eric the red - Page 179

Databases in Source Control

- by Grant Fritchey

I’ve been working as a database professional for quite a long time. But originally, I was a developer. And I loved being a developer. There was this constant feedback loop of a job well done, your code compiled and it ran. Every time this happened successfully, you’d check it into source control. These days you have to add another step; the code passed all the tests, unit, line, regression, qa, whatever, then into source control it goes. As a matter of fact, when I first made the jump from developer to DBA/database developer/database professional, source control was the one thing I couldn’t believe was missing from the DBA toolbox. Come to find out, source control was only the beginning of what was missing from your standard DBAs set of skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disrespecting the DBA. They’re focused where they should be, on your production data. But there has to be a method for developing applications that include databases and the database side of that development and deployment process has long been lacking. This lack of development and deployment methodologies is a part of what has given rise to some of the wackier implementations of Object Relational Mapping tools, the NoSQL movement, and some of the other foul cursing that is directed towards databases, DBAs, and database development by application developers. Some of that is well earned. A lot isn’t. But it is a fact that database professionals, in general, do not have as sophisticated a model for managing development and deployment as application developers do. We could charge out and start trying to come up with our own standards and methods. I’m sure people have done exactly that. However, I’m lazy, and not terribly bright. Rather than try to invent a whole new process, I’m going to look to my developer roots and choose instead to emulate the developers. They’re sitting over there across the hall from me working with SCRUM/Agile/Waterfall/Object Driven/Feature Driven/Test Driven development processes that they’ve been polishing for years. What if I just started working on database development the same way they work on code development? Win! Ah, but now I have to have a mechanism for treating my database like application code. First, I need a method for getting it into source control. That’s where Red Gate’s SQL Source Control comes into the picture. SQL Source Control works within SQL Server Management Studio to connect your database objects up to the source control system of your choice. Right out of the box SQL Source Control can link to TFS, SVN or Vault. With a little work you can connect it to Git or just about any other source control system. With the ability to get my database into source control, a lot of possibilities for more direct integration with the application development teams open up.

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My Mother Bought a Droid

- by Ben Griswold

I converted to iPhone two years ago when I left my former employer and my Blackberry behind. The truth is I half-heartedly purchased my iPhone. It was a great looking device, but as far as I was concerned, it was a mere toy compared to my Blackberry. I remember hiding the toy in my briefcase when attending business meetings because I didn’t consider it to be professional enough. I’ve since owned all three generations of the iPhone and, well, iPhone seems to have caught on. I still miss the click of the Blackberry keyboard and the blinking red light letting me know that someone/something requires my attention, but I’m officially an iPhone fanboy now. My mom called last weekend and asked if she should buy an iPhone. I talked her ear off about everything I love about iPhone. I went on for about twenty minutes. I couldn’t help myself. I mentioned everything from my podcast subscriptions to the application which manages my workouts. I went as far as to say that someday all smart phones will be referred to as iPhones just like all tissues are referred to as Kleenex and all sodas are referred to as Cokes. I was really on a roll and then I stopped. I had to…the call dropped. There I was, strategically standing in the far corner of my backyard where I get the most reliable AT&T reception and the call drops in middle of my iPhone pitch. Folks, I don’t care how good a salesperson you are, it’s tough to recover from a situation like this. I dialed my mom back and jokingly asked if she was planning to make calls with her new phone. I explained that AT&T is bound to provide better service eventually but I’m not sure she should wait. After all, I have troubles with the network in San Diego and I can only image how bad it would be for her in Western Massachusetts. Mom called back a few days later exclaiming, “I bought a Droid! I love this phone! I haven’t done anything with it but make phone calls, but I love it.” I had to laugh. My mom made the right call (pun intended.) The iPhone is an amazing device, but owners are constantly reminded that its core function (it’s a phone, remember?) is subpar. If you love gadgets, you’re probably enthralled by iPhone’s many bells and whistles and, relatively speaking, the terrible phone service might not amount to much. (Maybe it amounts to a rant on your blog.) The overall iPhone offering is so attractive that consumers are willing to wait for AT&T to straighten up their act or wait until Apple grants a choice of carriers. But I don’t see either of these remedies coming soon. In the interim, I’m willing to take my iPhone for what it is and just continue to enjoy my favorite features while pretending that poor coverage isn’t a big deal. With any luck, more and more reasonable folks will recognize that Android Phones are legitimate players in the smart phone space, they will buy loads of them and there will become plenty of functional phones to borrow when my “phone” is showing zero bars. Heck, I’m already covered when I visit my mom.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 19, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, March 19, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Visual Studio UnitTest Coverage Analyzer: Analyzing Visual Studio Unittest Coverage Exported XML filecrudwork is a library of reuseable classes for developing .NET applications: crudwork is a collection of reuseable .NET classes and features. If you searched for StpLibrary and landed here, you're in the right place. Origi...CWU Animated AVL Tree Tutorial: This is a silverlight demo of a self-balancing AVL tree. On the original team were CWU undergraduates Eric Brown, Barend Venter, Nick Rushton, Arry...DotNetNuke® Skin Modern: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Standards" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. The skin utilizes both the telerik...DotNetNuke® Skin Monster: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by Jon Edwards of SlumtownHero.co.za. This package uses totally tab...DotNetNuke® Skin Synapse: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Exionyte Solutions. This package features 2 colors with 4...earthworm: Earthworm is a pet project intended as a repository of data access logic, including some ORM, state management and bridging the gap between connect...ema: EMA is a place for collaborative effort to implement a PowerGrid game engine. For more info on PowerGrid the board game see: http://www.boardgamege...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: Extending capabilities of existing SharePoint 2007 Web Parts by inheriting and alterFreedomCraft: Craft development siteG.B SecondLife Sculpter: This is a Sculptor for "secondlife"InfoPath Error Viewer: InfoPath Error Viewer provides an intuitive list to show all errors in the entire InfoPath form. You'll no longer have to find the validation error...LEET (LEET Enhances Exploratory Testing): LEET is a capture-replay tool based on Microsoft’s User Interface Automation Framework. It is targeted at agile teams, and provides support for us...Linq To Entity: Linq,Linq to Entity,EntityMACFBTest: This is a test for a Facebook application.MetaProperties: MetaProperties helps you to create event driven architectures in .NET. It saves you time and it helps you avoid mistakes. It's compatible with WPF ...ownztec web: projeto da ownztec.comParallel Programming Guide: Content for the latest patterns & practices book on design patterns for parallel programming. Downloadable book outline and draft chapters as well ...Perseus - Sistema de Matrícula On-Line: Sistema de matrícula desenvolvido pelo 5º período de Desenvolvimento Web da FACECLA.Project Tru Tiên: Project EL tru tiên, ZhuxianProSysPlus.Net Framework: How do I get the ease and efficiency of my work in VFP (R.I.P. 2010)? The answer is here: the ProSysPlus.Net Framework. Why is it open source? Wh...Quick Anime Renamer: Originally included with AniPlayer X, Quick Anime Renamer easily renames your anime files into a "cleaner" format so you wont get retinal detachment.Simple XNA Button: This is a project of a helper for instancing Simple Buttons in XNA with a ButtonPanel. Its got various features like. Load a Panel from a Plain Tex...SteelVersion - Monitor your .NET Application versioning: SteelVersion helps you to find and store versioning information about .NET assemblies ("Explorer" mode). It also makes it easier to continuously ch...Stellar Results: Astronomical Tracking System for IUPUI CSCI506 - Fall 2007, Team2TheHunterGetsTheDeer: first AIwandal: wandalWeb App Data Architect's CodeCAN: Contains different types of code samples to explore different types of technical solutions/patterns from an architect's point of view.Yet Another GPS: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows MobileNew ReleasesASP.Net Client Dependency Framework: v1.0 RC1: ASP.Net Client Dependency has progressed to release candidate 1. With the community feedback and bug reports we've been able to make some great upd...C# FTP Library: FTPLib v1.0.1.1: This release has a couple of small bug fixes as well as the new abilities to specify a port to connect to and to create a new directory with the Cr...crudwork is a library of reuseable classes for developing .NET applications: crudwork 2.2.0.1: crudwork 2.2.0.1 (initial version)DotNetNuke® Skin Modern: Modern Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Standards" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. The skin utilizes both the telerik...DotNetNuke® Skinning Extensions: Nav Menu Demo Skins: This very basic skin demonstrates: 1. How to force NAV menu to generate an unordered list menu 2. The creation of a sub menu, both horizontal and ...DotNetNuke® XML: 04.03.05: XML/XSL Module 04.03.05 Release Candidate This is a maintainace release. Full Quallified Namespace avoids conflicts with Namespaces used by Teler...eCommerce by Onex Community Edition: Installer of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0: Installer of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0 Last changes: Added integration with Paypal Corrected of adding photos and attachments to products ...eCommerce by Onex Community Edition: Source code of eCommerce by Onex Community 1.0: Changes in version 1.0: Added integration with Paypal Corrected of adding photos and attachments to products Fixed problem with cancellation of...Employee Info Starter Kit: v2.2.0 (Visual Studio 2005-2008): This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (CRUD) the employee info of a com...Employee Info Starter Kit: v4.0.0.alpha (Visual Studio 2010): Employee Info Starter Kit is a ASP.NET based web application, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and d...Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.4: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.4). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. Once you have ext...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: ContentQueryAdvanced: This .wsp file contains a single web part ContentQueryAdvanced. This web part inherits from ContentQuery web part and adds a ToolPart field for a ...Extended SharePoint Web Parts: Source Code: Zip file includes all the source code used to extend Content Query Web Part, adding a Tool Part field to insert a CAML query/filter/sortFacebook Developer Toolkit: Version 3.02: Updated copyright. No new functionality. Version 3.1 in the works.fleXdoc: template-based server-side document generator (docx): fleXdoc 1.0 (final): fleXdoc consists of a webservice and a (test)client for the service. Make sure you also download the testclient: you can use it to test the install...InfoPath Error Viewer: InfoPath Error Viewer 1.0: This is an intial version of this tool. You can: 1. View all errors in a list. 2. Locate to a binding control of an error field. 3. See the detai...LEET (LEET Enhances Exploratory Testing): LEET Alpha: The first public release of LEET includes the ability to record tests from running GUIs, assist in writing tests manually from a running GUI, edit ...Linq To Entity: Linq to Entity: The Entity Framework enables developers to work with data in the form of domain-specific objects and properties, such as customers and customer add...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.8.56699: Fixed peformance and memory usage. Fixed Letitbit provider. Added detecting IMDB, NFO, TV.com... links in RSS Monitor. Supported password len...MetaProperties: MetaProperties 1.0.0.0: This is a multi-targeted release of MetaProperties for the desktop and Silverlight versions of the .NET framework. The desktop version is fully ...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 2: Added a cancelable Stream.CopyTo. Depends on Nito.Linq 0.2. Please report any issues via the Issue Tracker.Project Server 2007 Timesheet AutoStatus Plus: AutoStatusPlus 1.0.1.0: AutoStatusPlus 1.0.1.0 Supported Systems x86 and x64 Project Server 2007 deployments with or without MOSS 2007 Recommended Patchlevels WSS 3.0: ...Project Tru Tiên: Elements-test V1: Mô tả Bản elements.data - có full ID của bản Elemens.data Tru tiên 2 VIệt Nam (V37) - có full ID của bản Elements.data server offline tru tiên (hiệ...Quick Anime Renamer: Quick Anime Renamer v0.1: AniPlayer X v1.4.5 - started 3/18/2010Initial Release!QuickieB2B: Quickie v1.0b: QuickieB2B - made for DEV4FUN competition organized by Microsoft CroatiaSilverlight 3.0 Advanced ToolTipService: Advanced ToolTipService v2.0.2: This release is compiled against the Silverlight 3.0 runtime. A demonstration on how to set the ToolTip content to a property of the DataContext o...Simple XNA Button: XNA Button 1.0: The Main Project. this uses XNA 3.0 but it can be build with lower versions of XNA Framework. This was made using Visual Studio 2008.StoryQ: StoryQ 2.0.3 Library and Converter UI: New features in this release: Tagging and a tag-capable rich html report. The code generator is capable of generating entire classes This relea...The Silverlight Hyper Video Player [http://slhvp.com]: Version 1.0: Version 1.0VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30318.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWord Index extracts words or sentences from Word document according to patterns: Word Index 1.0.1.0 (For Word 2007 and Word 2003): Word Index for Word 2007 & 2003 : WordIndex.msi (Win-Installer Setup for Word Index) Source code : wordindex.codeplex.comV1.0.1.0.zip : (Source co...Yet Another GPS: YAGPS-Alfa.1: Yet another GPS tracker is a very powerful GPS track application for Windows MobileMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQOpen Data App Framework (ODAF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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Welcome to the SOA & E2.0 Partner Community Forum

