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• Would Ruby on Rails be appropriate for this Foreign Language project?

  - by Lynne Overesch-Maister

  I'm a Spanish professor & computer groupie. About 15 years ago, I authored in HyperCard a series of verb conjugation programs that are now completely out of date with respect to System OS X. I would like to redo these programs myself because I had a lot of fun doing them last time (mostly I coded while my son played in Leaps and Bounds, you know, one of those places where parents take their kids & let them run wild through the tubes...). Colleagues have mentioned using Flash, Director, and various other solutions, but I saw a presentation on RoR at our SIDLIT conference today, and was inspired. I will be parsing and comparing strings (and there are other features on top of that, but that is the main one), "adding" strings relationally indexed in some kind of database(s). It will also have to handle various foreign characters (accents, upside down question marks, etc.). On top of the main process of the program, it will have to provide a practice vs. test mode, keep track of specific answers as well as totals right/wrong, and print a report. Would this be either easier and/or more efficiently done in RoR than in other languages. I am pretty sure that it will work on a Microsoft server, right? Because I think that is where most of our stuff is. I would be programming either on a Mac or a PC, whichever you think is easier. So, in summary, is RoR the way for me to go with this project? If I have some (little) experience programming in Hypercard and C, should I be able to pick RoR up fairly quickly? What things will I need to start (I already saw something called Redhills foreign key migration plugin, which I assume would be beneficial)? I still have my old scripts from hypercard, however what I would really like to do is to combine all six of my former tense-specific programs into one larger program. I figure that it wouldn't be too hard to reference the individual tenses in some way--could that be a class? Many thanks for any help you can give me on this forum.

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• What could cause this difference in behaviour from iphone OS3.0 to iOS4.0?

  - by frankodwyer

  I am getting a strange EXC_BAD_ACCESS error when running my app on iOS4. The app has been pretty solid on OS3.x for some time - not even seeing crash logs in this area of the code (or many at all) in the wild. I've tracked the error down to this code: main class: - (void) sendPost:(PostRequest*)request { NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; NSURLResponse* response; NSError* error; NSData *serverReply = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request.request returningResponse:&response error:&error]; ServerResponse* serverResponse=[[ServerResponse alloc] initWithResponse:response error:error data:serverReply]; [request.objectToNotifyWhenDone performSelectorOnMainThread:request.targetToNotifyWhenDone withObject:serverResponse waitUntilDone:YES]; [pool drain]; } (Note: sendPost is run on a separate thread for each invocation of it. PostRequest is just a class to encapsulate a request and a selector to notify when complete) ServerResponse.m: @synthesize response; @synthesize replyString; @synthesize error; @synthesize plist; - (ServerResponse*) initWithResponse:(NSURLResponse*)resp error:(NSError*)err data:(NSData*)serverReply { self.response=resp; self.error=err; self.plist=nil; self.replyString=nil; if (serverReply) { self.replyString = [[[NSString alloc] initWithBytes:[serverReply bytes] length:[serverReply length] encoding: NSASCIIStringEncoding] autorelease]; NSPropertyListFormat format; NSString *errorStr; plist = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:serverReply mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable format:&format errorDescription:&errorStr]; } return self; } ServerResponse.h: @property (nonatomic, retain) NSURLResponse* response; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSString* replyString; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSError* error; @property (nonatomic, retain) NSDictionary* plist; - (ServerResponse*) initWithResponse:(NSURLResponse*)response error:(NSError*)error data:(NSData*)serverReply; This reliably crashes with a bad access in the line: self.error=err; ...i.e. in the synthesized property setter! I'm stumped as to why this should be, given the code worked on the previous OS and hasn't changed since (even the binary compiled with the previous SDK crashes the same way, but not on OS3.0) - and given it is a simple property method. Any ideas? Could the NSError implementation have changed between releases or am I missing something obvious?

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• Jquery Ajax Call In For Loop Only Runs Once - Possible Issue with Timing & Exit Condition?

  - by Grumps

  Background I'm building a form that uses autocomplete against the EchoNest API. First the users picks an artist, using the Artist Suggest call. Next they select a song but the Song and/Or Artist song search doesn't provide a "wild card" search. It only returns exact matches. So based on the forums they suggest building an array of the songs and using auto complete on the array. I can only get a maximum of 100 responses at a time. I do know based on the initial response the number of songs. My Plan: Wrap the ajax call in a for loop ('runonceloop'). Amend the loop exit condition after the first response with the total number of songs. Challenge I'm having: The 'runonceloop' only completes a singe loop because or at least that's what I believe: The exit condition is satisfied before the first response [1] is received. I've tried to adjust the 'exit condition' and 'counter' such that they are set and and increased at the end of the success block. This seems to lock up my browser. Can someone provide some guidance on this situation?[2] I'd really appreciate it. I also don't think turning async off is a good idea because it locks the browser. Response[1]: { "response": { "status": { "code": "0", "message": "Success", "version": "4.2" }, "start": 0, "total": 121, //Used for "songs": [ { "id": "SOXZYYG127F3E1B7A2", "title": "Karma police" }, { "id": "SOXZABD127F3E1B7A2", "title" : "Creep" } ] } } } Code[2] var songsList = []; function getSongs() { var numsongs = 2; //at least 2 runs. var startindex = 0; runonceloop: //<~~~~Referenced in question for (var j = 0;j >= numsongs;) { console.log('numsongs' + numsongs); $.ajax({ url: "http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/artist/songs", dataType: "jsonp", data: { results: 100, api_key: "XXXXXXXXXXX", format: "jsonp", name: $("#artist").val(), start: startindex }, success: function (data) { var songs = data.response.songs; numsongs = data.response.total; //modify exit condition for (var i = 0; i < songs.length; i++) { songsList.push(songs[i].title); } j +=100;// increase by 100 to match number of responses. } }); }};

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• Is Java assert broken?

