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• Minimizing Dependencies For GUIs

  - by tuba09

  I've been working on a project, and have been charged with designing the projects GUI front-end. I'm coding in Java and using the Swing toolkit. Usability-wise, the GUI front-end follows all of Nielsen's heuristics. Users can easily get to where they want to go through the click of a button / JComboBox. Essentially, in Swing terms, what happens is their actions drive the creation/deletion of custom panels. The GUI is coming along fine for the most part. However, I have to admit to being utterly dismayed at the tight web of dependencies my code is being smothered in. The main problem that I've encountered, that I haven't been able to fix as of yet, is how to keep a reference to the panels/buttons being changed. I'll give an example: Say there's a button A Say there's a panel B displaying picture C Say there's another picture D (not currently being displayed by panel B) When user clicks A, panel B should remove picture C and display picture D My question is, what's the best way of keeping track of panel B? Since I need a global point of access to panel B, my solution has so far been to just shoehorn it into a static variable, and access it through a series of static getters and setters. And this static variable is usually stored in the reference's original class. I.e. UserPanel has a static variable that stores a reference to itself. Is there an easy, tried-and-true way of dealing with these kinds of situations? Like my GUI works fine, but it is not modular and/or robust at all. To add to this, the dreaded 'cyclical dependencies' issue that's shunned by so many programmers is out here in full effect. I'm fairly new to development and just want to make sure that my code will be fairly extensible and won't cause much of a headache to the next person that decides to get a try at it. I know there's loads of books out there that probably have a nice elegant solution to this, but unfortunately I just don't have the time to leisure read right now. I need something that's quick and dirty. Thanks in advance

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• 3D terrain map with Hexagon Grids (XNA)

  - by Rob

  I'm working on a hobby project (I'm a web/backend developer by day) and I want to create a 3D Tile (terrain) engine. I'm using XNA, but I can use MonoGame, OpenGL, or straight DirectX, so the answer does not have to be XNA specific. I'm more looking for some high level advice on how to approach this problem. I know about creating height maps and such, there are thousands of references out there on the net for that, this is a bit more specific. I'm more concerned with is the approach to get a 3D hexagon tile grid out of my terrain (since the terrain, and all 3d objects, are basically triangles). The first approach I thought about is to basically draw the triangles on the screen in the following order (blue numbers) to give me the triangles for terrain (black triangles) and then make hexes out of the triangles (red hex). http://screencast.com/t/ebrH2g5V This approach seems complicated to me since i'm basically having to draw 4 different types of triangles. The next approach I thought of was to use the existing triangles like I did for a square grid and get my hexes from 6 triangles as follows http://screencast.com/t/w9b7qKzVJtb8 This seems like the easier approach to me since there are only 2 types of triangles (i would have to play with the heights and widths to get a "perfect" hexagon, but the idea is the same. So I'm looking for: 1) Any suggestions on which approach I should take, and why. 2) How would I translate mouse position to a hexagon grid position (especially when moving the camera around), for example in the second image if the mouse pointer were the green circle, how would I determine to highlight that hexagon and then translating that into grid coordinates (assuming it is 0,0)? 3) Any references, articles, books, etc - to get me going in the right direction. Note: I've done hex grid's and mouse-grid coordinate conversion before in 2d. looking for some pointers on how to do the same in 3d. The result I would like to achieve is something similar to the following: http :// www. youtube .com / watch?v=Ri92YkyC3fw (sorry about the youtube link, but it will only let me post 2 links in this post... same rep problem i mention below...) Thanks for any help! P.S. Sorry for not posting the images inline, I apparently don't have enough rep on this stack exchange site.

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• Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook book review

  - by Chris Muir

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

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• JGridView (Part 2)

  - by Geertjan

  The second sample in the JGrid download is a picture viewer that needs to be seen to be believed. Here it is, integrated into a NetBeans Platform application (click to enlarge it): When you mouse over the images, they change, showing several different images instantaneously. Here's the explorer view above, mainly making use of code from the sample: public class JGridView extends JScrollPane { @Override public void addNotify() { super.addNotify(); final ExplorerManager em = ExplorerManager.find(this); if (em != null) { final JGrid grid = new JGrid(); Node root = em.getRootContext(); final Node[] nodes = root.getChildren().getNodes(); final PicViewerObject[] pics = new PicViewerObject[nodes.length]; for (int i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++) { Node node = nodes[i]; pics[i] = node.getLookup().lookup(PicViewerObject.class); } grid.getCellRendererManager().setDefaultRenderer(new PicViewerRenderer()); grid.setModel(new DefaultListModel() { @Override public int getSize() { return pics.length; } @Override public Object getElementAt(int i) { return pics[i]; } }); grid.setFixedCellDimension(160); grid.addMouseMotionListener(new MouseAdapter() { int lastIndex = -1; @Override public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) { if (lastIndex >= 0) { Object o = grid.getModel().getElementAt(lastIndex); if (o instanceof PicViewerObject) { Rectangle r = grid.getCellBounds(lastIndex); if (r != null && !r.contains(e.getPoint())) { ((PicViewerObject) o).setMarker(false); grid.repaint(r); } } } int index = grid.getCellAt(e.getPoint()); if (index >= 0) { Object o = grid.getModel().getElementAt(index); if (o instanceof PicViewerObject) { Rectangle r = grid.getCellBounds(index); if (r != null) { ((PicViewerObject) o).setFraction(((float) e.getPoint().x - (float) r.x) / (float) r.width); ((PicViewerObject) o).setMarker(true); lastIndex = index; grid.repaint(r); } } } } }); grid.getSelectionModel().addListSelectionListener(new ListSelectionListener() { @Override public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) { //Somehow compare the selected item //with the list of books and find a matching book: int selectedIndex = grid.getSelectedIndex(); for (int i = 0; i < nodes.length; i++) { int picId = pics[i].getId(); if (selectedIndex == picId) { try { em.setSelectedNodes(new Node[]{nodes[i]}); } catch (PropertyVetoException ex) { Exceptions.printStackTrace(ex); } } } } }); setViewportView(grid); } } } The next step is to create a generic JGridView that will handle any kind of object automatically.