- by Jürgen Kress

With more than 200 registrations the SOA & E2.0 Partner Community Forum is a huge success! Conference program Is available online: http://tinyurl.com/soaforumagenda Agenda Tuesday March 15th 2011 12:15 Welcome & Introduction – Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress, Oracle 12:30 Oracle Middleware Strategy and Information on Application Grid and Exalogic - Andrew Sutherland, Oracle 13:15 Managing Online Customer, Partner and Employee Engagement Oracle E2.0 Solutions - Andrew Gilboy, Oracle 14:00 Coffee Break 14:30 Partner SOA/ BPM Reference Case – Leon Smiers, Capgemini 15:15 Partner WebCenter/ UCM Reference Case – Vikram Setia, Infomentum 16.00 Break 16.30 SOA and BPM 11gR1 PS3 Update – David Shaffer 17:00 Why specialization is important for Partners – Nick Kritikos, Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress 17:45 Social Event Wednesday March 16th 2011 09.00 Welcome & Introduction Day II 09.15 Breakout sessions Round 1 SOA Suite 11g PS3 & OSB Importance of ADF & Jdeveloper SOA Security IDM WebCenter PS3, Whats New E2.0 Sales Plays 10.30 Break 10.45 Breakout sessions Round 2 WebCenter PS3, Whats New Applications Management Enterprise Manager and Amberpoint ADF/WebCenter 11g integration with BPM Suite 11g Importance of ADF & Jdeveloper JCAPS & OC4J migration opportunities for service business 12.00 Lunch 13.00 Breakout sessions Round 3 BPM 11g, Whats New Universal Content Management! 11g SOA Security IDM E2.0 Surrounding Products: ATG, Documaker, Primavera Middleware Industry Value Propositions & Sales Plays 14.30 Break 14.45 Fusion Applications, Rajan Krishnan, Oracle 15.30 SOA & E2.0 Summary & Closing, Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress, Oracle 15.45 Finish & Departure 16:00 Bus departure Capgemini Nederland BV Papendorpseweg 100 3500 GN Utrecht The Netherlands Tel: +31 30 689 00 00 For a detailed routedescription by car or public transport please visit: http://www.nl.capgemini.com/pdf/Papendorp_UK.pdf Hotel In case you have not booked your hotel yet, please make your own hotel reservation. You can book your hotel room at the 'Hotel Vianen' at a special rate, by using the Oracle booking code: DDG VIA-GF41422. One night package € 110,- for a single room, including breakfast. Kindly secure your hotel room as soon as possible. The number of rooms is limited! Hotel Vianen Prins Bernhardstraat 75 4132 XE Vianen [email protected] The Netherlands [email protected] Arrival on 14th of March and staying at Hotel Vianen. On 15th of March we have arranged a transfer from Hotel Vianen to the Capgemini Offices. The bus is parked in front of the hotel and will leave at 10.15AM (UTC/GMT+1). Logistics Pass with barcode At your arrival you will receive a pass with a barcode. This pass will give you access to the conference building and the different floors within the building. Please make sure to hand in your pass at the registration desk at the end of the day. Arrival by plane Transfer from Schiphol Airport to Capgemini on 15th of March will be arranged by Oracle. A hostess will be welcoming you at the Meeting Point at Schiphol Airport (this is a red and white large cubicle situated next to Delifrance) The buses will depart from Schiphol Airport at 09.00AM, 09.45AM and 10.30AM (UTC/GMT+1). For future SOA Partner Community Forums become a member for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Partner Community Forum,Community,SOA Partner Community,Utrecht 03.2011,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress

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Best way to Draw a cube for 3D Picking

- by Kenneth Bray

Currently I am drawing a cube for a game that I am making and the cube draw method is below. My question is, what is the best way to draw a cube and to be able to easily find the face that the cursor is over? My draw method works just fine, but I am getting ready to start to add picking (this will be used to mold the cubes into other shaps), and would like to know the best way to find a face of the cube. public void Draw() { // center point posX, posY, posZ float radius = size / 2; //top glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // red glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //bottom glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(1.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // ?? color glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //right side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // ?? color glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //left side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,1.0f); // ?? color glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //front side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // blue glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ + radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); //back side glPushMatrix(); glBegin(GL_QUADS); { glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // green glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY - radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX - radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); glVertex3f(posX + radius, posY + radius, posZ - radius); } glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); }

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: The EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates

- by James Michael Hare

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the last two weeks, we examined the Action family of delegates (and delegates in general), and the Func family of delegates and how they can be used to support generic, reusable algorithms and classes. So this week, we are going to look at a handy pair of delegates that can be used to eliminate the need for defining custom delegates when creating events: the EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates. Events and delegates Before we begin, let’s quickly consider events in .NET. According to the MSDN: An event in C# is a way for a class to provide notifications to clients of that class when some interesting thing happens to an object. So, basically, you can create an event in a type so that users of that type can subscribe to notifications of things of interest. How is this different than some of the delegate programming that we talked about in the last two weeks? Well, you can think of an event as a special access modifier on a delegate. Some differences between the two are: Events are a special access case of delegates They behave much like delegates instances inside the type they are declared in, but outside of that type they can only be (un)subscribed to. Events can specify add/remove behavior explicitly If you want to do additional work when someone subscribes or unsubscribes to an event, you can specify the add and remove actions explicitly. Events have access modifiers, but these only specify the access level of those who can (un)subscribe A public event, for example, means anyone can (un)subscribe, but it does not mean that anyone can raise (invoke) the event directly. Events can only be raised by the type that contains them In contrast, if a delegate is visible, it can be invoked outside of the object (not even in a sub-class!). Events tend to be for notifications only, and should be treated as optional Semantically speaking, events typically don’t perform work on the the class directly, but tend to just notify subscribers when something of note occurs. My basic rule-of-thumb is that if you are just wanting to notify any listeners (who may or may not care) that something has happened, use an event. However, if you want the caller to provide some function to perform to direct the class about how it should perform work, make it a delegate. Declaring events using custom delegates To declare an event in a type, we simply use the event keyword and specify its delegate type. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a new TimeOfDayTimer that triggers at a given time of the day (as opposed to on an interval). We could write something like this: 1: public delegate void TimeOfDayHandler(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e); 2: 3: // A timer that will fire at time of day each day. 4: public class TimeOfDayTimer : IDisposable 5: { 6: // Event that is triggered at time of day. 7: public event TimeOfDayHandler Elapsed; 8: 9: // ... 10: } The first thing to note is that the event is a delegate type, which tells us what types of methods may subscribe to it. The second thing to note is the signature of the event handler delegate, according to the MSDN: The standard signature of an event handler delegate defines a method that does not return a value, whose first parameter is of type Object and refers to the instance that raises the event, and whose second parameter is derived from type EventArgs and holds the event data. If the event does not generate event data, the second parameter is simply an instance of EventArgs. Otherwise, the second parameter is a custom type derived from EventArgs and supplies any fields or properties needed to hold the event data. So, in a nutshell, the event handler delegates should return void and take two parameters: An object reference to the object that raised the event. An EventArgs (or a subclass of EventArgs) reference to event specific information. Even if your event has no additional information to provide, you are still expected to provide an EventArgs instance. In this case, feel free to pass the EventArgs.Empty singleton instead of creating new instances of EventArgs (to avoid generating unneeded memory garbage). The EventHandler delegate Because many events have no additional information to pass, and thus do not require custom EventArgs, the signature of the delegates for subscribing to these events is typically: 1: // always takes an object and an EventArgs reference 2: public delegate void EventHandler(object sender, EventArgs e) It would be insane to recreate this delegate for every class that had a basic event with no additional event data, so there already exists a delegate for you called EventHandler that has this very definition! Feel free to use it to define any events which supply no additional event information: 1: public class Cache 2: { 3: // event that is raised whenever the cache performs a cleanup 4: public event EventHandler OnCleanup; 5: 6: // ... 7: } This will handle any event with the standard EventArgs (no additional information). But what of events that do need to supply additional information? Does that mean we’re out of luck for subclasses of EventArgs? That’s where the generic for of EventHandler comes into play… The generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegate Starting with the introduction of generics in .NET 2.0, we have a generic delegate called EventHandler<TEventArgs>. Its signature is as follows: 1: public delegate void EventHandler<TEventArgs>(object sender, TEventArgs e) 2: where TEventArgs : EventArgs This is similar to EventHandler except it has been made generic to support the more general case. Thus, it will work for any delegate where the first argument is an object (the sender) and the second argument is a class derived from EventArgs (the event data). For example, let’s say we wanted to create a message receiver, and we wanted it to have a few events such as OnConnected that will tell us when a connection is established (probably with no additional information) and OnMessageReceived that will tell us when a new message arrives (probably with a string for the new message text). So for OnMessageReceived, our MessageReceivedEventArgs might look like this: 1: public sealed class MessageReceivedEventArgs : EventArgs 2: { 3: public string Message { get; set; } 4: } And since OnConnected needs no event argument type defined, our class might look something like this: 1: public class MessageReceiver 2: { 3: // event that is called when the receiver connects with sender 4: public event EventHandler OnConnected; 5: 6: // event that is called when a new message is received. 7: public event EventHandler<MessageReceivedEventArgs> OnMessageReceived; 8: 9: // ... 10: } Notice, nowhere did we have to define a delegate to fit our event definition, the EventHandler and generic EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates fit almost anything we’d need to do with events. Sidebar: Thread-safety and raising an event When the time comes to raise an event, we should always check to make sure there are subscribers, and then only raise the event if anyone is subscribed. This is important because if no one is subscribed to the event, then the instance will be null and we will get a NullReferenceException if we attempt to raise the event. 1: // This protects against NullReferenceException... or does it? 2: if (OnMessageReceived != null) 3: { 4: OnMessageReceived(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 5: } The above code seems to handle the null reference if no one is subscribed, but there’s a problem if this is being used in multi-threaded environments. For example, assume we have thread A which is about to raise the event, and it checks and clears the null check and is about to raise the event. However, before it can do that thread B unsubscribes to the event, which sets the delegate to null. Now, when thread A attempts to raise the event, this causes the NullReferenceException that we were hoping to avoid! To counter this, the simplest best-practice method is to copy the event (just a multicast delegate) to a temporary local variable just before we raise it. Since we are inside the class where this event is being raised, we can copy it to a local variable like this, and it will protect us from multi-threading since multicast delegates are immutable and assignments are atomic: 1: // always make copy of the event multi-cast delegate before checking 2: // for null to avoid race-condition between the null-check and raising it. 3: var handler = OnMessageReceived; 4: 5: if (handler != null) 6: { 7: handler(this, new MessageReceivedEventArgs(aMessage)); 8: } The very slight trade-off is that it’s possible a class may get an event after it unsubscribes in a multi-threaded environment, but this is a small risk and classes should be prepared for this possibility anyway. For a more detailed discussion on this, check out this excellent Eric Lippert blog post on Events and Races. Summary Generic delegates give us a lot of power to make generic algorithms and classes, and the EventHandler delegate family gives us the flexibility to create events easily, without needing to redefine delegates over and over. Use them whenever you need to define events with or without specialized EventArgs. Tweet Technorati Tags: .NET, C#, CSharp, Little Wonders, Generics, Delegates, EventHandler

