a section of the document to make it happen. In my case, I only wanted a particular section to have that, and I wanted to have a black line before and after the newspaper-like text columns. First you need to do a section break on either side of what you wanted, then you take the section and modify the page layout. Then you can modify the borders of the section (or another object in the word document). I also show here how to modify the alignment of a paragraph.            object oSectionBreak = WdBreakType.wdSectionBreakContinuous;            //These ranges were set while I was going through the paragraphs of my document, like I was showing earlier            rangeHeaderStart.InsertBreak(ref oSectionBreak);            rangeHeaderEnd.InsertBreak(ref oSectionBreak);            //change the alignment to justify            object oRangeHeaderStart = rangeStartJustifiedAlignment.Start;            object oRangeHeaderEnd = rangeHeaderEnd.End;            Range rangeHeader = wordDocument.Range(ref oRangeHeaderStart, ref oRangeHeaderEnd);            rangeHeader.Paragraphs.Alignment = WdParagraphAlignment.wdAlignParagraphJustify;            //find the section break and make it into triple text columns            foreach (Section mySection in wordDocument.Sections)            {                if (mySection.Range.Start == rangeHeaderStart.Start)                {                    mySection.PageSetup.TextColumns.Add(ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing);                    mySection.PageSetup.TextColumns.Add(ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing);                    //I didn't like the default spacing and column widths. This is how I adjusted them.                    foreach (TextColumn txtc in mySection.PageSetup.TextColumns)                    {                        try                        {                            txtc.SpaceAfter = 151.6f;                            txtc.Width = 7;                        }                        catch (Exception)                        {                            txtc.Width = 151.6f;                        }                    }                }            } That is all  I have time for today! I hope this was helpful to someone!

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• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

  - by Tim Dexter

  I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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