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• The Buzz at the JavaOne Bookstore

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  I found my way to the JavaOne bookstore, a hub of activity. Who says brick and mortar bookstores are dead? I asked what was hot and got two answers: Hadoop in Practice by Alex Holmes was doing well. And Scala for the Impatient by noted Java Champion Cay Horstmann also seemed to be a fast seller. Hadoop in PracticeHadoop is a framework that organizes large clusters of computers around a problem. It is touted as especially effective for large amounts of data, and is use such companies as  Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, eBay and LinkedIn. Hadoop in Practice collects nearly 100 Hadoop examples and presents them in a problem/solution format with step by step explanations of solutions and designs. It’s very much a participatory book intended to make developers more at home with Hadoop.The author, Alex Holmes, is a senior software engineer with more than 15 years of experience developing large-scale distributed Java systems. For the last four years, he has gained expertise in Hadoop solving Big Data problems across a number of projects. He has presented at JavaOne and Jazoon and is currently a technical lead at VeriSign.At this year’s JavaOne, he is presenting a session with VeriSign colleague, Karthik Shyamsunder called “Java: A Perfect Platform for Data Science” where they will explain how the Java platform has emerged as a perfect platform for practicing data science, and also talk about such technologies as Hadoop, Hive, Pig, HBase, Cassandra, and Mahout. Scala for the ImpatientSan Jose State University computer science professor and Java Champion Cay Horstmann is the principal author of the highly regarded Core Java. Scala for the Impatient is a basic, practical introduction to Scala for experienced programmers. Horstmann has a presentation summarizing the themes of his book on at his website. On the final page he offers an enticing summary of his conclusions:* Widespread dissatisfaction with Java + XML + IDEs               --Don't make me eat Elephant again * A separate language for every problem domain is not efficient               --It takes time to master the idioms* ”JavaScript Everywhere” isn't going to scale* Trend is towards languages with more expressive power, less boilerplate* Will Scala be the “one ring to rule them”?* Maybe              --If it succeeds in industry             --If student-friendly subsets and tools are created The popularity of both books echoed comments by IBM Distinguished Engineer Jason McGee who closed his part of the Sunday JavaOne keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers increasingly must know the strengths and weaknesses of such languages going forward.

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• I owe you an explanation

  - by Blueberry Coder

  Welcome to my blog! I am Frédéric Desbiens, a new member of the ADF Product Management team.  I joined Oracle only a few weeks ago. My boss is Grant Ronald, and I have the privilege to work in the same team as Susan Duncan, Frank Nimphius, Lynn Munsinger and Chris Muir. I share with them a passion for all things Java and ADF. With this blog, I hope to help you be more successful with our products – whether you are a customer or a partner. You may have heard of me before. Maybe you have my book in your bookshelf; or maybe we met at a conference. I went to JavaOne, ODTUG Kaleidoscope and Oracle OpenWorld in the past, when I worked for a major consulting firm. I will spare you all the details of my career; you can have a look at my LinkedIn profile if you are curious about my past.  Usually, my posts will be of a technical nature, and will focus on Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper. SOA and portals have always been two topics of interest for me, however, and I will write about them. Over time, you will probably get acquainted with my « strategic » side as well. I devour history books, and always had a tendency to look at the big picture. I will probably not resist to the temptation of mixing IT and history, but this will be occasional, I promise!  At this point, I owe you an explanation about the title of the blog. I am French-Canadian, and wanted to evoke my roots in an obvious yet unobtrusive way. I was born in Chicoutimi, which is one of the main cities found in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. Traditionally, a large part of the wild blueberry production of the province of Québec come from there. A common nickname for the inhabitants is thus Les Bleuets, « The Blueberries » in English. I hope to see you around. You can also follow me on Twitter under  @BlueberryCoder.

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• What Precalculus knowledge is required before learning Discrete Math Computer Science topics?

  - by Ein Doofus

  Below I've listed the chapters from a Precalculus book as well as the author recommended Computer Science chapters from a Discrete Mathematics book. Although these chapters are from two specific books on these subjects I believe the topics are generally the same between any Precalc or Discrete Math book. What Precalculus topics should one know before starting these Discrete Math Computer Science topics?: Discrete Mathematics CS Chapters 1.1 Propositional Logic 1.2 Propositional Equivalences 1.3 Predicates and Quantifiers 1.4 Nested Quantifiers 1.5 Rules of Inference 1.6 Introduction to Proofs 1.7 Proof Methods and Strategy 2.1 Sets 2.2 Set Operations 2.3 Functions 2.4 Sequences and Summations 3.1 Algorithms 3.2 The Growths of Functions 3.3 Complexity of Algorithms 3.4 The Integers and Division 3.5 Primes and Greatest Common Divisors 3.6 Integers and Algorithms 3.8 Matrices 4.1 Mathematical Induction 4.2 Strong Induction and Well-Ordering 4.3 Recursive Definitions and Structural Induction 4.4 Recursive Algorithms 4.5 Program Correctness 5.1 The Basics of Counting 5.2 The Pigeonhole Principle 5.3 Permutations and Combinations 5.6 Generating Permutations and Combinations 6.1 An Introduction to Discrete Probability 6.4 Expected Value and Variance 7.1 Recurrence Relations 7.3 Divide-and-Conquer Algorithms and Recurrence Relations 7.5 Inclusion-Exclusion 8.1 Relations and Their Properties 8.2 n-ary Relations and Their Applications 8.3 Representing Relations 8.5 Equivalence Relations 9.1 Graphs and Graph Models 9.2 Graph Terminology and Special Types of Graphs 9.3 Representing Graphs and Graph Isomorphism 9.4 Connectivity 9.5 Euler and Hamilton Ptahs 10.1 Introduction to Trees 10.2 Application of Trees 10.3 Tree Traversal 11.1 Boolean Functions 11.2 Representing Boolean Functions 11.3 Logic Gates 11.4 Minimization of Circuits 12.1 Language and Grammars 12.2 Finite-State Machines with Output 12.3 Finite-State Machines with No Output 12.4 Language Recognition 12.5 Turing Machines Precalculus Chapters R.1 The Real-Number System R.2 Integer Exponents, Scientific Notation, and Order of Operations R.3 Addition, Subtraction, and Multiplication of Polynomials R.4 Factoring R.5 Rational Expressions R.6 Radical Notation and Rational Exponents R.7 The Basics of Equation Solving 1.1 Functions, Graphs, Graphers 1.2 Linear Functions, Slope, and Applications 1.3 Modeling: Data Analysis, Curve Fitting, and Linear Regression 1.4 More on Functions 1.5 Symmetry and Transformations 1.6 Variation and Applications 1.7 Distance, Midpoints, and Circles 2.1 Zeros of Linear Functions and Models 2.2 The Complex Numbers 2.3 Zeros of Quadratic Functions and Models 2.4 Analyzing Graphs of Quadratic Functions 2.5 Modeling: Data Analysis, Curve Fitting, and Quadratic Regression 2.6 Zeros and More Equation Solving 2.7 Solving Inequalities 3.1 Polynomial Functions and Modeling 3.2 Polynomial Division; The Remainder and Factor Theorems 3.3 Theorems about Zeros of Polynomial Functions 3.4 Rational Functions 3.5 Polynomial and Rational Inequalities 4.1 Composite and Inverse Functions 4.2 Exponential Functions and Graphs 4.3 Logarithmic Functions and Graphs 4.4 Properties of Logarithmic Functions 4.5 Solving Exponential and Logarithmic Equations 4.6 Applications and Models: Growth and Decay 5.1 Systems of Equations in Two Variables 5.2 System of Equations in Three Variables 5.3 Matrices and Systems of Equations 5.4 Matrix Operations 5.5 Inverses of Matrices 5.6 System of Inequalities and Linear Programming 5.7 Partial Fractions 6.1 The Parabola 6.2 The Circle and Ellipse 6.3 The Hyperbola 6.4 Nonlinear Systems of Equations