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Listen to Online Radio with Antenna

- by Asian Angel

Are you looking for some fresh new music to listen to at home or at work? With Antenna you can listen to online radio stations from all over the world. Note: Requires Adobe AIR (download link at bottom of article). Antenna in Action Once you have completed the installation and started Antenna up this is the window that you will see. The left side will have a “browsing pane” where you can search for the stations that you would like to listen to using the various categories. Based on the stations that you choose the background map will change location to match the stations locations. Here is a closer look at the “Categories Bar”. For our first example we used the “Country Category” to find our first station to listen to. When you choose a country you will be presented with a list of the stations available for that country. To start listening to a particular station just double click on the appropriate entry line. A closer look at the “browser pane” with our first station playing. Notice the “Reliability Indicator” that will be available for each listing…some may be better than others and you can use this to choose the best streaming stations from the list. In the upper left corner you will notice three icons…each will open a small pop-up window with a specific purpose. The first icon will open up the “About Window”. If you need to contact Antenna’s creator or would like to place a request for a station to be added to the app then this is the best way to do it. The second icon will open up a Antenna specific chat window. The third icon will allow you to set a default location and make adjustments to some of the app’s settings. Recording Audio The “Recording Function” is the only area where we experienced some “quirkiness” with the app. To start recording press the “Round White Button”… Note: Based on feedback on the app creator’s webpage some people have experienced the same problem as we did during our tests with the app failing to complete the recordings. Hopefully this bug will be fixed with the next release. Once recording has started the button will turn red. Click on the button again to stop recording. Once you have stopped recording you will see the following message window appear and the main window will be shaded over with a whitish color until you click “OK”. Conclusion Regardless of the slight quirkiness in recording online music Antenna more than makes up for it with the terrific selection of online stations and streaming capability. New fresh music for you to listen to is only a click or two away… Links Download Antenna (Antenna Homepage) Download Antenna at Softpedia Download Adobe AIR Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Listen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media CenterListen to Over 100,000 Radio Stations in Windows Media CenterListen To XM Radio with Windows Media Center in Windows 7Listen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureWeekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTV TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic

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From NaN to Infinity...and Beyond!

- by Tony Davis

It is hard to believe that it was once possible to corrupt a SQL Server Database by storing perfectly normal data values into a table; but it is true. In SQL Server 2000 and before, one could inadvertently load invalid data values into certain data types via RPC calls or bulk insert methods rather than DML. In the particular case of the FLOAT data type, this meant that common 'special values' for this type, namely NaN (not-a-number) and +/- infinity, could be quite happily plugged into the database from an application and stored as 'out-of-range' values. This was like a time-bomb. When one then tried to query this data; the values were unsupported and so data pages containing them were flagged as being corrupt. Any query that needed to read a column containing the special value could fail or return unpredictable results. Microsoft even had to issue a hotfix to deal with failures in the automatic recovery process, caused by the presence of these NaN values, which rendered the whole database inaccessible! This problem is history for those of us on more current versions of SQL Server, but its ghost still haunts us. Recently, for example, a developer on Red Gate’s SQL Response team reported a strange problem when attempting to load historical monitoring data into a SQL Server 2005 database via the C# ADO.NET provider. The ratios used in some of their reporting calculations occasionally threw out NaN or infinity values, and the subsequent attempts to load these values resulted in a nasty error. It turns out to be a different manifestation of the same problem. SQL Server 2005 still does not fully support the IEEE 754 standard for floating point numbers, in that the FLOAT data type still cannot handle NaN or infinity values. Instead, they just added validation checks that prevent the 'invalid' values from being loaded in the first place. For people migrating from SQL Server 2000 databases that contained out-of-range FLOAT (or DATETIME etc.) data, to SQL Server 2005, Microsoft have added to the latter's version of the DBCC CHECKDB (or CHECKTABLE) command a DATA_PURITY clause. When enabled, this will seek out the corrupt data, but won’t fix it. You have to do this yourself in what can often be a slow, painful manual process. Our development team, after a quizzical shrug of the shoulders, simply decided to represent NaN and infinity values as NULL, and move on, accepting the minor inconvenience of not being able to tell them apart. However, what of scientific, engineering and other applications that really would like the luxury of being able to both store and access these perfectly-reasonable floating point data values? The sticking point seems to be the stipulation in the IEEE 754 standard that, when NaN is compared to any other value including itself, the answer is "unequal" (i.e. FALSE). This is clearly different from normal number comparisons and has repercussions for such things as indexing operations. Even so, this hardly applies to infinity values, which are single definite values. In fact, there is some encouraging talk in the Connect note on this issue that they might be supported 'in the SQL Server 2008 timeframe'. If didn't happen; SQL 2008 doesn't support NaN or infinity values, though one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, based on the MSDN documentation for the FLOAT type, which states that "The behavior of float and real follows the IEEE 754 specification on approximate numeric data types". However, the truth is revealed in the XPath documentation, which states that "…float (53) is not exactly IEEE 754. For example, neither NaN (Not-a-Number) nor infinity is used…". Is it really so hard to fix this problem the right way, and properly support in SQL Server the IEEE 754 standard for the floating point data type, NaNs, infinities and all? Oracle seems to have managed it quite nicely with its BINARY_FLOAT and BINARY_DOUBLE types, so it is technically possible. We have an enterprise-class database that is marketed as being part of an 'integrated' Windows platform. Absurdly, we have .NET and XPath libraries that fully support the standard for floating point numbers, and we can't even properly store these values, let alone query them, in the SQL Server database! Cheers, Tony.

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Add Spell Checking to Your Favorite Windows Apps