  - by BlairHippo

  While poking around the questions, I recently discovered the assert keyword in Java. At first, I was excited. Something useful I didn't already know! A more efficient way for me to check the validity of input parameters! Yay learning! But then I took a closer look, and my enthusiasm was not so much "tempered" as "snuffed-out completely" by one simple fact: you can turn assertions off.* This sounds like a nightmare. If I'm asserting that I don't want the code to keep going if the input listOfStuff is null, why on earth would I want that assertion ignored? It sounds like if I'm debugging a piece of production code and suspect that listOfStuff may have been erroneously passed a null but don't see any logfile evidence of that assertion being triggered, I can't trust that listOfStuff actually got sent a valid value; I also have to account for the possibility that assertions may have been turned off entirely. And this assumes that I'm the one debugging the code. Somebody unfamiliar with assertions might see that and assume (quite reasonably) that if the assertion message doesn't appear in the log, listOfStuff couldn't be the problem. If your first encounter with assert was in the wild, would it even occur to you that it could be turned-off entirely? It's not like there's a command-line option that lets you disable try/catch blocks, after all. All of which brings me to my question (and this is a question, not an excuse for a rant! I promise!): What am I missing? Is there some nuance that renders Java's implementation of assert far more useful than I'm giving it credit for? Is the ability to enable/disable it from the command line actually incredibly valuable in some contexts? Am I misconceptualizing it somehow when I envision using it in production code in lieu of statements like if (listOfStuff == null) barf();? I just feel like there's something important here that I'm not getting. *Okay, technically speaking, they're actually off by default; you have to go out of your way to turn them on. But still, you can knock them out entirely.

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• JavaScript Resource Management Design Pattern

  - by Adam

  As a web developer, a common problem I find myself tackling is waiting for something to load before doing something else. In particular, I often hide (using either display: none; or visibility: hidden; depending on the situation) elements while waiting for a background image or a CSS file to load. Consider this example from Last.FM. They overlay a semi-transparant PNG over each album art image so that it looks like it's inside a jewel-case. They let it load when it loads, so depending on your internet speed, you may see the art image by itself (without the overlay) temporarily. In this case, the album art looks fine without the jewel-case effect. But in similar situations, I have found that I don't want the user to see the site's design mangled as resources incrementally load. So, in rare cases I have hidden everything from the user until the whole kit and kaboodle has loaded. But this is often a pain to write out, and may force the user to wait for a pretty long time to see anything (besides "loading..." text). I can think of (and have used on occasion) some obvious solutions/compromises: Use some inline CSS so that as certain parts of the DOM load and render, they will immediately have the correct size/position/etc. Immediately render the navigation part of the site, so that if the user wanted to use the current page purely to get somewhere else, they don't have to wait for the rest to load. Load pixelated images first as placeholders for layout while lazy-loading higher quality images as replacements. Something quirky like using a cute animated gif to distract the user during a "loading..." phase. Show useful information as a reference while loading the full UI. (Something akin to Gmail Inbox Preview, etc.) (Sorry if my question was basically just asked and answered...) Despite all of these ideas, I still find myself hoping there are better ways of doing some of these things. So I guess what I'm looking for is some inspiration and/or any creative ways of dealing with this problem that you guys may have seen out in the wild.

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• evaluating cost/benefits of using extension methods in C# => 3.0

  - by BillW

  Hi, In what circumstances (usage scenarios) would you choose to write an extension rather than sub-classing an object ? < full disclosure : I am not an MS employee; I do not know Mitsu Furota personally; I do know the author of the open-source Componax library mentioned here, but I have no business dealings with him whatsoever; I am not creating, or planning to create any commercial product using extensions : in sum : this post is from pure intellectal curiousity related to my trying to (continually) become aware of "best practices" I find the idea of extension methods "cool," and obviously you can do "far-out" things with them as in the many examples you can in Mitsu Furota's (MS) blog postslink text. A personal friend wrote the open-source Componax librarylink text, and there's some remarkable facilities in there; but he is in complete command of his small company with total control over code guidelines, and every line of code "passes through his hands." While this is speculation on my part : I think/guess other issues might come into play in a medium-to-large software team situation re use of Extensions. Looking at MS's guidelines at link text, you find : In general, you will probably be calling extension methods far more often than implementing your own. ... In general, we recommend that you implement extension methods sparingly and only when you have to. Whenever possible, client code that must extend an existing type should do so by creating a new type derived from the existing type. For more information, see Inheritance (C# Programming Guide). ... When the compiler encounters a method invocation, it first looks for a match in the type's instance methods. If no match is found, it will search for any extension methods that are defined for the type, and bind to the first extension method that it finds. And at Ms's link text : Extension methods present no specific security vulnerabilities. They can never be used to impersonate existing methods on a type, because all name collisions are resolved in favor of the instance or static method defined by the type itself. Extension methods cannot access any private data in the extended class. Factors that seem obvious to me would include : I assume you would not write an extension unless you expected it be used very generally and very frequently. On the other hand : couldn't you say the same thing about sub-classing ? Knowing we can compile them into a seperate dll, and add the compiled dll, and reference it, and then use the extensions : is "cool," but does that "balance out" the cost inherent in the compiler first having to check to see if instance methods are defined as described above. Or the cost, in case of a "name clash," of using the Static invocation methods to make sure your extension is invoked rather than the instance definition ? How frequent use of Extensions would affect run-time performance or memory use : I have no idea. So, I'd appreciate your thoughts, or knowing about how/when you do, or don't do, use Extensions, compared to sub-classing. thanks, Bill

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• How to design a data model that deals with (real) contracts?