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• How to handle encryption key conflicts when synchronizing data?

  - by Rafael

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

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• prism and multiple screens

  - by Avi

  OK - I am studying Prism a little because of a "free weekend" offer on Pluralsight. As this is proving too complex for me, I went to the Prism book and looked at the forward, and this is what it said: What comes after “Hello, World?” WPF and Silverlight developers are blessed with an abundance of excellent books... There’s no lack of tutorials on Model-View-ViewModel ... But they stop short of the guidance you need to deliver a non-trivial application in full. Your first screen goes well. You add a second screen and a third. Because you started your solution with the built-in “Navigation Application Template,” adding new screens feels like hanging shirts on a closet rod. You are on a roll. Until the harsh reality of real application requirements sets in. As it happens, your application has 30 screens not three. There’s no room on that closet rod for 30 screens. Some screens are modal pop-ups; you don’t navigate to a pop-up. Screens become interdependent such that user activity in one screen triggers changes that propagate throughout the UI. Some screens are optional; others are visible only to authorized users. Some screens are permanent, while other screens can be opened and closed at will. You discover that navigating back to a previously displayed screen creates a new instance. That’s not what you expected and, to your horror, the prior instance is gone along with the user’s unsaved changes. Now the issue is, I don't relate to this description. I've never been a UI programmer, but same as everyone else I'm using Windows apps such as MS-Office, and web sites such as Amazon, Facebook and StackExchange. And I look at these and I don't see many "so many screens" issues! Indeed, the only applications having many windows I can think of is Visual Studio. Maybe also Visio, a little. But take Word - You have a ribbon and a main window. Or take Facebook: You have those lists on the left (Favorites, Lists, Groups etc.), the status middle, the adds and then the Contacts sidebar. But it's only one page. Of course, I understand that in enterprise scenarios there are dashboad applications where multiple segments of the screen are updated from multiple non-related services. This I dig. But other scenarios? So - What am I missing? What is the "multiple screens" monster Pirsm is supposed to be the silver bullet solution for? Shoud I invest in studying Prism in addition to learning WPF or ASP.NET MVC?

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• Best Practices for serializing/persisting String Object Dictionary entities

  - by Mark Heath

  I'm noticing a trend towards using a dictionary of string to object (or sometimes string to string), instead of strongly typed objects. For example, the new Katana project makes heavy use of IDictionary<string,object>. This approach avoids the need to continually update your entity classes/DTOs and the database tables that persist them with new properties. It also avoids the need to create new derived entity types to support new types of entity, since the Dictionary is flexible enough to store any arbitrary properties. Here's a contrived example: class StorageDevice { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } class NetworkShare : StorageDevice { public string Path { get; set; } public string LoginName { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } } class CloudStorage : StorageDevice { public string ServerUri { get; set } public string ContainerName { get; set; } public int PortNumber { get; set; } public Guid ApiKey { get; set; } } versus: class StorageDevice { public IDictionary<string, object> Properties { get; set; } } Basically I'm on the lookout for any talks, books or articles on this approach, so I can pick up on any best practices / difficulties to avoid. Here's my main questions: Does this approach have a name? (only thing I've heard used so far is "self-describing objects") What are the best practices for persisting these dictionaries into a relational database? Especially the challenges of deserializing them successfully with strongly typed languages like C#. Does it change anything if some of the objects in the dictionary are themselves lists of strongly typed entities? Should a second dictionary be used if you want to temporarily store objects that are not to be persisted/serialized across a network, or should you use some kind of namespacing on the keys to indicate this?

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• What is a good design model for my new class?

  - by user66662

  I am a beginning programmer who, after trying to manage over 2000 lines of procedural php code, now has discovered the value of OOP. I have read a few books to get me up to speed on the beginning theory, but would like some advice on practical application. So,for example, let's say there are two types of content objects - an ad and a calendar event. what my application does is scan different websites (a predefined list), and, when it finds an ad or an event, it extracts the data and saves it to a database. All of my objects will share a $title and $description. However, the Ad object will have a $price and the Event object will have $startDate. Should I have two separate classes, one for each object? Should I have a 'superclass' with the $title and $description with two other Ad and Event classes with their own properties? The latter is at least the direction I am on now. My second question about this design is how to handle the logic that extracts the data for $title, $description, $price, and $date. For each website in my predefined list, there is a specific regex that returns the desired value for each property. Currently, I have an extremely large switch statement in my constructor which determines what website I am own, sets the regex variables accordingly, and continues on. Not only that, but now I have to repeat the logic to determine what site I am on in the constructor of each class. This doesn't feel right. Should I create another class Algorithms and store the logic there for each site? Should the functions of to handle that logic be in this class? or specific to the classes whos properties they set? I want to take into account in my design two things: 1) I will add different content objects in the future that share $title and $description, but will have their own properties, so, I want to be able to easily grow these as needed. 2) I will add more websites constantly (each with their own algorithms for data extraction) so I would like to plan efficienty managing and working with these now. I thought about extending the Ad or Event class with 'websiteX' class and store its functions there. But, this didn't feel right either as now I have to manage 100s of little website specific class files. Note, I didn't know if this was the correct site or stackoverflow was the better choice. If so, let me know and I'll post there.