- by Asian Angel

Some but not all Windows apps have built-in spell checking of some sort. If you want to add spell checking to all of your apps (or a select group) then join us as we look at tinySpell. Note: There is a paid version of this software (tinySpell+) available as well for those who want extra functionality. tinySpell in Action The installation process is simple and straightforward…as soon as you have finished installing tinySpell you will see your new “System Tray Icon”. You can see tinySpell’s “Context Menu” here. Before going any further you may want to have a look through the settings to make any desired display modifications. During our tests we found it very helpful to modify the Spelling Tip options…it will make for a much nicer and easier to read display when you have a spelling error. Clicking on the Applications… Command in the Context Menu will bring up the following window. You can really finesse how active tinySpell will be here: Create a special list of apps that tinySpell will not monitor Create a custom list of apps that tinySpell will monitor If you have any particular or unique words that you would like to add to tinySpell’s Dictionary ahead of time you can do that by clicking on the Dictionary… Command in the Context Menu. Want to check the spelling of a word ahead of time or find that you are just curious about how it is spelled? Click on Open spelling window in the Context Menu to access a special spell check window. For our example we misspelled “spelling” on purpose…notice that the word has turned red. Clicking on the Check Mark Button will open a drop-down list with suggested spellings for the word that you are inquiring about. Click on the appropriate listing if you intend to copy and paste the word. Next we moved on to Notepad. As we were typing tinySpell alerted us when we typed the word “app”. You will hear a small default system sound and see a small popup as shown here if tinySpell thinks a word has been misspelled. The System Tray Icon will also change to a yellow color. You can access the list of suggested spellings by either left clicking on the small popup or the System Tray Icon. If the word is a properly spelled “abbreviation” (or special/custom) like our word here you can select Add to dictionary. Going further in our text document we once again purposely misspelled “spelling”… Left clicking on the popup gave us access to the drop-down list of suggested spellings… And clicking on the correct spelling automatically inserted it into our document in place of the misspelled word. As you can see here tinySpell was even monitoring file names when we went to save the document. Very thorough indeed. Conclusion If your favorite app does not have built-in spell checking, then tinySpell will definitely be a welcome (and very helpful) addition to your Windows system. They offer a portable version as well so you can take it with you to any PC. Links Download tinySpell *Note: The download link is located approximately half-way down the page. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Spell Check Firefox Text Input FieldsEdit the Windows Live Writer Custom DictionaryAccess Your Favorite Google Services in Chrome the Easy WayLaunch External Apps from FirefoxNinite Makes Installing Software Incredibly Simple TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 11, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 11, 2010New ProjectsBIxPress Community Edition: SSIS Toolset BIDS Addin,Audit,Notify,Deploy,Template: BI xPress is a BIDS Addin/standalone application for SQL Developer/DBA. This tool has many features including Auditing, Notification, Deployment, P...C# Shell (cash): Cash is a command-line interpreter (shell), written in C#. It is part of an project to produce tools which replace the traditional GNU/Linux user-l...Chernarus Life Revivved: Chernarus life revivved for arma 2 multiplayerDKAL: DKAL is a distributed authorization policy language. This project contains an engine for running DKAL policies. It is implemented primarly in F#.ImageResizer for Albulle: Application permettant de déployer le contenu pour une la galerie photos php Albulle. L'objectif est de faciliter et automatiser le redimensionnem...Intraweb Active Directory Authentication Demo: A simple demo created using Delphi 7 and Intraweb 9.0.42 with the Active Directory Helper interface to authenticate a user to Active Directory. ...Lokad CQRS - build scalable web sites and enterprise solutions on Windows Azure: Lokad CQRS helps to build scalable cloud applications for Windows Azure. It provides time-proven guidance and .NET Application Blocks to help arc...LRS: Write a concise, reader-focused summary. Write a concise, reader-focused summary. Write a concise, reader-focused summary. ManagementPeople99: ...MEDILIG - MEDICAL LIFE GUARD: Cross-platform EHR/EMR software for the design, implementation and use of autonomous, open database models for multilingual clinical data managemen...NETris - ASP .NET, AJAX, Web Service based Tetris Game: Tetris game with business logic provided via Web Services.Peace Through Force: Peace Through Force is a 2D side scrolling tactical shooter developed in XNA Game Studio 3.1 using C#. The game is targeted to be made available o...Powwa: Util to show battery status and cpu speed on laptop. Uses jWMI's for interfacing with Windows' WMI.Resource Management System: Resource Management system for Internal purpose using WPF,WCF and SilverlighttChat - ASP.NET, Ajax & Web Service based Chat Room: Simple chat room application. Technology: ASP .NET, Ajax, Web Services and MS SQL Server Database. Uses ASP .NET authentication mechanism.Test Project (ignore): This is used to demonstrate CodePlex at meetings. Please ignore this project.Transform Config: Transfom Config lets you use the new configuration transformation feature in Visual Studio 2010 without performing a publish on a web application p...unsocialcity: trying to make a game for facebook called <projectname> - just seemed like a fun idea http://apps.facebook.com/unsocialcityVorbisPlayer: VorbisPlayer is the audio user control for Silverlight games. It plays loop-sets seamless, it solves the short sound problem, and it can play sound...New ReleasesA Guide to Parallel Programming: Drop 5 - Guide Preface, Chapters 1 - 7, and code: This is Drop 5 with Guide Preface, Chapters 1 - 7, Appendix B, Glossary, and References, and the accompanying code samples. This drop requires Visu...CC.Hearts Screen Saver: CC.Hearts Screen Saver 1.0.10.610: The third release of CC.Hearts Screen Saver. Key features are: Further performance enhancements Keyboard commands (Press ? for help) Help Popu...Fiddler Delayed Responses Extension: v1 beta: UI improvement . drag and drop . session markers . icons . layout Algorithm review . Performance issues Thanks to Eric Lawrence for his ideas.FontViewer 2010: FontViewer 2010 (Codename Eraser): This is the installer for the development version ("Eraser") of FontViewer 2010. Because many of the features are under development, functionality...Genuilder: Genuilder 1.2: First release of Genuilder.Extensibility.ImageResizer for Albulle: ImageResizer1.0-bin: Première version. Permet de déployer des images dans un système de fichier (local).imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.5: myImdb 0.9.5KooBoo Image Gallery: Beta 4: This new version has a new example using s3slider script http://www.serie3.info/s3slider/demonstration.html thanks to mshimao Now there are two pl...LogikBug's IoC Container: LogikBug's IoC Container v1.1.1: In this release: I extended the Extensibility namespace. Fixed a few minor issues with the Extensibility namespace.LRS: jlrs: asdfaLRS: jlrs src: jlrs srcMiniTwitter: 1.14: MiniTwitter 1.14 更新内容修正リストのインポートをキャンセルしてもタイムラインの名前がリストの名前になるバグを修正 OAuth の承認を取り消した後、再ログインできないバグを修正インポートするリストを選択せずにインポートをクリックすると落ちるバグを修正追加 ...NETris - ASP .NET, AJAX, Web Service based Tetris Game: NETris - Source Code and Documentation: Fully functional prototype. Please note that documentation is written in the form of a report as the project was an assignment at Coventry University.Object/Relational Mapper & Code Generator in Net 2.0 for Relational & XML Schema: 2.10: Minor release, incremental changes to sample website and UI templates.Opalis Community Releases: Integration Pack for Standard OIS Logging: The Integration Pack for Standard OIS Logging provides extended Policy Logging functions to OIS and MSSQL. This Integration Pack adds the followin...PicassoCms: 0.6: More intuitive UI, new controlsPowerAuras: PowerAuras-3.0.0K-beta2: New Auras: Item Name Equipment Slot Tracking Changes from beta1 5 new aura textures Fixed Tracking bug Added graphical equipment slot sele...PowerPivot Sample Data: PowerPivot for Excel Tutorial Sample Data-v.2: The PowerPivot Tutorial Sample Data-Version 2 download includes a variety of data sources that you can use to complete the tutorial in the PowerPiv...Powwa: First build: Unpack & built with NetBean 6.8Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.4: Added functionality to add and remove performance counters at run time. Also added saving and loading to file so sets of performance counters can b...Resonance: TrainNode Client Library: Libraries to access the TrainNode ServiceSharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Import Utility: TaxonomyBuilder Version 1.0.2: New Features Added support for additional term labels per term Added support for Term Set Owners Added support for Term Set stakeholders Upda...Silverlight for Umbraco Media Objects (SUMO): Community Tech Preview: The CTP for SUMO is now live, feedback appreciated!Silverlight Reporting: Initial Release: This is the first release of the code. It includes the source code from Pete's blog post article on Silverlight reporting.Simple.NET: Simple.Mocking 1.0.0.7: Initial version of a new mocking framework for .NET Revision 1: Expect.AnyInocationOn<T>(T target) changed to Expect.AnyInocationOn(object target...Smart Voice: Smart Voice 0.2.2: Changelog: Fixed more bugs Added a readme into the archiveSoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): WPFClient pre alpha 2: pre alpha 2, need your feedbackSquiggle - A Free open source Lan Messenger: Squiggle 1.5: File Transfer capability added (With drag/drop support) Message text box maintains history of last 10 messages and you can retrieve them by CTRL+U...SSIS Expression Editor & Tester: Expression Editor and Tester v1.0.1.0: Minor updated release of expression editor tool and editor control. Download and extract the files to get started, no install required. Changes Si...StreamInsight Samples: GregLow HighwayMonitor Samples: Initial Upload of GregLow HighwayMonitor StreamInsight samples. These samples are used in the upcoming free eClinic for StreamInsight and have been...tChat - ASP.NET, Ajax & Web Service based Chat Room: tChat Source Code and Documentation: Functional prototype. T-SQL scripts can be found in the SQL folder. Please note that the documentation is written in a format of a report for a "du...Transform Config: Initial Release: This is the initial release of the project. It's all been thrown together quickly so it's lacking error handling etc, but it's still fully function...UrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer v2.0.2: Integrate the support of SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 SP2 for a better portability.Value Injecter: map anything to anything anyway you might imagine: ValueInjecter 1.9: Features map anything to anything flattening unflattening includes sample projects for: asp.net mvc asp.net web-forms win-formsVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30610.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Picture SlideShow Viewer (Visual C++ 2008): A picture slidershow viewer.VorbisPlayer: VorbisPlayer: The first release of the Silverlight VorbisPlayer, including source code and example files.WCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010: AnonymousOverHttps Template: Produces a WCF service application configured for anonymous calls over HTTPS/SSL. Supplies a BasicHttpBinding default configured for Transport secu...Most Popular ProjectsHaoRan_TokyoTyrantClient.NET Transactional File ManagerSOLID by exampleMemetic NPC Behavior ToolkitSharpotify - Spotify .Net LibraryWCF 4 Templates for Visual Studio 2010SFTP Component for .NET CSharp, VB.NET, and ASP.NETUltimate FTP Component for .NET C#, VB.NET and ASP.NETAnurag Pallaprolu's Code RepositoryBigfootMVCMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesRhyduino - Arduino and Managed Codepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleCassandraemonBlogEngine.NETMediaCoder.NETAndrew's XNA HelpersStyleCop

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Odd MVC 4 Beta Razor Designer Issue

- by Rick Strahl

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

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Release Management as Orchestra

- by ericajanine

I read an excellent, concise article (http://www.buildmeister.com/articles/software_release_management_best_practices) on the basics of release management practices. In the article, it states "Release Management is often likened to the conductor of an orchestra, with the individual changes to be implemented the various instruments within it." I played in music ensembles for years, so this is especially close to my heart as example. I learned most of my discipline from hours and hours of practice at the hand of a very skilled conductor and leader. I also learned that the true magic in symphonic performance is one where everyone involved is focused on one sound, one goal. In turn, that solid focus creates a sound and experience bigger than just mechanics alone accomplish. In symphony, a conductor's true purpose is to make you, a performer, better so the overall sound and end product is better. The big picture (the performance of the composition) is the end-game, and all musicians in the orchestra know without question their part makes up an important but incomplete piece of that performance. A good conductor works with each section (e.g. group) to ensure their individual pieces are solid. Let's restate: The conductor leads and is responsible for ensuring those pieces are solid. While the performers themselves are doing the work, the conductor is the final authority on when the pieces are ready or not. If not, the conductor initiates the efforts to get them ready or makes the decision to scrap their parts altogether for the sake of an overall performance. Let it sink in, because it's clear--It is not the performer's call if they play their part as agreed, it's the conductor's final call to allow it. In comparison, if a software release manager is a conductor, the only way for that manager to be effective is to drive the overarching process and execution of individual pieces of a software development lifecycle. It does not mean the release manager performs each and every piece, it means the release manager has oversight and influence because the end-game is a successful software enhancin a useable environment. It means the release manager, not the developer or development manager, has the final call if something goes into a software release. Of course, this is not a process of autocracy or dictation of absolute rule, it's cooperative effort. But the release manager must have the final authority to make a decision if something is ready to be added to the bigger piece, the overall symphony of software changes being considered for package and release. It also goes without saying a release manager, like a conductor, must have full autonomy and isolation from other software groups. A conductor is the one on the podium waving a little stick at the each section and cueing them for their parts, not yelling from the back of the room while also playing a tuba and taking direction from the horn section. I have personally seen where release managers are relegated to being considered little more than coordinators, red-tapers to "satisfy" the demands of an audit group without being bothered to actually respect all that a release manager gives a group willing to employ them fully. In this dysfunctional scenario, development managers, project managers, business users, and other stakeholders have been given nearly full clearance to demand and push their agendas forward, causing a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario where an inherent conflict will ensue. Depending on the strength, determination for peace, and willingness to overlook a built-in expectation that is wrong, the release manager here must face the crafted conflict head-on and diffuse it as quickly as possible. Then, the release manager must clearly make a case why a change cannot be released without negative impact to all parties involved. If a political agenda is solely driving a software release, there IS no symphony, there is no "software lifecycle". It's just out-of-tune noise. More importantly, there is no real conductor. Sometimes, just wanting to make a beautiful sound is not enough. If you are a release manager, are you freed up enough to move, to conduct the sections of software creation to ensure a solid release performance is possible? If not, it's time to take stock in what your role actually is and see if that is what you truly want to achieve in your position. If you are, then you can successfully build your career and that of the people in your groups to create truly beautiful software (music) together.