  - by Geoffrey

  I was looking for some advice on designing a data model for contract administration. The general life cycle of a contract is thus: Contract is created and in a "draft" state. It is viewable internally and changes may be made. Contract goes out to vendor, status is set to "pending" Contract is rejected by vendor. At this state, nothing can be done to the contract. No statuses may be added to the collection. Contract is accepted by vendor. At this state, nothing can be done to the contract. No statuses may be added to the collection. I obviously want to avoid a situation where the contract is accepted and, say, the amount is changed. Here are my classes: [EnforceNoChangesAfterDraftState] public class VendorContract { public virtual Vendor Vendor { get; set; } public virtual decimal Amount { get; set; } public virtual VendorContact VendorContact { get; set; } public virtual string CreatedBy { get; set; } public virtual DateTime CreatedOn { get; set; } public virtual FileStore Contract { get; set; } public virtual IList<VendorContractStatus> ContractStatus { get; set; } } [EnforceCorrectWorkflow] public class VendorContractStatus { public virtual VendorContract VendorContract { get; set; } public virtual FileStore ExecutedDocument { get; set; } public virtual string Status { get; set; } public virtual string Reason { get; set; } public virtual string CreatedBy { get; set; } public virtual DateTime CreatedOn { get; set; } } I've omitted the filestore class, which is basically a key/value lookup to find the document based on its guid. The VendorContractStatus is mapped as a many-to-one in Nhibernate. I then use a custom validator as described here. If anything but draft is returned in the VendorContractStatus collection, no changes are allowed. Furthermore the VendorContractStatus must follow the correct workflow (you can add a rejected after a pending, but you can't add anything else to the collection if a reject or accepted exists, etc.). All sounds alright? Well a colleague has argued that we should simply add an "IsDraft" bool property to VendorContract and not accept updates if IsDraft is false. Then we should setup a method inside of VendorContractStatus for updating the status, if something gets added after a draft, it sets the IsDraft property of VendorContract to false. I do not like this as it feels like I'm dirtying up the POCOs and adding logic that should persist in the validation area, that no rules should really exist in these classes and they shouldn't be aware of their states. Any thoughts on this and what is the better practice from a DDD perspective? From my view, if in the future we want more complex rules, my way will be more maintainable over the long run. Say we have contracts over a certain amount to be approved by a manager. I would think it would be better to have a one-to-one mapping with a VendorContractApproval class, rather than adding IsApproved properties, but that's just speculation. This might be splitting hairs, but this is the first real gritty enterprise software project we've done. Any advice would be appreciated!

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• How do you unit test the real world?

  - by Kim Sun-wu

  I'm primarily a C++ coder, and thus far, have managed without really writing tests for all of my code. I've decided this is a Bad Idea(tm), after adding new features that subtly broke old features, or, depending on how you wish to look at it, introduced some new "features" of their own. But, unit testing seems to be an extremely brittle mechanism. You can test for something in "perfect" conditions, but you don't get to see how your code performs when stuff breaks. A for instance is a crawler, let's say it crawls a few specific sites, for data X. Do you simply save sample pages, test against those, and hope that the sites never change? This would work fine as regression tests, but, what sort of tests would you write to constantly check those sites live and let you know when the application isn't doing it's job because the site changed something, that now causes your application to crash? Wouldn't you want your test suite to monitor the intent of the code? The above example is a bit contrived, and something I haven't run into (in case you haven't guessed). Let me pick something I have, though. How do you test an application will do its job in the face of a degraded network stack? That is, say you have a moderate amount of packet loss, for one reason or the other, and you have a function DoSomethingOverTheNetwork() which is supposed to degrade gracefully when the stack isn't performing as it's supposed to; but does it? The developer tests it personally by purposely setting up a gateway that drops packets to simulate a bad network when he first writes it. A few months later, someone checks in some code that modifies something subtly, so the degradation isn't detected in time, or, the application doesn't even recognize the degradation, this is never caught, because you can't run real world tests like this using unit tests, can you? Further, how about file corruption? Let's say you're storing a list of servers in a file, and the checksum looks okay, but the data isn't really. You want the code to handle that, you write some code that you think does that. How do you test that it does exactly that for the life of the application? Can you? Hence, brittleness. Unit tests seem to test the code only in perfect conditions(and this is promoted, with mock objects and such), not what they'll face in the wild. Don't get me wrong, I think unit tests are great, but a test suite composed only of them seems to be a smart way to introduce subtle bugs in your code while feeling overconfident about it's reliability. How do I address the above situations? If unit tests aren't the answer, what is? Thanks!

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• What is GC holes?

  - by tianyi

  I wrote a long TCP connection socket server in C#. Spike in memory in my server happens. I used dotNet Memory Profiler(a tool) to detect where the memory leaks. Memory Profiler indicates the private heap is huge, and the memory is something like below(the number is not real,what I want to show is the GC0 and GC2's Holes are very very huge, the data size is normal): Managed heaps - 1,500,000KB Normal heap - 1400,000KB Generation #0 - 600,000KB Data - 100,000KB "Holes" - 500,000KB Generation #1 - xxKB Data - 0KB "Holes" - xKB Generation #2 - xxxxxxxxxxxxxKB Data - 100,000KB "Holes" - 700,000KB Large heap - 131072KB Large heap - 83KB Overhead/unused - 130989KB Overhead - 0KB Howerver, what is GC hole? I read an article about the hole: http://kaushalp.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-is-gc-hole-and-how-to-create-gc.html The author said : The code snippet below is the simplest way to introduce a GC hole into the system. //OBJECTREF is a typedef for Object*. { PointerTable *pTBL = o_pObjectClass->GetPointerTable(); OBJECTREF aObj = AllocateObjectMemory(pTBL); OBJECTREF bObj = AllocateObjectMemory(pTBL); //WRONG!!! “aObj” may point to garbage if the second //“AllocateObjectMemory” triggered a GC. DoSomething (aOb, bObj); } All it does is allocate two managed objects, and then does something with them both. This code compiles fine, and if you run simple pre-checkin tests, it will probably “work.” But this code will crash eventually. Why? If the second call to “AllocateObjectMemory” triggers a GC, that GC discards the object instance you just assigned to “aObj”. This code, like all C++ code inside the CLR, is compiled by a non-managed compiler and the GC cannot know that “aObj” holds a root reference to an object you want kept live. ======================================================================== I can't understand what he explained. Does the sample mean aObj becomes a wild pointer after GC? Is it mean { aObj = (*aObj)malloc(sizeof(object)); free(aObj); function(aObj);? } ? I hope somebody can explain it.