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• Learning by doing (and programming by trial and error)

  - by AlexBottoni

  How do you learn a new platform/toolkit while producing working code and keeping your codebase clean? When I know what I can do with the underlying platform and toolkit, I usually do this: I create a new branch (with GIT, in my case) I write a few unit tests (with JUnit, for example) I write my code until it passes my tests So far, so good. The problem is that very often I do not know what I can do with the toolkit because it is brand new to me. I work as a consulant so I cannot have my preferred language/platform/toolkit. I have to cope with whatever the customer uses for the task at hand. Most often, I have to deal (often in a hurry) with a large toolkit that I know very little so I'm forced to "learn by doing" (actually, programming by "trial and error") and this makes me anxious. Please note that, at some point in the learning process, usually I already have: read one or more five-stars books followed one or more web tutorials (writing working code a line at a time) created a couple of small experimental projects with my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA, at the moment. I use Eclipse, Netbeans and others, as well.) Despite all my efforts, at this point usually I can just have a coarse understanding of the platform/toolkit I have to use. I cannot yet grasp each and every detail. This means that each and every new feature that involves some data preparation and some non-trivial algorithm is a pain to implement and requires a lot of trial-and-error. Unfortunately, working by trial-and-error is neither safe nor easy. Actually, this is the phase that makes me most anxious: experimenting with a new toolkit while producing working code and keeping my codebase clean. Usually, at this stage I cannot use the Eclipse Scrapbook because the code I have to write is already too large and complex for this small tool. In the same way, I cannot use any more an indipendent small project for my experiments because I need to try the new code in place. I can just write my code in place and rely on GIT for a safe bail-out. This makes me anxious because this kind of intertwined, half-ripe code can rapidly become incredibly hard to manage. How do you face this phase of the development process? How do you learn-by-doing without making a mess of your codebase? Any tips&tricks, best practice or something like that?

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• Evolution laggy due to IMAP -profile or due to some odd Sync -issue?

  - by Izzy

  I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine -- but it is very slow to react in certain situations. Helper questions Could it be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down? There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? Are there e.g. any configuration files? I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up? Different scenarios when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out. Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current, where I cannot do anything in the application until the window closes. switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few things: I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried to access the address book. No noticeable difference. I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one might have expected this in this case according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here) Maybe I should also mention that I'm using the KDE4 desktop (so no Unity or Gnome, though both is installed on the computer). And I did not have this issue before I updated to 12.04.

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• Understanding exceptional cases

  - by Justin

  I've been studying the use of exceptions in various php projects (such as Doctrine and Zend Framework). Exceptions seem to be thrown when unordinary input/state occurs. A perfect example is Doctrine throwing an exception when you try to use a invalid query string. I think the creators of the doctrine api understood that first, you can't query data by using an invalid DQL statement, and a developer should immediately be warned that an error has occurred, rather then letting execution continue with the possibility of an error code going un-checked. I also bet that this simplifies reading the code. I can't think of a situation where you would want to use an invalid DQL statement, except unit testing. Since this is true, it's better to avoid plaguing a bunch of code with null/error checks and use exceptions. I've read in books that exceptions shouldn't be thrown when validating dating user input. I've seen examples where of where the guideline is broken. One example is the Zend framework. If supplying an invalid controller or action name, an exception is thrown. Unlike doctrine, the user has more direct control over this sort of input. I know you can configure an error controller and set up a 404 message or what have you, but I'm curious why they have used an exception in this scenario? I guess you can argue the Zend Framework does not know how to continue processing the quest. One last example Is I wrote a function to return some html based on a given resource type. This resource type is hard-coded and sent when a user interacts with a web site (such as clicking a button to display the form to input data). I don't expect users to be mucking around with the request type. Under normal operating conditions, the resource type should be valid. To clean up some logic, I was going to throw an exception if a particular form wasn't found. This is mainly to find the correct form associated with a resource type so proper validation can occur. Does this sound like a valid use case for an exception? Right now it's pretty trivial, but I do plan to implement a restful consumer and re-using a function to map resources to their validation services would be very useful. I can then catch the exception and based on the consumer, return an error message suitable for the request type...

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• Should i continue my self-taught coding practice or learn how to do coding professionally?

  - by G1i1ch

  Lately I've been getting professional work, hanging out with other programmers, and making friends in the industry. The only thing is I'm 100% self-taught. It's caused my style to extremely deviate from the style of those that are properly trained. It's the techniques and organization of my code that's different. It's a mixture of several things I do. I tend to blend several programming paradigms together. Like Functional and OO. I lean to the Functional side more than OO, but I see the use of OO when something would make more sense as an abstract entity. Like a game object. Next I also go the simple route when doing something. When in contrast, it seems like sometimes the code I see from professional programmers is complicated for the sake of it! I use lots of closures. And lastly, I'm not the best commenter. I find it easier just to read through my code than reading the comment. And most cases I just end up reading the code even if there are comments. Plus I've been told that, because of how simply I write my code, it's very easy to read it. I hear professionally trained programmers go on and on about things like unit tests. Something I've never used before so I haven't even the faintest idea of what they are or how they work. Lots and lots of underscores "_", which aren't really my taste. Most of the techniques I use are straight from me, or a few books I've read. Don't know anything about MVC, I've heard a lot about it though with things like backbone.js. I think it's a way to organize an application. It just confuses me though because by now I've made my own organizational structures. It's a bit of a pain. I can't use template applications at all when learning something new like with Ubuntu's Quickly. I have trouble understanding code that I can tell is from someone trained. Complete OO programming really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, yet that seems to be what EVERYONE else is strictly using. It's left me not that confident in the look of my code, or wondering whether I'll cause sparks when joining a company or maybe contributing to open source projects. In fact I'm rather scared of the fact that people will eventually be checking out my code. Is this just something normal any programmer goes through or should I really look to change up my techniques?

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• When a co-worker asks you to teach him what you know, do you share the information or keep it to yourself? [closed]

  - by Chuck

  I am the only developer/DBA in a small IT department. There is another guy who can do it, but he's more of a backup as he spends his time working on IT support stuff. Anyway we have a new hire and I've been training him on the IT support side of things. Seems like he is eager to learn and be productive, but nobody is going out of their way to show him anything. He's been asking me to teach him database design, SQL, etc. For some reason, the boss has him working with me. He is also sending him to meetings that I go to, yet he hasn't said outright that I have to teach him anything. Meanwhile, the boss insists on doing a lot of the support work himself (i.e. he hoards information and doesn't delegate to anyone). I'm a little bit on the fence. First, the new guy doesn't yet have a strong foundation on the IT support functions which is where we really need help at this time. Second, I paid thousands of dollars for classes and spent many hours learning this stuff. Is it my responsibility to teach others skills that I had to learn on my own? Others here really aren't quick to share information so I'm not sure that I should either in this environment. I do know that if I get him involved, and get him started on projects, then I'd be responsible for his mistakes. I had to take the heat for the other guy when he made mistakes. OTOH the guy wants to learn something, is motivated, and I don't want to stop him. We've had our share of slackers in the group and it's nice to have someone who is willing to work for a change. So what would you guys do? Would you teach him the skills that you spent all of that time learning? Set him up with a test database on his PC and recommend some books for him? Encourage him to get a strong foundation in IT support first and ask later? We haven't had a new hire in years, let alone one that is interested in what I do, so this is new to me.