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Monitoring the Application alongside SQL Server

- by Tony Davis

Sometimes, on Simple-Talk, it takes a while to spot strange and unexpected patterns of user activity, or small bugs. For example, one morning we spotted that an article’s comment count had leapt to 1485, but that only four were displayed. With some rooting around in Google Analytics, and the endlessly annoying Community Server admin-interface, we were able to work out that a few days previously the article had been subject to a spam attack and that the comment count was for some reason including both accepted and unaccepted comments (which in turn uncovered a bug in the SQL). This sort of incident made us a lot keener on monitoring Simple-talk website usage more effectively. However, the metrics we wanted are troublesome, because they are far too specific for Google Analytics to measure, and the SQL Server backend doesn’t keep sufficient information to enable us to plot trends. The latter could provide, for example, the total number of comments made on, or votes cast for, articles, over all time, but not the number that occur by hour over a set time. We lacked a baseline, in other words. We couldn’t alter the database, as it is a bought-in package. We had neither the resources nor inclination to build-in dedicated application monitoring. Possibly, we could investigate a third-party tool to do the job; but then it occurred to us that we were already using a monitoring tool (SQL Monitor) to keep an eye on the database. It stored data, made graphs and sent alerts. Could we get it to monitor some aspects of the application as well? Of course, SQL Monitor’s single purpose is to check and monitor SQL Server, over time, rather than to monitor applications that use SQL Server. However, how different is the business of gathering and plotting SQL Server Wait Stats, from gathering and plotting various aspects of user activity on the site? Not a lot, it turns out. The latest version allows us to write our own custom monitoring scripts, meaning that we could now monitor any metric in the application that returns an integer. It took little time to write a simple SQL Query that collects basic metrics of the total number of subscribers, votes cast, comments made, or views of articles, over time. The SQL Monitor database polls Simple-Talk every second or so in order to get the latest totals, and can then store and plot this information, or even correlate SQL Server usage to application usage. You can see the live data by visiting monitor.red-gate.com. Click the "Analysis" tab, and select one of the "Simple-talk:" entries in the "Show" box and an appropriate data range (e.g. last 30 days). It’s nascent, and we’re still working on it, but it’s already given us more confidence that we’ll spot quickly trends, bugs, or bursts of ‘abnormal’ activity. If there is a sudden rise in comments, we get an alert, and if it’s due to a spam attack, we can moderate or ban the perpetrator very quickly. We’ve often argued that a tool should perform a single job well rather than turn into a Swiss-army knife, but ironically we’ve rather appreciated being able to make best use of what’s there anyway for a slightly different purpose. Is this a good or common practice? What do you think? Cheers, Tony.

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How to Watch NCAA March Madness Online

- by DigitalGeekery

You’ve filled out your brackets and now you are ready for one of America’s most popular sporting events. But what if you are you stuck at work or away from your TV? Or your local affiliate is showing a different game? Today we show how to catch all the March Madness online. March Madness on Demand You’ll need a broadband connection, 512 MB RAM or higher, with cookies and Javascript enabled in your browser. March Madness on Demand offers two viewing options, a Standard Player and a High Quality player. The High Quality player is not, unfortunately, high definition. Standard Player Requirements Windows XP/Vista/7 or Mac OS X IE 6+ (We also successfully tested it in Firefox, Chrome, & Opera) Adobe Flash Player 9 or higher High Quality Player Requirements 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 or Intel-based Macintosh Mac OS 10.4.8+ (Intel-based) Windows: XP SP2, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, Windows 7 Firefox 1.5+ or IE 6/7/8 Silverlight 3 browser plug-in Watching March Madness on Demand Go to the March Madness on Demand website. (Link below) Check the “Watch in High Quality” section to see if your browser is ready and compatible for the High Quality viewer. If not, you’ll see a message indicating either your browser and system are incompatible… Or that you need to install Silverlight. To install Silverlight, click on the “Get HQ” button and follow the prompts to download and install Silverlight. To launch the player, click the large red “Launch Player” button. At the top of the screen, you’ll see the current and upcoming games. Click on “Watch Now” below to begin watching. At the bottom left, is where you click to watch with the High Quality player. If to many people are watching the High Quality player, you’ll see the following message and have to go back to the Standard Player. At the lower right are volume controls, a “Full Screen” button, and a “Share” button which allows you to share the game you are watching on various social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps most importantly for those who want to steal a bit of viewing time while at work is the “Boss Button” at the top right. Clicking on the “Boss Button” will open a fake Office document so it may appear at first glance like you’re actually doing legitimate work. To return to the game, click anywhere on the screen with your mouse. You’ll be able to catch every single game of the tournament from the first round all the way through the championship with March Madness on Demand. If your computer and Internet connection can handle it, you can even watch multiple games at the same time by opening March Madness on Demand in multiple browser windows. Watch March Madness online Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Weekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTVWatch NFL Sunday Night Football On Your PCWatch TV On Your PC with FreeZ Online TVGeek Fun: Download Favorite NBC Programs for FreeDitch the RealPlayer Bloat with Real Alternative TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional How to Browse Privately in Firefox Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, September 18, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, September 18, 2012Popular ReleasesfastJSON: v2.0.5: 2.0.5 - fixed number parsing for invariant format - added a test for German locale number testing (,. problems)????????API for .Net SDK: SDK for .Net ??? Release 4: 2012?9?17??? ?????，???????????????。 ?????Release 3??????，???????，???，??? ??????????????????SDK，????????。 ??，??????? That's all.VidCoder: 1.4.0 Beta: First Beta release! Catches up to HandBrake nightlies with SVN 4937. Added PGS (Blu-ray) subtitle support. Additional framerates available: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates available: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates available for audio. Same as Source Constant Framerate available. Added Apple TV 3 preset. Added new Bob deinterlacing option. Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will keep running and continue pro...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.01: Stabilization release fixed this issues: Links not worked on FF, Chrome and Safari Modified packaging with own manifest file for install and source package. Moved the user Image on the Login to the left side. Moved h2 font-size to 24px. Note : This release Comes w/o source package about we still work an a solution. Who Needs the Visual Studio source files please go to source and download it from there. Known 16 CSS issues that related to the skin.css. All others are DNN default o...Visual Studio Icon Patcher: Version 1.5.1: This fixes a bug in the 1.5 release where it would crash when no language packs were installed for VS2010.sheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.1.0: This release of sheetengine introduces major drawing optimizations. A background canvas is created with the full drawn scenery onto which only the changed parts are redrawn. For example a moving object will cause only its bounding box to be redrawn instead of the full scene. This background canvas is copied to the main canvas in each iteration. For this reason the size of the bounding box of every object needs to be defined and also the width and height of the background canvas. The example...VFPX: Desktop Alerts 1.0.2: This update for the Desktop Alerts contains changes to behavior for setting custom sounds for alerts. I have removed ALERTWAV.TXT from the project, and also removed DA_DEFAULTSOUND from the VFPALERT.H file. The AlertManager class and Alert class both have a "default" cSound of ADDBS(JUSTPATH(_VFP.ServerName))+"alert.wav" --- so, as long as you distribute a sound file with the file name "alert.wav" along with the EXE, that file will be used. You can set your own sound file globally by setti...MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.2.15: Changelog for 2.2.15 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Added support for %originalfilepath% to get the source file full path. Used for custom commands only. 2. Added support for better parsing of Media Portal XML files to extract ShowName and Episode Name and download additional details from TVDB (like Season No, Episode No etc). 3. Added support for TVDB seriesID in metadata 4. Added support for eMail non blocking UI testCrashReporter.NET : Exception reporting library for C# and VB.NET: CrashReporter.NET 1.2: *Added html mail format which shows hierarchical exception report for better understanding.PDF Viewer Web part: PDF Viewer Web Part: PDF Viewer Web PartMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.67: Fix issue #18629 - incorrectly handling null characters in string literals and not throwing an error when outside string literals. update for Issue #18600 - forgot to make the ///#DEBUG= directive also set a known-global for the given debug namespace. removed the kill-switch for disregarding preprocessor define-comments (///#IF and the like) and created a separate CodeSettings.IgnorePreprocessorDefines property for those who really need to turn that off. Some people had been setting -kil...MPC-BE: Media Player Classic BE 1.0.1.0 build 1122: MPC-BE is a free and open source audio and video player for Windows. MPC-BE is based on the original "Media Player Classic" project (Gabest) and "Media Player Classic Home Cinema" project (Casimir666), contains additional features and bug fixes. Supported Operating Systems: Windows XP SP2, Vista, 7 32bit/64bit System Requirements: An SSE capable CPU The latest DirectX 9.0c runtime (June 2010). Install it regardless of the operating system, they all need it. Web installer: http://www.micro...Preactor Object Model: Visual Studio Template .NET 3.5: Visual Studio Template with all the necessary files to get started with POM. You will still need to Get the Preactor.ObjectModel and Preactor.ObjectModleExtensions libraries from Nuget though. You will also need to sign with assembly with a strong name key.Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2: Lakana V2 contains : - Lakana WPF Forms (with sample project) - Lakana WPF Navigation (with sample project)myCollections: Version 2.3.0.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for games and nds Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash Screen BugFixingMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: OData QueryFeed workflow activity: The OData QueryFeed sample activity shows how to create a workflow activity that consumes an OData resource, and renders entity properties in a Microsoft Excel 2010 worksheet or Microsoft Word 2010 document. Using the sample QueryFeed activity, you can consume any OData resource. The sample activity uses LINQ to project OData metadata into activity designer expression items. By setting activity expressions, a fully qualified OData query string is constructed consisting of Resource, Filter, Or...F# 3.0 Sample Pack: FSharp 3.0 Sample Pack for Visual Studio 2012 RTM: F# 3.0 Sample Pack for Visual Studio 2012 RTMANPR MX: ANPR_MX Release 1: ANPR MX Release 1 Features: Correctly detects plate area for the average North American plate. (It won't work for the "European" plate size.) Provides potential values for the recognized plate. Allows images 800x600 and below (.jpg / .png). The example requires the VC 10 runtime & .NET 4 Framework to be already installed. The Source code project was made on Visual Studio 2010.Cocktail: Cocktail v1.0.1: PrerequisitesVisual Studio 2010 with SP1 (any edition but Express) Optional: Silverlight 4 or 5 Note: Install Silverlight 4 Tools and then the Silverlight 4 Toolkit. Likewise for Silverlight 5 Tools and the Silverlight 5 Toolkit DevForce Express 6.1.8.1 Included in the Cocktail download, DevForce Express requires registration) Important: Install DevForce after all other components. Download contentsDebug and release assemblies API documentation Source code License.txt Re...weber: weber v0.1: first release, creates a basic browser shell and allows user to navigate to web sites.New Projects.NET Code Editor & Compiler Component: .Net compiler component with integrated advanced text box, VisualStudio like highlightning, ability to intercept and show StandardOutput strings.NET Plugin Manager: Provides agnostic functionality for tiered plugin loading, unloading, and plugin collection management.Amazon Control Panel v2: Amazon Control Panel is a application that lets you control you Amazon Seller Central account using the Amazon MWS (Merchant Web Service) API.AutoSPSourceBuilder: AutoSPSourceBuilder: a utility for automatically building a SharePoint 2010 or 2013 install source including service packs, language packs & cumulative updates.CAOS: RBAC acess controllChat Forum: An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site conversations in the form of posted messages.CRM 2011 - Many-To-Many Relationship Entity View: This Silverlight Web Resource for CRM 2011 will allow user to see N:N relationship entity data from single place.dardasim: dardasim gil and lior Tel Cabir DolphinsDBAManage: ???????ERP??，????！DimDate Generator: A SSIS project for generation a data dimansion table and data.DNL: eine grße .net bibliothek für entwicklerDouban FM for Metro: A music radio client for http://douban.fm running on Windows 8 / WinRTExtended WPF Control: Extended WPF Control for research and learning.FizzBuzzDaveC: Implements the classic FizzBuzz programmine exercise.HamStart: Nothing for now...Infopath XSN Modifier: A tool for editing the dataconnections of Infopath.KH Picture Resizer: Picture Resizer ermöglicht es Bilder per Drag and Dop zu verkleinern. Das Program wurde in C# geschrieben und nutzt Windows Forms.Korean String Extension for .NET: ?? ??? ??? ????? ???? string??? ??? ????? Extension library for "string" class that enhances "Hangul Jamo system" features Lucky Loot - Tattoo Shop Management Application: Lucky Loot - Tattoo Shop Management Application Por: Eric Gabriel Rodrigues Castoldi Objetivo: Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso de Sistemas de InformaçãoMagnOS - C# Cosmos Operating System: MagnOS is an Open Source operating system, made to learn how to make operating systems with Cosmos.Móa mày: Project m?iOData Samples: A collection of samples demonstrating solutions and functionality in WCF Data Services, ODataLib and EdmLib.Online Image Editor: Online Photo CanvasOptimuss Administración: La mejor aplicación de Gestión y Control EscolarOptimuss Obelix: La mejor aplicación de Gestión y Control EscolarPersonal Website: My personal websitePlanisoft: Proyecto de Planilla para clinica los fresnosPROYECTODT: ..................................................................................................................PtLibrary: PtLibrary stands for Peter Thönell's Delphi library. PtSettings and PtSettingsGUI make the management and use of settings extremely easy and powerful.RTS WebServer: A small lightweight, modern and fast webserver (template). with in the feature the newest technologies like SPDY and websocketsStandards: Standards is an Intranet application (using Windows authentication) designed to document and manage company standards. It is written in C#/MVC 4.Truttle OS: This is an OS I made with CosmosWfp System: zdgdsfgdsfgzpo: projekt na zaliczenie zpo???: ???