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• Jquery Autocomplete after space press

  - by Limpep

  I am having an issue with my auto-complete feature such as when a user presses the space button the auto-complete doesn't show up again. Here is my code script type="text/javascript"> function lookup(inputString) { if(inputString.length == 0) { // Hide the suggestion box. $('#suggestions').hide(); } else { $.post("autocomplete.php", { queryString: ""+inputString+"" }, function(data){ if(data.length >0) { $('#suggestions').show(); $('#autoSuggestionsList').html(data); } }); } } // lookup function fill(thisValue) { $('#tag').val(thisValue); setTimeout("$('#suggestions').hide();", 200); } here my php code <?php require_once('config.php'); $db = new mysqli(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD,DB_DATABASE); if(!$db) { // Show error if we cannot connect. echo 'ERROR: Could not connect to the database.'; } else { // Is there a posted query string? if(isset($_POST['queryString'])) { $queryString = $db->real_escape_string($_POST['queryString']); // Is the string length greater than 0? if(strlen($queryString) >0) { // Run the query: We use LIKE '$queryString%' // The percentage sign is a wild-card, in my example of countries it works like this... // $queryString = 'Uni'; // Returned data = 'United States, United Kindom'; $query = $db->query("SELECT name FROM tag WHERE name LIKE '$queryString%' ORDER BY name LIMIT 10"); if($query) { // While there are results loop through them - fetching an Object (i like PHP5 btw!). while ($result = $query ->fetch_object()) { // Format the results, im using <li> for the list, you can change it. // The onClick function fills the textbox with the result. echo '<li onClick="fill(\''.$result->name.'\');">'.$result->name.'</li>'; } } else { echo 'ERROR: There was a problem with the query.'; } } else { // Dont do anything. } // There is a queryString. } else { echo 'There should be no direct access to this script!'; } } ? Any help would be great, thanks.

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• Windows 8 Will be Here Tomorrow; but Should Silverlight be Gone Today?

  - by andrewbrust

  The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary.  IT interests intentionally live in the past.  On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it.  Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of “it takes all kinds.”  Different subcultures have different tendencies.  So be it. Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can’t take such a laissez-faire view of the world though.  Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS.  It must indulge and nourish developers’ fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users. With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later.  Meanwhile, there’s a technology that runs on today’s Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version’s codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack.  That technology is Silverlight.  And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it. But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology’s last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact some are fleeing from it.  Is this sensible?  Is it not unprecedented?  What options does it lead to?  What’s the right way to think about the situation? Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight?  We don’t know.  But Scott Guthrie, the “father” and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him.  John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely.  About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight’s demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers’ fears; but now they’ve moved on. So read into that what you will and let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight’s days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct.  Let’s assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed.  Let’s assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application’s platform needs to stay current. Is this really so different from any technology investment we make?  Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence.  What differs from project to project, is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be.  The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental.  Some of the further changes were too.  But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle.  The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka)  point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8.  And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.  But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers’ skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely.  That’s not a coincidence.  It’s not an accident.  This is a protected transition.  It’s not a slap in the face. There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others: The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see.  Instead of being ignorant of the technology’s expiration date, we believe we know it.  If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it. The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight. .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age.  That’s equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear. My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead.  I understand the logic behind that.  I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus.  But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it.  HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients.  They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved.  But they still lag.  They still feel like they’re emulating something, like they’re prototypes, like they’re not comfortable in their own skins.  They are based on compromise, and they feel compromised too. HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but they are not as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android.  HTML’s roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity.  I do not necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it’s here today. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.  Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog.  A second class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good.  Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular.  Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary?  Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development. If you’re an ISV and you’re coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it’s a different story.  You’ve likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift.  You’re deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.  Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform.  Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility.  Arguably, that’s already happened to Windows.  The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue.  The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable.  We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight.  But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal.  The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft’s internal management of products and technologies.  But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name.  Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you’ll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one.  It’s all coffee, it’s all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end.  Back on the software side, it’s all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end.  Coffee drinkers wouldn’t switch to tea.  Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

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• Finding a person in the forest

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved finding a person in the forest or Limiting the AD result in SharePoint People Picker There are times when we need to limit the SharePoint audience of certain farms or servers or site collections to a particular audience. One of my experiences involved limiting access to US citizens, another to a particular location. Now, most of us – your humble servant included – are not Active Directory experts – but we must be able to handle the “audience restrictions” as required. So here is how it’s done in a nutshell. Important note. Not all could be done in PowerShell (at least not yet)! There are no Windows PowerShell commands to configure People Picker. The stsadm command is: stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery -pv ADQuery –url http://somethingOrOther Note the long-hyphenated property name. Now to filling the ADQuery.   LDAP Query in a nutshell Syntax LDAP is no older than SQL and an LDAP query is actually a query against the LDAP Database. LDAP attributes are the equivalent of Database columns, so why do we have to learn a new query language? Beats me! But we must, so here it is. The syntax of an LDAP query string is made of individual statements with relational operators including: = Equal <= Lower than or equal >= Greater than or equal… and memberOf – a group membership. ! Not * Wildcard Equal and memberOf are the most commonly used. Checking for absence uses the ! – not and the * - wildcard Example: (SN=Grant) All whose last name – SurName – is Grant Example: (!(SN=Grant)) All except Grant Example: (!(SN=*)) all where there is no SurName i.e SurName is absent (probably Rappers). Example: (CN=MyGroup) Common Name is MyGroup.  Example: (GN=J*) all the Given Names that start with J (JJ, Jane, Jon, John, etc.) The cryptic SN, CN, GN, etc. are attributes and more about them later All the queries are enclosed in parentheses (Query). Complex queries are comprised of sets that are in AND or OR conditions. AND is denoted by the ampersand (&) and the OR is denoted by the vertical pipe (|). The general syntax is that of the Prefix polish notation where the operand precedes the variables. E.g +ab is the sum of a and b. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which both A and B are true. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which A, B and C are true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which either A or B are true. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which at least one of A, B and C is true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. More complex queries have both types of conditions and the parentheses determine the order of operations. Attributes Now let’s get into the SN, CN, GN, and other attributes of the query SN – is the SurName (last name) GN – is the Given Name (first name) CN – is the Common Name, usually GN followed by SN OU – is an Organization Unit such as division, department etc. DC – is a Domain Content in the AD forest l – lower case ‘L’ stands for location. Jerusalem anybody? Or Katmandu. UPN – User Principal Name, is usually the first part of an email address. By nature it is unique in the forest. Most systems set the UPN to be the first initial followed by the SN of the person involved. Some limit the total to 8 characters. If we have many ‘jsmith’ we have to somehow distinguish them from each other. DN – is the distinguished name – a name unique to AD forest in which it lives. Usually it’s a CN with some domain or group distinguishers. DN is important in conjunction with the memberOf relation. Groups have stricter requirement. Each group has to have a unique name - its CN and it has to be unique regardless of its place. See more below. All of the attributes are case insensitive. CN, cn, Cn, and cN are identical. objectCategory is an element that requires special consideration. AD contains many different object like computers, printers, and of course people and groups. In the queries below, we’re limiting our search to people (person). Putting it altogether Let’s get a list of all the Johns in the SPAdmin group of the Jerusalem that local domain. (&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local)) The memberOf=cn=SPAdmin uses the cn (Common Name) of the SPAdmin group. This is how the memberOf relation is used. ‘SPAdmin’ is actually the DN of the group. Also the memberOf relation does not allow wild cards (*) in the group name. Also, you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ entry. Let’s add Marvin Minsky to the search above. |(&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local))(CN=Marvin Minsky) Here I added the or pipeline at the beginning of the query and put the CN requirement for Minsky at the end. Note that if Marvin was already in the prior result, he’s not going to be listed twice. One last note: You may see a dryer but more complete list of attributes rules and examples in: http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5667 And finally (thus negating the claim that my previous note was last), to the best of my knowledge there are 3 more ways to limit the audience. One is to use the peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter property using the same ADQuery. This works only in SP1 and above. The second is to limit the search to users within this particular site collection – the property name is peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection and the value is yes (-pv yes) And the third is –pn peoplepicker-serviceaccountdirectorypaths –pv “OU=ou1,DC=dc1…..” Again you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ phrase – no OU=ou1,OU=ou2… And now the real end. The main property discussed in this sprawling and seemingly endless monogram – peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery - is the most general way of getting the job done. Here are a few examples of command lines that worked and some that didn’t. Can you see why? C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (!Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,OU=OUMid,OU=OUTop,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Command line error. Too many OUs C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully.   That’s all folks!