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• Introduction to Agile Development

  - by Grant Fritchey

  Even though my current job is a little weird, I still consider myself to be a DBA. I didn’t start that way in IT. I came through support and into development. I loved development. There was a constant struggle to attempt to improve your code, your understanding, and, most importantly, the process of development itself. Development can be slow and tedious. Left alone, developers can simply disappear to build a project and not come back for two years, at which time they deliver it. But, maybe that software isn’t what you wanted, or it’s no longer needed, or who knows what. So developers are constantly attempting to improve their processes in order to deliver more relavent software quicker (something DBAs could learn about). I really admire it. One of the many processes that has come out of that constant striving is known as Agile. As the name implies, Agile development attempts to come up with a quick, fast turning, business aware, well, for want of a word, agile, process that is more responsive to the needs of the business. There are tons and tons of books and blogs and videos on the subject that can get you going. But, Agile isn’t easy (note, Easy is not part of the name). Agile processes can be hard. I’ve worked on multiple agile teams, some successful, some not. The two principal differences between the teams were their discipline and their knowledge of the process. Discipline, that comes from within. But knowledge, ah, well there I can help. Red Gate is bringing a series of free instructional events to the United States in a few weeks time focused primarily on SQL Server (click here right now to register while there’s still space). We’re also offering some .NET instruction too. That’s a full day, free, with top experts in the business. But, the next day, there’s a full day session introducing Agile. You can go to this and learn how to do Agile. Develop that knowledge that will enable you to successfully use the Agile process. Go to this web site to check it out. No, this event is not free, but not everything can be. And it’s not just for developers. DBAs, you need to learn this stuff too. Management could also benefit from understanding these processes (because you guys can help to enforce discipline). It’s really for everyone involved in the development process.

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• Silverlight 4 Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of Silverlight 4 is now available. What is in the Silverlight 4 Release Silverlight 4 contains a ton of new features and capabilities.  In particular we focused on three scenarios with this release: Further enhancing media support Building great business applications Enabling out of the browser experiences On Tuesday I gave a 60 minute keynote about Silverlight 4 which showed off many of the new features and capabilities now available.  You can watch my keynote to learn more about Silverlight 4 and see a ton of great demos of it in action. Also check out these three great posts by Tim Heuer that talk about the new features and provide a guide to the new Silverlight 4 capabilities: Silverlight 4 Beta – A Guide to the New Features Silverlight 4 RC – What was updated Silverlight 4 Released Also read David Anson’s great Silverlight 4 Toolkit post to learn more about the new controls and functionality also available within the Silverlight Toolkit release we also made available today.  Also visit this page to learn more about the new Pivot functionality in Silverlight 4 – which makes it really easy to visualize and interact with collections of images using Silverlight. Lastly – make sure to visit the www.silverlight.net web-site and visit the “Get Started” section to find free tutorials that you can use. Download and Install Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 To develop Silverlight 4 applications you should first download and install Visual Studio 2010 or download and install the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express edition. Then install the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010.  This setup includes the Silverlight 4 Developer Runtime, Silverlight 4 SDK, RIA Services, and VS 2010 tools support.  Once installed you can do File->New Project and choose Silverlight Application to create your first Silverlight 4 project.  You can then use the new WYSIWYG Silverlight designer in Visual Studio 2010 to design and build rich Silverlight 4 applications. Important: If you previously installed the Silverlight 4 Beta or RC build on your machine, please make sure to go into Add/Remove programs and uninstall the “Update for Visual Studio 2010 (KB976272)” package prior to installing the Silverlight Tools RC2 for Visual Studio 2010 setup.  Note that while Silverlight 4 is released, the “Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010” is currently in “RC2” mode (meaning we are going to keep an eye out for any remaining issues before finally calling it done).  We’ll update the tools to be “final” in a few weeks once we verify that no last minute issues/bugs remain. Download and Install Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate You can also download and install the Expression Blend 4 RC to create and design great Silverlight 4 applications.  Blend contains “Sketchflow” support – which makes it really easy to rapidly prototype ideas and applications.  To learn more about Sketchflow watch this 90 second video of it in action. Summary Today’s release is the fourth release of Silverlight that we’ve shipped in the last 2.5 years.  The team has done a great job of advancing it quickly and staying focused.  We think today’s Silverlight 4 release opens up a ton of new opportunities to build great solutions for both consumers and business scenarios.  We are looking forward to seeing what you build with it! Hope this helps, Scott

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• The Microsoft Ajax Library and Visual Studio Beta 2