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How Exactly Is One Linux OS “Based On” Another Linux OS?

- by Jason Fitzpatrick

When reviewing different flavors of Linux, you’ll frequently come across phrases like “Ubuntu is based on Debian” but what exactly does that mean? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader PLPiper is trying to get a handle on how Linux variants work: I’ve been looking through quite a number of Linux distros recently to get an idea of what’s around, and one phrase that keeps coming up is that “[this OS] is based on [another OS]“. For example: Fedora is based on Red Hat Ubuntu is based on Debian Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu For someone coming from a Mac environment I understand how “OS X is based on Darwin”, however when I look at Linux Distros, I find myself asking “Aren’t they all based on Linux..?” In this context, what exactly does it mean for one Linux OS to be based on another Linux OS? So, what exactly does it mean when we talk about one version of Linux being based off another version? The Answer SuperUser contributor kostix offers a solid overview of the whole system: Linux is a kernel — a (complex) piece of software which works with the hardware and exports a certain Application Programming Interface (API), and binary conventions on how to precisely use it (Application Binary Interface, ABI) available to the “user-space” applications. Debian, RedHat and others are operating systems — complete software environments which consist of the kernel and a set of user-space programs which make the computer useful as they perform sensible tasks (sending/receiving mail, allowing you to browse the Internet, driving a robot etc). Now each such OS, while providing mostly the same software (there are not so many free mail server programs or Internet browsers or desktop environments, for example) differ in approaches to do this and also in their stated goals and release cycles. Quite typically these OSes are called “distributions”. This is, IMO, a somewhat wrong term stemming from the fact you’re technically able to build all the required software by hand and install it on a target machine, so these OSes distribute the packaged software so you either don’t need to build it (Debian, RedHat) or they facilitate such building (Gentoo). They also usually provide an installer which helps to install the OS onto a target machine. Making and supporting an OS is a very complicated task requiring a complex and intricate infrastructure (upload queues, build servers, a bug tracker, and archive servers, mailing list software etc etc etc) and staff. This obviously raises a high barrier for creating a new, from-scratch OS. For instance, Debian provides ca. 37k packages for some five hardware architectures — go figure how much work is put into supporting this stuff. Still, if someone thinks they need to create a new OS for whatever reason, it may be a good idea to use an existing foundation to build on. And this is exactly where OSes based on other OSes come into existence. For instance, Ubuntu builds upon Debian by just importing most packages from it and repackaging only a small subset of them, plus packaging their own, providing their own artwork, default settings, documentation etc. Note that there are variations to this “based on” thing. For instance, Debian fosters the creation of “pure blends” of itself: distributions which use Debian rather directly, and just add a bunch of packages and other stuff only useful for rather small groups of users such as those working in education or medicine or music industry etc. Another twist is that not all these OSes are based on Linux. For instance, Debian also provide FreeBSD and Hurd kernels. They have quite tiny user groups but anyway. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

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BizTalk 2009 - BizTalk Benchmark Wizard: Running a Test

- by StuartBrierley

The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard is a ultility that can be used to gain some validation of a BizTalk installation, giving a level of guidance on whether it is performing as might be expected. It should be used after BizTalk Server has been installed and before any solutions are deployed to the environment. This will ensure that you are getting consistent and clean results from the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard applies load to the BizTalk Server environment under a choice of specific scenarios. During these scenarios performance counter information is collected and assessed against statistics that are appropriate to the BizTalk Server environment. For details on installing the Benchmark Wizard see my previous post. The BizTalk Benchmarking Wizard provides two simple test scenarios, one for messaging and one for Orchestrations, which can be used to test your BizTalk implementation. Messaging Loadgen generates a new XML message and sends it over NetTCP A WCF-NetTCP Receive Location receives a the xml document from Loadgen. The PassThruReceive pipeline performs no processing and the message is published by the EPM to the MessageBox. The WCF One-Way Send Port, which is the only subscriber to the message, retrieves the message from the MessageBox The PassThruTransmit pipeline provides no additional processing The message is delivered to the back end WCF service by the WCF NetTCP adapter Orchestrations Loadgen generates a new XML message and sends it over NetTCP A WCF-NetTCP Receive Location receives a the xml document from Loadgen. The XMLReceive pipeline performs no processing and the message is published by the EPM to the MessageBox. The message is delivered to a simple Orchestration which consists of a receive location and a send port The WCF One-Way Send Port, which is the only subscriber to the Orchestration message, retrieves the message from the MessageBox The PassThruTransmit pipeline provides no additional processing The message is delivered to the back end WCF service by the WCF NetTCP adapter Below is a quick outline of how to run the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard on a single server, although it should be noted that this is not ideal as this server is then both generating and processing the load. In order to separate this load out you should run the "Indigo" service on a seperate server. To start the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard click Start > All Programs > BizTalk Benchmark Wizard > BizTalk Benchmark Wizard. On this screen click next, you will then get the following pop up window. Check the server and database names and check the "check prerequsites" check-box before pressing ok. The wizard will then check that the appropriate test scenarios are installed. You should then choose the test scenario that wish to run (messaging or orchestration) and the architecture that most closely matches your environment. You will then be asked to confirm the host server for each of the host instances. Next you will be presented with the prepare screen. You will need to start the indigo service before pressing the Test Indigo Service Button. If you are running the indigo service on a separate server you can enter the server name here. To start the indigo service click Start > All Programs > BizTalk Benchmark Wizard > Start Indigo Service. While the test is running you will be presented with two speed dial type displays - one for the received messages per second and one for the processed messages per second. The green dial shows the current rate and the red dial shows the overall average rate. Optionally you can view the CPU usage of the various servers involved in processing the tests. For my development environment I expected low results and this is what I got. Although looking at the online high scores table and comparing to the quad core system listed, the results are perhaps not really that bad. At some time I may look at what improvements I can make to this score, but if you are interested in that now take a look at Benchmark your BizTalk Server (Part 3).