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• Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

  - by Roger Hart

  Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

  - by DotNetBlues

  I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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• 5 Lessons learnt in localization / multi language support in WPF

  - by MarkPearl

  For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on how to improve it. Two of the most dominant suggestions that we received were… Support for imperial measurements (the original program only supported the metric system) Multi language support (we had someone who volunteered to translate the program into Japanese for us). I am not going to dive into the Imperial to Metric support in todays blog post, but I would like to cover a few brief lessons we learned in adding support for multi-language functionality in the software. I have sectioned them below under different lessons. Lesson 1 – Build multi-language support in from the start So the first lesson I learnt was if you know you are going to do multi language support – build it in from the very beginning! One of the power points of WPF/Silverlight is data binding in XAML and so while it wasn’t to painful to retro fit multi language support into the programing, it was still time consuming and a bit tedious to go through mounds and mounds of views and would have been a minor job to have implemented this while the form was being designed. Lesson 2 – Accommodate for varying word lengths using Grids The next lesson was a little harder to learn and was learnt a bit further down the road in the development cycle. We developed everything in English, assuming that other languages would have similar character length words for equivalent meanings… don’t!. A word that is short in your language may be of varying character lengths in other languages. Some language like Dutch and German allow for concatenation of nouns which has the potential to create really long words. We picked up a few places where our views had been structured incorrectly so that if a word was to long it would get clipped off or cut out. To get around this we began using the WPF grid extensively with column widths that would automatically expand if they needed to. Generally speaking the grid replacement got round this hurdle, and if in future you have a choice between a stack panel or a grid – think twice before going for the easier option… often the grid will be a bit more work to setup, but will be more flexible. Lesson 3 – Separate the separators Our initial run through moving the words to a resource dictionary led us to make what I thought was one potential mistake. If we had a label like the following… “length : “ In the resource dictionary we put it as a single entry. This is fine until you start using a word more than once. For instance in our scenario we used the word “length’ frequently. with different variations of the word with grammar and separators included in the resource we ended up having what I would consider a bloated dictionary. When we removed the separators from the words and put them as their own resources we saw a dramatic reduction in dictionary size… so something that looked like this… “length : “ “length. “ “length?” Was reduced to… “length” “:” “?” “.” While this may not seem like a reduction at first glance, consider that the separators “:?.” are used everywhere and suddenly you see a real reduction in bloat. Lesson 4 – Centralize the Language Dictionary This lesson was learnt at the very end of the project after we had already had a release candidate out in the wild. Because our translations would be done on a volunteer basis and remotely, we wanted it to be really simple for someone to translate our program into another language. As a common design practice we had tiered the application so that we had a business logic layer, a ui layer, etc. The problem was in several of these layers we had resource files specific for that layer. What this resulted in was us having multiple resource files that we would need to send to our translators. To add to our problems, some of the wordings were duplicated in different resource files, which would result in additional frustration from our translators as they felt they were duplicating work. Eventually the workaround was to make a separate project in VS2010 with just the language translations. We then exposed the dictionary as public within this project and made it as a reference to the other projects within the solution. This solved out problem as now we had a central dictionary and could remove any duplication's. Lesson 5 – Make a dummy translation file to test that you haven’t missed anything The final lesson learnt about multi language support in WPF was when checking if you had forgotten to translate anything in the inline code, make a test resource file with dummy data. Ideally you want the data for each word to be identical. In our instance we made one which had all the resource key values pointing to a value of test. This allowed us point the language file to our test resource file and very quickly browse through the program and see if we had missed any linking. The alternative to this approach is to have two language files and swap between the two while running the program to make sure that you haven’t missed anything, but the downside of dual language file approach is that it is much a lot harder spotting a mistake if everything is different – almost like playing Where’s Wally / Waldo. It is much easier spotting variance in uniformity – meaning when you put the “test’ keyword for everything, anything that didn’t say “test” stuck out like a sore thumb. So these are my top five lessons learnt on implementing multi language support in WPF. Feel free to make any suggestions in the comments section if you feel maybe something is more important than one of these or if I got it wrong!