  - by Stephen Walther

  Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released this week and one of the first things that I hope you notice is that it no longer contains the latest version of ASP.NET AJAX. What happened? Where did AJAX go? Just like Sting and The Police, just like Phil Collins and Genesis, just like Greg Page and the Wiggles, AJAX has gone out of band! We are starting a solo career. A Name Change First things first. In previous releases, our Ajax framework was named ASP.NET AJAX. We now have changed the name of the framework to the Microsoft Ajax Library. There are two reasons behind this name change. First, the members of the Ajax team got tired of explaining to everyone that our Ajax framework is not tied to the server-side ASP.NET framework. You can use the Microsoft Ajax Library with ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Ruby on RAILS, and even pure HTML applications. Our framework can be used as a client-only framework and having the word ASP.NET in our name was confusing people. Second, it was time to start spelling the word Ajax like everyone else. Notice that the name is the Microsoft Ajax Library and not the Microsoft AJAX library. Originally, Microsoft used upper case AJAX because AJAX originally was an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. And, according to Strunk and Wagnell, acronyms should be all uppercase. However, Ajax is one of those words that have migrated from acronym status to “just a word” status. So whenever you hear one of your co-workers talk about ASP.NET AJAX, gently correct your co-worker and say “It is now called the Microsoft Ajax Library.” Why OOB? But why move out-of-band (OOB)? The short answer is that we have had approximately 6 preview releases of the Microsoft Ajax Library over the last year. That’s a lot. We pride ourselves on being agile. Client-side technology evolves quickly. We want to be able to get a preview version of the Microsoft Ajax Library out to our customers, get feedback, and make changes to the library quickly. Shipping the Microsoft Ajax Library out-of-band keeps us agile and enables us to continue to ship new versions of the library even after ASP.NET 4 ships. Showing Love for JavaScript Developers One area in which we have received a lot of feedback is around making the Microsoft Ajax Library easier to use for developers who are comfortable with JavaScript. We also wanted to make it easy for jQuery developers to take advantage of the innovative features of the Microsoft Ajax Library. To achieve these goals, we’ve added the following features to the Microsoft Ajax Library (these features are included in the latest preview release that you can download right now): A simplified imperative syntax – We wanted to make it brain-dead simple to create client-side Ajax controls when writing JavaScript. A client script loader – We wanted the Microsoft Ajax Library to load all of the scripts required by a component or control automatically. jQuery integration – We love the jQuery selector syntax. We wanted to make it easy for jQuery developers to use the Microsoft Ajax Library without changing their programming style. If you are interested in learning about these new features of the Microsoft Ajax Library, I recommend that you read the following blog post by Scott Guthrie: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/15/announcing-microsoft-ajax-library-preview-6-and-the-microsoft-ajax-minifier.aspx Downloading the Latest Version of the Microsoft Ajax Library Currently, the best place to download the latest version of the Microsoft Ajax Library is directly from the ASP.NET CodePlex project: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/ As I write this, the current version is Preview 6. The next version is coming out at the PDC. Summary I’m really excited about the future of the Microsoft Ajax Library. Moving outside of the ASP.NET framework provides us the flexibility to remain agile and continue to innovate aggressively. The latest preview release of the Microsoft Ajax Library includes several major new features including a client script loader, jQuery integration, and a simplified client control creation syntax.

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• Links to my “Best of 2010” Posts

  - by ScottGu

  I hope everyone is having a Happy New Years! 2010 has been a busy blogging year for me (this is the 100th blog post I’ve done in 2010).  Several people this week suggested I put together a summary post listing/organizing my favorite posts from the year.  Below is a quick listing of some of my favorite posts organized by topic area: VS 2010 and .NET 4 Below is a series of posts I wrote (some in late 2009) about the VS 2010 and .NET 4 (including ASP.NET 4 and WPF 4) release we shipped in April: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (DataTips, BreakPoints, Import/Export) Box Selection and Multi-line Editing Support with VS 2010 VS 2010 Extension Manager (and the cool new PowerCommands Extension) Pinning Projects and Solutions VS 2010 Web Deployment Debugging Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio Visual Studio Below are some additional Visual Studio posts I’ve done (not in the first series above) that I thought were nice: Download and Share Visual Studio Color Schemes Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers Silverlight We shipped Silverlight 4 in April, and announced Silverlight 5 the beginning of December: Silverlight 4 Released Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released Silverlight 4 Training Kit Silverlight PivotViewer Now Available Silverlight Questions Announcing Silverlight 5 Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 We shipped Windows Phone 7 this fall and shipped free Visual Studio development tools with great Silverlight and XNA support in September: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight ASP.NET MVC We shipped ASP.NET MVC 2 in March, and started previewing ASP.NET MVC 3 this summer.  ASP.NET MVC 3 will RTM in less than 2 weeks from today: ASP.NET MVC 2: Strongly Typed Html Helpers ASP.NET MVC 2: Model Validation Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1) Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta and NuGet (nee NuPack) Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 1  Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 2 Introducing Razor – A New View Engine for ASP.NET ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: New @model keyword in Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: Server-Side Comments with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <text> syntax ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts and Sections with Razor IIS and Web Server Stack The IIS and Web Stack teams have made a bunch of great improvements to the core web server this year: Fix Common SEO Problems using the URL Rewrite Extension Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Introducing IIS Express SQL CE 4 (New Embedded Database Support with ASP.NET) Introducing Web Matrix EF Code First EF Code First is a really nice new data option that enables a very clean code-oriented data workflow: Announcing Entity Framework Code-First CTP5 Release Class-Level Model Validation with EF Code First and ASP.NET MVC 3 Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 EF 4 Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database jQuery and AJAX Contributions My team began making some significant source code contributions to the jQuery project this year: jQuery Templates, Data Link and Globalization Accepted as Official jQuery Plugins jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery) jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft Patches and Hot Fixes Some useful fixes you can download prior to VS 2010 SP1: Patch for Cut/Copy “Insufficient Memory” issue with VS 2010 Patch for VS 2010 Find and Replace Dialog Growing Patch for VS 2010 Scrolling Context Menu Videos of My Talks Some recordings of technical talks I’ve done this year: ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight 4 Talks I did in Europe VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Talk in Arizona Other About Technical Debates (and ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC debates in particular) ASP.NET Security Fix Now on Windows Update Upcoming Web Camps I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who follows my blog – I really appreciate you reading it (the comments you post help encourage me to write it).  See you in the New Year! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Feb 2nd Links: Visual Studio, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, JQuery, Windows Phone