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wcf http 504: Working on a mystery

- by James Fleming

Ok, So you're here because you've been trying to solve the mystery of why you're getting a 504 error. If you've made it to this lonely corner of the Internet, then the advice you're getting from other bloggers isn't the answer you are after. It wasn't the answer I needed either, so once I did solve my problem, I thought I'd share the answer with you. For starters, if by some miracle, you landed here first you may not already know that the 504 error is NOT coming from IIS or Casini, that response code is coming from Fiddler. HTTP/1.1 504 Fiddler - Receive Failure Content-Type: text/html Connection: close Timestamp: 09:43:05.193 ReadResponse() failed: The server did not return a response for this request. The take away here is Fiddler won't help you with the diagnosis and any further digging in that direction is a red herring. Assuming you've dug around a bit, you may have arrived at posts which suggest you may be getting the error because you're trying to hump too much data over the wire, and have an urgent need to employ an anti-pattern: due to a special case: http://delphimike.blogspot.com/2010/01/error-504-in-wcfnet-35.html Or perhaps you're experiencing wonky behavior using WCF-CustomIsolated Adapter on Windows Server 2008 64bit environment, in which case the rather fly MVP Dwight Goins' advice is what you need. http://dgoins.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/64bit-wcf-custom-isolated-%E2%80%93-rest-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9C504%E2%80%9D-response/ For me, none of that was helpful. I could perform a get on a single record http://localhost:8783/Criterion/Skip(0)/Take(1) but I couldn't get more than one record in my collection as in: http://localhost:8783/Criterion/Skip(0)/Take(2) I didn't have a big payload, or a large number of objects (as you can see by the size of one record below) - - A-1B f5abd850-ec52-401a-8bac-bcea22c74138 .biological/legal mother This item refers to the supervisor’s evaluation of the caseworker’s ability to involve the biological/legal mother in the permanency planning process. 75d8ecb7-91df-475f-aa17-26367aeb8b21 false true Admin account 2010-01-06T17:58:24.88 1.20 764a2333-f445-4793-b54d-1c3084116daa So while I was able to retrieve one record without a hitch (thus the record above) I wasn't able to return multiple records. I confirmed I could get each record individually, (Skip(1)/Take(1))so it stood to reason the problem wasn't with the data at all, so I suspected a serialization error. The first step to resolving this was to enable WCF Tracing. Instructions on how to set it up are here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733025.aspx. The tracing log led me to the solution. The use of type 'Application.Survey.Model.Criterion' as a get-only collection is not supported with NetDataContractSerializer. Consider marking the type with the CollectionDataContractAttribute attribute or the SerializableAttribute attribute or adding a setter to the property. So I was wrong (but close!). The problem was a deserializing issue in trying to recreate my read only collection. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347850.aspx#Y1455 So looking at my underlying model, I saw I did have a read only collection. Adding a setter was all it took. public virtual ICollection<string> GoverningResponses { get { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(GoverningResponse)) { return GoverningResponse.Split(';'); } else return null; } } Hope this helps. If it does, post a comment.

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LibGDX Box2D Body and Sprite AND DebugRenderer out of sync

- by Free Lancer

I am having a couple issues with Box2D bodies. I have a GameObject holding a Sprite and Body. I use a ShapeRenderer to draw an outline of the Body's and Sprite's bounding boxes. I also added a Box2DDebugRenderer to make sure everything's lining up properly. My problem is the Sprite and Body at first overlap perfectly, but as I turn the Body moves a bit off the sprite then comes back when the Car is facing either North or South. Here's an image of what I mean: (Not sure what that line is, first time to show up) BLUE is the Body, RED is the Sprite, PURPLE is the Box2DDebugRenderer. Also, you probably noticed a purple square in the top right corner. Well that's the Car drawn by the Box2D Debug Renderer. I thought it might be the camera but I've been playing with the Cameras for hours and nothing seems to work. All give me weird results. Here's my code: Screen: public void show() { // --------------------- SETUP ALL THE CAMERA STUFF ------------------------------ // battleStage = new Stage( 720, 480, false ); // Setup the camera. In Box2D we operate on a meter scale, pixels won't do it. So we use // an Orthographic camera with a Viewport of 24 meters in width and 16 meters in height. battleStage.setCamera( new OrthographicCamera( CAM_METER_WIDTH, CAM_METER_HEIGHT ) ); battleStage.getCamera().position.set( CAM_METER_WIDTH / 2, CAM_METER_HEIGHT / 2, 0 ); // The Box2D Debug Renderer will handle rendering all physics objects for debugging debugger = new Box2DDebugRenderer( true, true, true, true ); //debugCam = new OrthographicCamera( CAM_METER_WIDTH, CAM_METER_HEIGHT ); } public void render(float delta) { // Update the Physics World, use 1/45 for something around 45 Frames/Second for mobile devices physicsWorld.step( 1/45.0f, 8, 3 ); // 1/45 for devices // Set the Camera matrices and clear the screen Gdx.gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); battleStage.getCamera().update(); // Draw game objects here battleStage.act(delta); battleStage.draw(); // Again update the Camera matrices and call the debug renderer debugCam.update(); debugger.render( physicsWorld, debugCam.combined); // Vehicle handles its own interaction with the HUD // update all Actors movements in the game Stage hudStage.act( delta ); // Draw each Actor onto the Scene at their new positions hudStage.draw(); } Car: (extends Actor) public Car( Texture texture, float posX, float posY, World world ) { super( "Car" ); mSprite = new Sprite( texture ); mSprite.setSize( WIDTH * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO, HEIGHT * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO ); mSprite.setOrigin( mSprite.getWidth()/2, mSprite.getHeight()/2); // set the origin to be at the center of the body mSprite.setPosition( posX * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO, posY * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO ); // place the car in the center of the game map FixtureDef carFixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); mBody = Physics.createBoxBody( BodyType.DynamicBody, carFixtureDef, mSprite ); } public void draw() { mSprite.setPosition( mBody.getPosition().x * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO, mBody.getPosition().y * Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO ); mSprite.setRotation( MathUtils.radiansToDegrees * mBody.getAngle() ); // draw the sprite mSprite.draw( batch ); } Physics: (Create the Body) public static Body createBoxBody( final BodyType pBodyType, final FixtureDef pFixtureDef, Sprite pSprite ) { float pRotation = 0; float pWidth = pSprite.getWidth(); float pHeight = pSprite.getHeight(); final BodyDef boxBodyDef = new BodyDef(); boxBodyDef.type = pBodyType; boxBodyDef.position.x = pSprite.getX() / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; boxBodyDef.position.y = pSprite.getY() / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; // Temporary Box shape of the Body final PolygonShape boxPoly = new PolygonShape(); final float halfWidth = pWidth * 0.5f / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; final float halfHeight = pHeight * 0.5f / Consts.PIXEL_METER_RATIO; boxPoly.setAsBox( halfWidth, halfHeight ); // set the anchor point to be the center of the sprite pFixtureDef.shape = boxPoly; final Body boxBody = BattleScreen.getPhysicsWorld().createBody(boxBodyDef); boxBody.createFixture(pFixtureDef); } Sorry for all the code and long description but it's hard to pin down what exactly might be causing the problem.

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Mandatory look back at 2010

- by Bertrand Le Roy

Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry. First, the mildly depressing: the most popular post on this blog this year with 47,000 hits was a post from last year about a fix to a bug in ASP.NET. A content-less post except for that link to the KB article that people should have found by going directly to the support site in the first place. Then, the really depressing: the second most popular post this year with 34,000 hits was a post from 2005 about how to display message boxes on a web page. I mean come on. This was kind of fun five years ago and it did solve one of the most common n00b mistakes VB programmers trying to move to the web were making. But come on, we've traveled about 4.7 billion miles around the Earth since then. Do people still do that kind of stuff? I should probably put a big red banner on top of this post. Oh [supernatural entity of your choice]. Hand me that gun, please. Third most popular post with 24,000 hits is from 2004. It's about how to set a session variable before redirecting. That problem has been fixed a long time ago. Oh well. Fourth most popular post. 21,000 hits. 2007. How to work around a stupid bug in ASP.NET Ajax 1.0. Fixed in ASP.NET 3.5? ASP.NET Ajax 1.0? Need I say more? The fifth one (20,000 hits) is an old post as well but I'm kind of fond of it: it's about that photo album handler I've been organically growing for a few years. It reminds me that I need to refresh it and make a new release. Good SEO title too. Back to insanity with the sixth one (16,000) that's about working around a bug in IE6. IE6. Please just refuse to pander to that browser any more. It's about time. Let's move on, please. Actually, the first post from 2010 is 15th in the list. We have a trio of these actually with server-side image resizing and FluentPath. So what happened? Well, I like the ad money, but not to the point that I'm going to write my stuff to inflate it. Actually I think if I tried I would fail miserably (I mean, I would fail worse). What really happened this year was new stuff: Orchard, FluentPath and the stuff with the Netduino. That stuff needs time to get off the ground but my hope is that it's going to be useful in the long run and that five years from now I'll be lamenting on how well those posts are still doing. So, no regret. 2010 was a good year. Oh, and I was on This Developer's Life this year! Yay! Anyways, thank you all for reading me. Please continue doing that. And happy 2011!

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How to mix textures in DirectX?