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• Different Not Automatically Implies Better

  - by Alois Kraus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/11/05/154556.aspxRecently I was digging deeper why some WCF hosted workflow application did consume quite a lot of memory although it did basically only load a xaml workflow. The first tool of choice is Process Explorer or even better Process Hacker (has more options and the best feature copy&paste does work). The three most important numbers of a process with regards to memory are Working Set, Private Working Set and Private Bytes. Working set is the currently consumed physical memory (parts can be shared between processes e.g. loaded dlls which are read only) Private Working Set is the physical memory needed by this process which is not shareable Private Bytes is the number of non shareable which is only visible in the current process (e.g. all new, malloc, VirtualAlloc calls do create private bytes) When you have a bigger workflow it can consume under 64 bit easily 500MB for a 1-2 MB xaml file. This does not look very scalable. Under 64 bit the issue is excessive private bytes consumption and not the managed heap. The picture is quite different for 32 bit which looks a bit strange but it seems that the hosted VB compiler is a lot less memory hungry under 32 bit. I did try to repro the issue with a medium sized xaml file (400KB) which does contain 1000 variables and 1000 if which can be represented by C# code like this: string Var1; string Var2; ... string Var1000; if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var1) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var1”); } if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Var2) ) { Console.WriteLine(“Var2”); } ....   Since WF is based on VB.NET expressions you are bound to the hosted VB.NET compiler which does result in (x64) 140 MB of private bytes which is ca. 140 KB for each if clause which is quite a lot if you think about the actually present functionality. But there is hope. .NET 4.5 does allow now C# expressions for WF which is a major step forward for all C# lovers. I did create some simple patcher to “cross compile” my xaml to C# expressions. Lets look at the result: C# Expressions VB Expressions x86 x86 On my home machine I have only 32 bit which gives you quite exactly half of the memory consumption under 64 bit. C# expressions are 10 times more memory hungry than VB.NET expressions! I wanted to do more with less memory but instead it did consume a magnitude more memory. That is surprising to say the least. The workflow does initialize in about the same time under x64 and x86 where the VB code does it in 2s whereas the C# version needs 18s. Also nearly ten times slower. That is a too high price to pay for any bigger sized xaml workflow to convert from VB.NET to C# expressions. If I do reduce the number of expressions to 500 then it does need 400MB which is about half of the memory. It seems that the cost per if does rise linear with the number of total expressions in a xaml workflow.  Expression Language Cost per IF Startup Time C# 1000 Ifs x64 1,5 MB 18s C# 500 Ifs x64 750 KB 9s VB 1000 Ifs x64 140 KB 2s VB 500 Ifs x64 70 KB 1s Now we can directly compare two MS implementations. It is clear that the VB.NET compiler uses the same underlying structure but it has much higher offset compared to the highly inefficient C# expression compiler. I have filed a connect bug here with a harsher wording about recent advances in memory consumption. The funniest thing is that one MS employee did give an Azure AppFabric demo around early 2011 which was so slow that he needed to investigate with xperf. He was after startup time and the call stacks with regards to VB.NET expression compilation were remarkably similar. In fact I only found this post by googling for parts of my call stacks. … “C# expressions will be coming soon to WF, and that will have different performance characteristics than VB” … What did he know Jan 2011 what I did no know until today? ;-). He knew that C# expression will come but that they will not be automatically have better footprint. It is about time to fix that. In its current state C# expressions are not usable for bigger workflows. That also explains the headline for today. You can cheat startup time by prestarting workflows so that the demo looks nice and snappy but it does hurt scalability a lot since you do need much more memory than necessary. I did find the stacks by enabling virtual allocation tracking within XPerf which is still the best tool out there. But first you need to look at your process to check where the memory is hiding: For the C# Expression compiler you do not need xperf. You can directly dump the managed heap and check with a profiler of your choice. But if the allocations are happening on the Private Data ( VirtualAlloc ) you can find it with xperf. There is a nice video on channel 9 explaining VirtualAlloc tracking it in greater detail. If your data allocations are on the Heap it does mean that the C/C++ runtime did create a heap for you where all malloc, new calls do allocate from it. You can enable heap tracing with xperf and full call stack support as well which is doable via xperf like it is shown also on channel 9. Or you can use WPRUI directly: To make “Heap Usage” it work you need to set for your executable the tracing flags (before you start it). For example devenv.exe HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\devenv.exe DWORD TracingFlags 1 Do not forget to disable it after you did complete profiling the process or it will impact the startup time quite a lot. You can with xperf attach directly to a running process and collect heap allocation information from a gone wild process. Very handy if you need to find out what a process was doing which has arrived in a funny state. “VirtualAlloc usage” does work without explicitly enabling stuff for a specific process and is always on machine wide. I had issues on my Windows 7 machines with the call stack collection and the latest Windows 8.1 Performance Toolkit. I was told that WPA from Windows 8.0 should work fine but I do not want to downgrade.

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• Why are my hard drives failing?