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I’ve done in the last year. [I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Community News MVCConf Conference Next Wednesday: Attend the free, online ASP.NET MVC Conference being organized by the community next Wednesday.  Here is a list of some of the talks you can watch live. Visual Studio HTML5 and CSS3 in VS 2010 SP1: Good post from the Visual Studio web tools team that talks about the new support coming in VS 2010 SP1 for HTML5 and CSS3. Database Deployment with the VS 2010 Package/Publish Database Tool: Rachel Appel has a nice post that covers how to enable database deployment using the built-in VS 2010 web deployment support.  Also check out her ASP.NET web deployment post from last month. VsVim Update Released: Jared posts about the latest update of his VsVim extension for Visual Studio 2010.  This free extension enables VIM based key-bindings within VS. ASP.NET How to Add Mobile Pages to your ASP.NET Web Forms / MVC Apps: Great whitepaper by Steve Sanderson that covers how to mobile-enable your ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC based applications. New Entity Framework Tutorials for ASP.NET Developers: The ASP.NET and EF teams have put together a bunch of nice tutorials on using the Entity Framework data library with ASP.NET Web Forms. Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with EF Code First (via NuGet): Nice post from David Ebbo that talks about how to use the new EF Code First Library with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Common Performance Issues with ASP.NET Web Sites: Good post with lots of performance tuning suggestions (mostly deployment settings) for ASP.NET apps. ASP.NET MVC Razor View Converter: Free, automated tool from Terlik that can convert existing .aspx view templates to Razor view templates. ASP.NET MVC 3 Internationalization: Nadeem has a great post that talks about a variety of techniques you can use to enable Globalization and Localization within your ASP.NET MVC 3 applications. ASP.NET MVC 3 Tutorials by David Hayden: Great set of tutorials and posts by David Hayden on some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features. EF Fixed Concurrency Mode and MVC: Chris Sells has a nice post that talks about how to handle concurrency with updates done with EF using ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET and jQuery jQuery Performance Tips and Tricks: A free 30 minute video that covers some great tips and tricks to keep in mind when using jQuery. jQuery 1.5’s AJAX rewrite and ASP.NET services - All is well: Nice post by Dave Ward that talks about using the new jQuery 1.5 to call ASP.NET ASMX Services. Good news according to Dave is that all is well :-) jQuery UI Modal Dialogs for ASP.NET MVC: Nice post by Rob Regan that talks about a few approaches you can use to implement dialogs with jQuery UI and ASP.NET MVC.  Windows Phone 7 Free PDF eBook on Building Windows Phone 7 Applications with Silverlight: Free book that walksthrough how to use Silverlight and Visual Studio to build Windows Phone 7 applications. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Some VS 2010 RC Updates (including patches for Intellisense and Web Designer fixes)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] We are continuing to make progress on shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has downloaded and tried out the VS 2010 Release Candidate, and especially to those who have sent us feedback or reported issues with it. This data has been invaluable in helping us find and fix remaining bugs before we ship the final release. Last month I blogged about a patch we released for the VS 2010 RC that fixed a bad intellisense crash issue.  This past week we released two additional patches that you can download and apply to the VS 2010 RC to immediately fix two other common issues we’ve seen people run into: Patch that fixes crashes with Tooltip invocation and when hovering over identifiers The Visual Studio team recently released a second patch that fixes some crashes we’ve seen when tooltips are displayed – most commonly when hovering over an identifier to view a QuickInfo tooltip. You can learn more about this issue from this blog post, and download and apply the patch here. Patch that fixes issues with the Web Forms designer not correctly adding controls to the auto-generated designer files The Visual Web Developer team recently released a patch that fixes issues where web controls are not correctly added to the .designer.cs file associated with the .aspx file – which means they can’t be programmed against in the code-behind file.  This issue is most commonly described as “controls are not being recognized in the code-behind” or “editing existing .aspx files regenerates the .aspx.designer.(vb or cs) file and controls are now missing” or “I can’t embed controls within the Ajax Control Toolkit TabContainer or the <asp:createuserwizard> control”. You can learn more about the issue here, and download the patch that fixes it here. Common Cause of Intellisense and IDE sluggishness on Windows XP, Vista, Win Server 2003/2008 systems Over the last few months we’ve occasionally seen reports of people seeing tremendous slowness when typing and using intellisense within VS 2010 despite running on decent machines.  It took us awhile to track down the cause – but we have found that the common culprit seems to be that these machines don’t have the latest versions of the UIA (Windows Automation) component installed. UIA 3 ships with Windows 7, and is a recommended Windows Update patch on XP and Vista (which is why we didn’t see the problem in our tests – since our machines are patched with all recommended updates).  Many systems (especially on XP) don’t automatically install recommended updates, though, and are running with older versions of UIA. This can cause significant performance slow-downs within the VS 2010 editor when large lists are displayed (for example: with intellisense). If you are running on Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and are seeing any performance issues with the editor or IDE, please install the free UIA 3 update that can be downloaded from this page.  If you scroll down the page you’ll find direct links to versions for each OS. Note that we are making improvements to the final release of VS 2010 so that we don’t have big perf issues when UIA 3 isn’t installed – and we are also adding a message within the IDE that will warn you if you don’t have UIA 3 installed and accessibility is activated. Improved Text Rendering with WPF 4 and VS 2010 We recently made some nice changes to WPF 4 which improve the text clarity and text crispness over what was in the VS 2010/.NET 4 Release Candidate.  In particular these changes improve scenarios where you have a dark background with light text. You can learn more about these improvements in this WPF Team blog post.  These changes will be in the final release of VS 2010 and .NET 4. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support with VB 2010

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the eighteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. A few days ago I blogged about two new language features coming with C# 4.0: optional parameters and named arguments.  Today I’m going to post about a few of my favorite new features being added to VB with VS 2010: Auto-Implemented Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support. Auto-Implemented Properties Prior to VB 2010, implementing properties within a class using VB required you to explicitly declare the property as well as implement a backing field variable to store its value.  For example, the code below demonstrates how to implement a “Person” class using VB 2008 that exposes two public properties - “Name” and “Age”:   While explicitly declaring properties like above provides maximum flexibility, I’ve always found writing this type of boiler-plate get/set code tedious when you are simply storing/retrieving the value from a field.  You can use VS code snippets to help automate the generation of it – but it still generates a lot of code that feels redundant.  C# 2008 introduced a cool new feature called automatic properties that helps cut down the code quite a bit for the common case where properties are simply backed by a field.  VB 2010 also now supports this same feature.  Using the auto-implemented properties feature of VB 2010 we can now implement our Person class using just the code below: When you declare an auto-implemented property, the VB compiler automatically creates a private field to store the property value as well as generates the associated Get/Set methods for you.  As you can see above – the code is much more concise and easier to read. The syntax supports optionally initializing the properties with default values as well if you want to: You can learn more about VB 2010’s automatic property support from this MSDN page. Collection Initializers VB 2010 also now supports using collection initializers to easily create a collection and populate it with an initial set of values.  You identify a collection initializer by declaring a collection variable and then use the From keyword followed by braces { } that contain the list of initial values to add to the collection.  Below is a code example where I am using the new collection initializer feature to populate a “Friends” list of Person objects with two people, and then bind it to a GridView control to display on a page: You can learn more about VB 2010’s collection initializer support from this MSDN page. Implicit Line Continuation Support Traditionally, when a statement in VB has been split up across multiple lines, you had to use a line-continuation underscore character (_) to indicate that the statement wasn’t complete.  For example, with VB 2008 the below LINQ query needs to append a “_” at the end of each line to indicate that the query is not complete yet: The VB 2010 compiler and code editor now adds support for what is called “implicit line continuation support” – which means that it is smarter about auto-detecting line continuation scenarios, and as a result no longer needs you to explicitly indicate that the statement continues in many, many scenarios.  This means that with VB 2010 we can now write the above code with no “_” at all: The implicit line continuation feature also works well when editing XML Literals within VB (which is pretty cool). You can learn more about VB 2010’s Implicit Line Continuation support and many of the scenarios it supports from this MSDN page (scroll down to the “Implicit Line Continuation” section to find details). Summary The above three VB language features are but a few of the new language and code editor features coming with VB 2010.  Visit this site to learn more about some of the other VB language features coming with the release.  Also subscribe to the VB team’s blog to learn more and stay up-to-date with the posts they the team regularly publishes. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tool Extensions