- by tobsen

I am new to DirectX development and I am wondering if I am taking the wrong route to achieve the following: I would like to mix three textures which contain transparent areas and some solid areas (Red, Blue, Green). The three textures should blend like shown in this example: How can I achieve that in DirectX (preferably in directx9)? A link or example code would be nice. Update: My rendering method looks like this and I still think I am doing it wrong, because the sprite only shows the last texture (nothing is rendered transparent or blended): void D3DTester::render() { d3ddevice->Clear(0, NULL, D3DCLEAR_TARGET, D3DCOLOR_XRGB(0,0,0), 1.0f, 0); d3ddevice->BeginScene(); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ALPHABLENDENABLE, TRUE); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_SRCBLEND, D3DBLEND_ONE); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_DESTBLEND, D3DBLEND_ONE); LPD3DXSPRITE sprite=NULL; HRESULT hres = D3DXCreateSprite(d3ddevice, &sprite); if(hres != S_OK) { throw std::exception(); } sprite->Begin(D3DXSPRITE_ALPHABLEND); std::vector<LPDIRECT3DTEXTURE9>::iterator it; for ( it=textures.begin() ; it < textures.end(); it++ ) { sprite->Draw(*it, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0xFFFFFFFF); } sprite->End(); d3ddevice->EndScene(); d3ddevice->Present(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL); } The resulting image looks like this: But I need it to look like this instead: Update2: I figured out that I have to SetRenderState after I use sprite->Begin(D3DXSPRITE_ALPHABLEND); thanks to the hint by Josh Petrie. However, by using this: sprite->Begin(D3DXSPRITE_ALPHABLEND); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ALPHABLENDENABLE, TRUE); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_SRCBLEND, D3DBLEND_ONE); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_DESTBLEND, D3DBLEND_ONE); std::vector<LPDIRECT3DTEXTURE9>::iterator it; for ( it=textures.begin() ; it < textures.end(); it++ ) { sprite->Draw(*it, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0xFFFFFFFF); } sprite->End(); The sprites colors are becoming transparent towards the background scene e.g.: if I use d3ddevice->Clear(0, NULL, D3DCLEAR_TARGET, D3DCOLOR_XRGB(0,100,21), 1.0f, 0); the result looks like: Is there any way to avoid that? I would like the sprites be transparent to each other but to be still solid to the background. Update3: After having sombody explained to me, how to do what @LaurentCouvidou and @JoshPetrie suggested, I have a working solution and therfore accept the answer: d3ddevice->BeginScene(); D3DCOLOR white = D3DCOLOR_RGBA((UINT)255, (UINT)255, (UINT)255, 255); D3DCOLOR black = D3DCOLOR_RGBA((UINT)0, (UINT)0, (UINT)0, 255); sprite->Begin(D3DXSPRITE_ALPHABLEND); sprite->Draw(pTextureRed, NULL, NULL, NULL, black); sprite->Draw(pTextureGreen, NULL, NULL, NULL, black); sprite->Draw(pTextureBlue, NULL, NULL, NULL, black); sprite->End(); sprite->Begin(D3DXSPRITE_ALPHABLEND); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ALPHATESTENABLE, TRUE); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_BLENDOP, D3DBLENDOP_ADD); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_SRCBLEND, D3DBLEND_ONE); d3ddevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_DESTBLEND, D3DBLEND_ONE); sprite->Draw(pTextureRed, NULL, NULL, NULL, white); sprite->Draw(pTextureGreen, NULL, NULL, NULL, white); sprite->Draw(pTextureBlue, NULL, NULL, NULL, white); sprite->End(); d3ddevice->EndScene(); d3ddevice->Present(NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL);

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Technical workshop with the gurus: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)

- by Javier Puerta

Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ -- OCTOBER 2013 Invitation: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Stay Connected Sign up for Specific Updates Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Dear partner, We are pleased to invite you to a 2-day workshop dedicated to EMEA partners on "Architecting Oracle Private Database Cloud & Delivering Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)". This exclusive workshop will be delivered by Product Management and Product Development from Oracle HQ and focuses on the main theme CIOs are tackling with in the last decade: Consolidation to Private Cloud. For many customers the journey to consolidation has led to DBaaS Cloud deployments to significantly reduce costs and offer agile IT services. With the recent launch of Oracle Database 12c, the game really has changed in terms of what Oracle offers and how database clouds can be deployed. REGISTER NOW Who should attend: Enterprise Architects Infrastructure Architects DB Architects from System Integrators and large Independent Software Vendors. Take this opportunity to learn from the gurus, how you can help your customers maximize on their cloud consolidation strategies. The workshops main focus is service delivery, which includes standardization and consolidation, and how you would help your customers transform their current IT infrastructure to a service delivery model. It will discuss best practices and reviews customer examples that have successfully implemented a database cloud. The agenda is split into two days sessions: Day 1: Overview & Planning Database Cloud - Demos Customer Case Studies Database 12c Day 2: Database Cloud - Design Database Cloud - Implementation EM Cloud Control DBaaS on Engineered Systems Question and Answers Attendance is free of charge for qualified Oracle partners - Register now for one of the below sessions: Date Country Location 5 & 6 November 2013 United Kingdom Manchester 7 & 8 November 2013 Germany Munich 11 & 12 November 2013 Netherlands Amsterdam 14 & 15 November 2013 Turkey Istanbul 18 & 19 November 2013 Austria Vienna Looking forward to seeing you! Javier Puerta Director, Core Technology Partner Programs EMEA Prashant Barot Director, Core Technology Resources OPN Portal OPN Enablement News Blog Oracle Partner Store Use Oracle Trademark in Google AdWords OPN Events Calendar OPN Information Center OPN Solutions Catalog Promote Your Events on Oracle Calendar Copyright © 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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Technical workshop with the gurus: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)

- by Javier Puerta

Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together inside the Click Here The order you must follow to make the colored link appear in browsers. If not the default window link will appear 1. Select the word you want to use for the link 2. Select the desired color, Red, Black, etc 3. Select bold if necessary ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Templates use two sizes of fonts and the sans-serif font tag for the email. All Fonts should be (Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif) tags Normal size reading body fonts should be set to the size of 2. Small font sizes should be set to 1 !!!!!!!DO NOT USE ANY OTHER SIZE FONT FOR THE EMAILS!!!!!!!! ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ -- OCTOBER 2013 Invitation: Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Stay Connected Sign up for Specific Updates Architecting Oracle Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS) Dear partner, We are pleased to invite you to a 2-day workshop dedicated to EMEA partners on "Architecting Oracle Private Database Cloud & Delivering Database-As-A-Service (DBaaS)". This exclusive workshop will be delivered by Product Management and Product Development from Oracle HQ and focuses on the main theme CIOs are tackling with in the last decade: Consolidation to Private Cloud. For many customers the journey to consolidation has led to DBaaS Cloud deployments to significantly reduce costs and offer agile IT services. With the recent launch of Oracle Database 12c, the game really has changed in terms of what Oracle offers and how database clouds can be deployed. REGISTER NOW Who should attend: Enterprise Architects Infrastructure Architects DB Architects from System Integrators and large Independent Software Vendors. Take this opportunity to learn from the gurus, how you can help your customers maximize on their cloud consolidation strategies. The workshops main focus is service delivery, which includes standardization and consolidation, and how you would help your customers transform their current IT infrastructure to a service delivery model. It will discuss best practices and reviews customer examples that have successfully implemented a database cloud. The agenda is split into two days sessions: Day 1: Overview & Planning Database Cloud - Demos Customer Case Studies Database 12c Day 2: Database Cloud - Design Database Cloud - Implementation EM Cloud Control DBaaS on Engineered Systems Question and Answers Attendance is free of charge for qualified Oracle partners - Register now for one of the below sessions: Date Country Location 5 & 6 November 2013 United Kingdom Manchester 7 & 8 November 2013 Germany Munich 11 & 12 November 2013 Netherlands Amsterdam 14 & 15 November 2013 Turkey Istanbul 18 & 19 November 2013 Austria Vienna Looking forward to seeing you! Javier Puerta Director, Core Technology Partner Programs EMEA Prashant Barot Director, Core Technology Resources OPN Portal OPN Enablement News Blog Oracle Partner Store Use Oracle Trademark in Google AdWords OPN Events Calendar OPN Information Center OPN Solutions Catalog Promote Your Events on Oracle Calendar Copyright © 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

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XNA Health Bar continually decreasing

- by Craig

As per the Health bar tutorial on ... http://www.xnadevelopment.com/tutorials/notsohealthy/NotSoHealthy.shtml I have set up the above, how do I make it decrease by 1 health per second? I want to create a mini survival game, and this is an important factor. Where am i going wrong? I want it to visibly decrease every second. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; namespace Health { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Texture2D healthBar; int currentHealth = 100; float seconds; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); healthBar = Content.Load<Texture2D>("HealthBar"); // TODO: use this.Content to load your game content here } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // TODO: Add your update logic here currentHealth = (int)MathHelper.Clamp(currentHealth, 0, 100); seconds += (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; if (seconds >= 1) { currentHealth -= 1; } seconds = 0; base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.Draw(healthBar, new Rectangle(this.Window.ClientBounds.Width / 2 - healthBar.Width / 2, 30, healthBar.Width, 44), new Rectangle(0, 45, healthBar.Width, 44), Color.Gray); spriteBatch.Draw(healthBar, new Rectangle(this.Window.ClientBounds.Width / 2 - healthBar.Width / 2, 30, (int)(healthBar.Width * ((double)currentHealth / 100)), 44), new Rectangle(0, 45, healthBar.Width, 44), Color.Red); spriteBatch.Draw(healthBar, new Rectangle(this.Window.ClientBounds.Width / 2 - healthBar.Width / 2, 30, healthBar.Width, 44), new Rectangle(0, 0, healthBar.Width, 44), Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } } } Cheers!

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Increasing touch surface (#wp7dev)

- by Laurent Bugnion

When you design for Windows Phone 7 (or for any touch device, for that matter, and most especially small screens), you need to be very careful to give enough surface to your users’ fingers. It is easy to miss a touch on such small screens, and that can be horrifyingly frustrating. This is especially true when people are on the move, and trying to hit the control while walking and holding their device in one hand, or when the device is mounted in a car and vibrating with the engine. In my experience, a touch surface should be ideally minimum 60x60 pixels to be easy to activate on the Windows Phone 7 screen (which is, as we know, 800 pixels x 480 pixels). Ideally, I try to make my touch surfaces 80x80 pixels minimum. This causes a few design challenges of course. Using transparent backgrounds However, one thing is helping us tremendously: some surfaces can be made transparent, and yet react to touch. The secret is the following: If you have a panel that has a Null background (i.e. the Background is not set at all), then the empty surface does not react to touch. If however the Background is set to the Transparent color (or any color where the Alpha channel is set to 0), then it will react to touch. Setting a transparent background is easy. For example: <Grid Background="#00000000"> </Grid> or <Grid Background="Transparent"> </Grid> In C#: var grid = new Grid { Background = new SolidColorBrush( Colors.Transparent) }; Using negative margins Having a transparent background reactive to touch is a good start, but in addition, you must make sure that the surface is big enough for my clumsy fingers. One way to achieve that is to increase the transparent, touch-reactive surface, and reposition the element using negative margins. For example, consider the following UI. I changed the transparent background of the HyperlinkButton to Red, in order to visualize the touch surface. In this figure, the Settings HyperlinkButton is 105 pixels x 31 pixels. This is wide enough, but really small in height and easy to miss. To improve this, we can use negative margins, for instance: <HyperlinkButton Content="Settings" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Height="60" Margin="0,0,0,-15" /> Notice the usage of negative bottom margin to bring the HyperlinkButton back at the bottom of the main Grid’s first row, where it belongs. And the result is: Notice how the touch surface is much bigger than before. This makes the HyperlinkButton easier to reach, and improves the user experience. With the background set back to normal, the UI looks exactly the same, as it should: In summary: Remember to maximize the touch surface for your controls. Plan your design in consequence by reserving enough room around each control to allow their hit surface to be expanded as shown in this article. Do not cram too many controls in one page. If REALLY needed, use an additional page (or even better: use a Pivot control with multiple pivot items) for the controls that don’t fit on the first one. This should ensure a smoother user experience and improved touch behavior. Happy coding! Laurent Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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