  - by WishCow

  I have a small Ubuntu server running at home, with 2 HDDs. There are two software raids (raid1) on the disks, managed by mdadm, which I believe is irrelevant, but mentioning it anyway. Both of the HDDs are Western Digital, and have been used for around 2 years, when one of them started making clicking noises, and died. I figured that maybe it's natural after 2 years, so I bought a new one, and resynced the raid arrays. After about a month, the other drive also died. I didn't get suspicious, since both drives have been bought at the same time, it's not that surprising to see both of them near each other, so I bought another one. So far, 2 old drives failed, and 2 brand new in the system. After one month, one of the new drives died. This is when it started getting suspicious. Since the PC was put together from some really old parts (think AthlonXP), I figured that maybe the motherboard's SATA controller is the culprit. Of course you can't switch parts easily in an old PC like this, so I bought a whole system, new MB, new CPU, new RAM. Took the just failed drive back, since it was under warranty, and got it replaced. So it is up to 2 failed drives from the old ones, and 1 failed drive from the new ones. No problems, for 1 month. After that errors were creeping up again in /var/log/messages, and mdadm was reporting raid array failures. I started tearing my hair out. Everything is new in the system, it's up to the third brand new HDD, it's simply not possible that all of the new drives that I bought were faulty. Let's see what is still common... the cables. Okay, long shot, let's replace the SATA cables. Take HDD back, smile to the guy at the counter and say that I'm really unlucky. He replaces the HDD. I come home, one month passes and one of HDDs fails, again. I'm not joking. Two of the brand new HDDs have failed. Maybe it's a bug in the OS. Let's see what the manufacturer's testing tool says. Download testing tool, burn it to a CD, reboot, leave HDD testing overnight. Test says that the drive is faulty, and I should back up everything, if I still can. I don't know what's happening, but it does not look like a software problem, something is definitely thrashing the HDDs. I should mention now, that the whole system is in a shoebox. Since there are a load of "build your own ikea case" stuff, I thought there shouldn't be any problems throwing the thing in a box, and stuffing it away somewhere. The box is well ventilated, but I thought that just maybe the drives were overheating. There is no other possible answer to this. So I took the HDD back, and got it replaced (for the 3rd time), and bought HDD coolers. And just now, I have heard the sound of doom. click click whizzzzzzzzz. SSH into the box: You have new mail! mail r 1 DegradedArrayEvent on /dev/md0 ... dmesg output: [47128.000051] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [47128.000097] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 58588863 [47128.000134] md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 [48043.976054] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [48043.976086] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen [48043.976132] ata3.00: cmd c8/00:18:bf:40:52/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 dma 12288 in [48043.976135] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) [48043.976208] ata3.00: status: { DRDY } [48043.976241] ata3: soft resetting link [48044.148446] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [48044.148457] ata3.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0 [48044.148477] ata3: EH complete Recap: No possibility of overheating 6 drives have failed, 4 of those have been brand new. I'm not sure now that the original two have been faulty, or suffered the same thing that the new ones. There is nothing common in the system, apart from the OS which is Ubuntu Karmic now (started with Jaunty). New MB, new CPU, new RAM, new SATA cables. No, the little holes on the HDD are not covered I'm crying. Really. I don't have the face to return to the store now, it's not possible for 4 drives to fail under 4 months. A few ideas that I have been thinking: Is it possible that I fuck up something when I partition and resync the drives? Can it be so bad that it physicaly wrecks the drive? (since the vendor supplied tool says that the drive is damaged) I do the partitoning with fdisk, and use the same block size for the raid1 partitions (I check the exact block sizes with fdisk -lu) Is it possible that the linux kernel or mdadm, or something is not compatible with this exact brand of HDDs, and thrashes them? Is it possible that it may be the shoebox? Try placing it somewhere else? It's under a shelf now, so humidity is not a problem either. Is it possible that a normal PC case will solve my problem (I'm going to shoot myself then)? I will get a picture tomorrow. Am I just simply cursed? Any help or speculation is greatly appreciated. Edit: The power strip is guarded against overvoltage. Edit2: I have moved inbetween these 4 months, so the possibility of the cause being "dirty" electricity in both places, is very low. Edit3: I have checked the voltages in the BIOS (couldn't borrow a multimeter), and they are all seem correct, the biggest discrepancy is in the 12V, because it's supplying 11.3. Should I be worried about that? Edit4: I put my desktop PC's PSU into the server. The BIOS reported much more accurate voltage readings, and also it has successfully rebuilt the raid1 array, which took some 3-4 hours, so I feel a little positive now. Will get a new PSU tomorrow to test with that. Also, attaching the picture about the box: (disregard the 3rd drive)

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• How would you go about tackling this problem? [SOLVED in C++]

  - by incrediman

  Intro: EDIT: See solution at the bottom of this question (c++) I have a programming contest coming up in about half a week, and I've been prepping :) I found a bunch of questions from this canadian competition, they're great practice: http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/computing/2009/stage2/day1.pdf I'm looking at problem B ("Dinner"). Any idea where to start? I can't really think of anything besides the naive approach (ie. trying all permutations) which would take too long to be a valid answer. Btw, the language there says c++ and pascal I think, but i don't care what language you use - I mean really all I want is a hint as to the direction I should proceed in, and perhpas a short explanation to go along with it. It feels like I'm missing something obvious... Of course extended speculation is more than welcome, but I just wanted to clarify that I'm not looking for a full solution here :) Short version of the question: You have a binary string N of length 1-100 (in the question they use H's and G's instead of one's and 0's). You must remove all of the digits from it, in the least number of steps possible. In each step you may remove any number of adjacent digits so long as they are the same. That is, in each step you can remove any number of adjacent G's, or any number of adjacent H's, but you can't remove H's and G's in one step. Example: HHHGHHGHH Solution to the example: 1. HHGGHH (remove middle Hs) 2. HHHH (remove middle Gs) 3. Done (remove Hs) -->Would return '3' as the answer. Note that there can also be a limit placed on how large adjacent groups have to be when you remove them. For example it might say '2', and then you can't remove single digits (you'd have to remove pairs or larger groups at a time). Solution I took Mark Harrison's main algorithm, and Paradigm's grouping idea and used them to create the solution below. You can try it out on the official test cases if you want. //B.cpp //include debug messages? #define DEBUG false #include <iostream> #include <stdio.h> #include <vector> using namespace std; #define FOR(i,n) for (int i=0;i<n;i++) #define FROM(i,s,n) for (int i=s;i<n;i++) #define H 'H' #define G 'G' class String{ public: int num; char type; String(){ type=H; num=0; } String(char type){ this->type=type; num=1; } }; //n is the number of bits originally in the line //k is the minimum number of people you can remove at a time //moves is the counter used to determine how many moves we've made so far int n, k, moves; int main(){ /*Input from File*/ scanf("%d %d",&n,&k); char * buffer = new char[200]; scanf("%s",buffer); /*Process input into a vector*/ //the 'line' is a vector of 'String's (essentially contigious groups of identical 'bits') vector<String> line; line.push_back(String()); FOR(i,n){ //if the last String is of the correct type, simply increment its count if (line.back().type==buffer[i]) line.back().num++; //if the last String is of the wrong type but has a 0 count, correct its type and set its count to 1 else if (line.back().num==0){ line.back().type=buffer[i]; line.back().num=1; } //otherwise this is the beginning of a new group, so create the new group at the back with the correct type, and a count of 1 else{ line.push_back(String(buffer[i])); } } /*Geedily remove groups until there are at most two groups left*/ moves=0; int I;//the position of the best group to remove int bestNum;//the size of the newly connected group the removal of group I will create while (line.size()>2){ /*START DEBUG*/ if (DEBUG){ cout<<"\n"<<moves<<"\n----\n"; FOR(i,line.size()) printf("%d %c \n",line[i].num,line[i].type); cout<<"----\n"; } /*END DEBUG*/ I=1; bestNum=-1; FROM(i,1,line.size()-1){ if (line[i-1].num+line[i+1].num>bestNum && line[i].num>=k){ bestNum=line[i-1].num+line[i+1].num; I=i; } } //remove the chosen group, thus merging the two adjacent groups line[I-1].num+=line[I+1].num; line.erase(line.begin()+I);line.erase(line.begin()+I); moves++; } /*START DEBUG*/ if (DEBUG){ cout<<"\n"<<moves<<"\n----\n"; FOR(i,line.size()) printf("%d %c \n",line[i].num,line[i].type); cout<<"----\n"; cout<<"\n\nFinal Answer: "; } /*END DEBUG*/ /*Attempt the removal of the last two groups, and output the final result*/ if (line.size()==2 && line[0].num>=k && line[1].num>=k) cout<<moves+2;//success else if (line.size()==1 && line[0].num>=k) cout<<moves+1;//success else cout<<-1;//not everyone could dine. /*START DEBUG*/ if (DEBUG){ cout<<" moves."; } /*END DEBUG*/ }