  - by ScottGu

  Last month I blogged about the Extension Manager that is built-into VS 2010 – as well as about a cool VS 2010 PowerCommands extension that provides some extra features for Visual Studio.  The Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager provides an easy way for developers to quickly find and install extensions and plugins that enhance the built-in functionality to VS 2010. New VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools Release Earlier this week Jason Zander announced the availability of a new VS 2010 Productivity Power Tools release that includes a bunch of great new VS 2010 extensions that provide a bunch of cool new functionality for you to take advantage of.  You can download and install the release for free here.  Some of the code editor improvements it provides include: Entire Line Highlighting: Makes it easier to track cursor location within the editor Entire Line Selection: Triple Clicking a line in the code editor now selects the entire line (like with MS Word) Code Block Movement: Use Alt+Up/Down Arrow now moves selected code blocks up/down in the editor Consistent Tabs vs. Spaces: Ensure consistent tab vs. space usage across your projects Colorized Parameters: It is now easier to see/identify method parameters Column Guide: You can now add vertical column guidelines to help with text alignment and sizes Align assignments: Makes it easier to line-up multiple variable assignments within your code HTML Clipboard Support: Copy/paste code from VS into an HTML buffer (useful for blogging!) Ctrl + Click Go to Definition: You can now hold down the Ctrl key and click a type to go to its definition It also includes several tab management improvements for managing document tabs within the IDE: Show Close Button in Tab Well: Shows a close button in document well for the active tab (like VS 2008 did) Colored Tabs: You can now select the color of each document tab by project or by regex Pinned Tabs: Enables you to pin tabs to keep them always visible and available Vertical Tabs: You can now show document tabs vertically to fit more tabs than normal Remove Tabs by Usage Order: Better behavior when adding new tabs and one needs to be hidden for space reasons Sort Tabs by Project: Tabs can be sorted by project they belong to, keeping them grouped together Sort Tabs Alphabetically: Tabs can be sorted alphabetically And last – but not least – it includes a new and improved “Add Reference” dialog: This new Add Reference dialog caches assembly information – which means it loads within a second or two (note: the very first time it still loads assembly data – but it then caches it and makes it fast afterwards). The new Add Reference dialog also now includes searching support – making it easier to find the assembly you are looking for. You can read more about all of the above improvements in Jason’s blog post about the release. New Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack Release Earlier this week we also shipped a new feature pack that adds additional modeling and code visualization features to VS 2010 Ultimate.  You can download it here. The Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack includes a bunch of great new capabilities including: Web Site Visualization: New support for generating a DGML visualization for ASP.NET projects C/C++ Native Code Visualization: New support for generating DGML diagrams for C/C++ projects Generate Code from UML Class Diagrams: You can now generate code from your UML diagrams Create UML Class Diagrams from Code: Create UML diagrams from existing code bases Import UML from XML: Import UML class, sequence, and use case elements from XMI 2.1 files Custom Validation Layer Rules: Write custom code to create, modify, and validate layer diagrams Jason’s blog post covers more about these features as well. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• ASP.NET Web API - Screencast series with downloadable sample code - Part 1

  - by Jon Galloway

  There's a lot of great ASP.NET Web API content on the ASP.NET website at http://asp.net/web-api. I mentioned my screencast series in original announcement post, but we've since added the sample code so I thought it was worth pointing the series out specifically. This is an introductory screencast series that walks through from File / New Project to some more advanced scenarios like Custom Validation and Authorization. The screencast videos are all short (3-5 minutes) and the sample code for the series is both available for download and browsable online. I did the screencasts, but the samples were written by the ASP.NET Web API team. So - let's watch them together! Grab some popcorn and pay attention, because these are short. After each video, I'll talk about what I thought was important. I'm embedding the videos using HTML5 (MP4) with Silverlight fallback, but if something goes wrong or your browser / device / whatever doesn't support them, I'll include the link to where the videos are more professionally hosted on the ASP.NET site. Note also if you're following along with the samples that, since Part 1 just looks at the File / New Project step, the screencast part numbers are one ahead of the sample part numbers - so screencast 4 matches with sample code demo 3. Note: I started this as one long post for all 6 parts, but as it grew over 2000 words I figured it'd be better to break it up. Part 1: Your First Web API [Video and code on the ASP.NET site] This screencast starts with an overview of why you'd want to use ASP.NET Web API: Reach more clients (thinking beyond the browser to mobile clients, other applications, etc.) Scale (who doesn't love the cloud?!) Embrace HTTP (a focus on HTTP both on client and server really simplifies and focuses service interactions) Next, I start a new ASP.NET Web API application and show some of the basics of the ApiController. We don't write any new code in this first step, just look at the example controller that's created by File / New Project. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; namespace NewProject_Mvc4BetaWebApi.Controllers { public class ValuesController : ApiController { // GET /api/values public IEnumerable<string> Get() { return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } // GET /api/values/5 public string Get(int id) { return "value"; } // POST /api/values public void Post(string value) { } // PUT /api/values/5 public void Put(int id, string value) { } // DELETE /api/values/5 public void Delete(int id) { } } } Finally, we walk through testing the output of this API controller using browser tools. There are several ways you can test API output, including Fiddler (as described by Scott Hanselman in this post) and built-in developer tools available in all modern browsers. For simplicity I used Internet Explorer 9 F12 developer tools, but you're of course welcome to use whatever you'd like. A few important things to note: This class derives from an ApiController base class, not the standard ASP.NET MVC Controller base class. They're similar in places where API's and HTML returning controller uses are similar, and different where API and HTML use differ. A good example of where those things are different is in the routing conventions. In an HTTP controller, there's no need for an "action" to be specified, since the HTTP verbs are the actions. We don't need to do anything to map verbs to actions; when a request comes in to /api/values/5 with the DELETE HTTP verb, it'll automatically be handled by the Delete method in an ApiController. The comments above the API methods show sample URL's and HTTP verbs, so we can test out the first two GET methods by browsing to the site in IE9, hitting F12 to bring up the tools, and entering /api/values in the URL: That sample action returns a list of values. To get just one value back, we'd browse to /values/5: That's it for Part 1. In Part 2 we'll look at getting data (beyond hardcoded strings) and start building out a sample application.

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