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• Azure WNS to Win8 - Push Notifications for Metro Apps

  - by JoshReuben

  Background The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 allows you to build a Windows Azure Cloud Service that can send Push Notifications to registered Metro apps via Windows Notification Service (WNS). Some configuration is required - you need to: Register the Metro app for Windows Live Application Management Provide Package SID & Client Secret to WNS Modify the Azure Cloud App cscfg file and the Metro app package.appxmanifest file to contain matching Metro package name, SID and client secret. The Mechanism: These notifications take the form of XAML Tile, Toast, Raw or Badge UI notifications. The core engine is provided via the WNS nuget recipe, which exposes an API for constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS. An application receives push notifications by requesting a notification channel from WNS, which returns a channel URI that the application then registers with a cloud service. In the cloud service, A WnsAccessTokenProvider authenticates with WNS by providing its credentials, the package SID and secret key, and receives in return an access token that the provider caches and can reuse for multiple notification requests. The cloud service constructs a notification request by filling out a template class that contains the information that will be sent with the notification, including text and image references. Using the channel URI of a registered client, the cloud service can then send a notification whenever it has an update for the user. The package contains the NotificationSendUtils class for submitting notifications. The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 (WAT) provides the PNWorker sample pair of solutions - The Azure server side contains a WebRole & a WorkerRole. The WebRole allows submission of new push notifications into an Azure Queue which the WorkerRole extracts and processes. Further background resources: http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/ - Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Push%20Notification%20Worker%20Sample - WAT WNS sample setup http://watwindows8.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Using%20the%20Windows%208%20Cloud%20Application%20Services%20Application – using Windows 8 with Cloud Application Services A bit of Configuration Register the Metro apps for Windows Live Application Management From the current app manifest of your metro app Publish tab, copy the Package Display Name and the Publisher From: https://manage.dev.live.com/Build/ Package name: <-- we need to change this Client secret: keep this Package Security Identifier (SID): keep this Verify the app here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index - so this step is done "If you wish to send push notifications in your application, provide your Package Security Identifier (SID) and client secret to WNS." Provide Package SID & Client Secret to WNS http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465407.aspx - How to authenticate with WNS https://appdev.microsoft.com/StorePortals/en-us/Account/Signup/PurchaseSubscription - register app with dashboard - need registration code or register a new account & pay $170 shekels http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868184.aspx - Registering for a Windows Store developer account http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868187.aspx - Picking a Microsoft account for the Windows Store The WNS Nuget Recipe The WNS Recipe is a nuget package that provides an API for authenticating against WNS, constructing payloads and posting notifications to WNS. After installing this package, a WnsRecipe assembly is added to project references. To send notifications using WNS, first register the application at the Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect portal to obtain Package Security Identifier (SID) and a secret key that your cloud service uses to authenticate with WNS. An application receives push notifications by requesting a notification channel from WNS, which returns a channel URI that the application then registers with a cloud service. In the cloud service, the WnsAccessTokenProvider authenticates with WNS by providing its credentials, the package SID and secret key, and receives in return an access token that the provider caches and can reuse for multiple notification requests. The cloud service constructs a notification request by filling out a template class that contains the information that will be sent with the notification, including text and image references.Using the channel URI of a registered client, the cloud service can then send a notification whenever it has an update for the user. var provider = new WnsAccessTokenProvider(clientId, clientSecret); var notification = new ToastNotification(provider) {     ToastType = ToastType.ToastText02,     Text = new List<string> { "blah"} }; notification.Send(channelUri); the WNS Recipe is instrumented to write trace information via a trace listener – configuratively or programmatically from Application_Start(): WnsDiagnostics.Enable(); WnsDiagnostics.TraceSource.Listeners.Add(new DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener()); WnsDiagnostics.TraceSource.Switch.Level = SourceLevels.Verbose; The WAT PNWorker Sample The Azure server side contains a WebRole & a WorkerRole. The WebRole allows submission of new push notifications into an Azure Queue which the WorkerRole extracts and processes. Overview of Push Notification Worker Sample The toolkit includes a sample application based on the same solution structure as the one created by theWindows 8 Cloud Application Services project template. The sample demonstrates how to off-load the job of sending Windows Push Notifications using a Windows Azure worker role. You can find the source code in theSamples\PNWorker folder. This folder contains a full version of the sample application showing how to use Windows Push Notifications using ASP.NET Membership as the authentication mechanism. The sample contains two different solution files: WATWindows.Azure.sln: This solution must be opened with Visual Studio 2010 and contains the projects related to the Windows Azure web and worker roles. WATWindows.Client.sln: This solution must be opened with Visual Studio 11 and contains the Windows Metro style application project. Only Visual Studio 2010 supports Windows Azure cloud projects so you currently need to use this edition to launch the server application. This will change in a future release of the Windows Azure tools when support for Visual Studio 11 is enabled. Important: Setting up the PNWorker Sample Before running the PNWorker sample, you need to register the application and configure it: 1. Register the app: To register your application, go to the Windows Live Application Management site for Metro style apps at https://manage.dev.live.com/build and sign in with your Windows Live ID. In the Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect page, enter the following information. Package Display Name PNWorker.Sample Publisher CN=127.0.0.1, O=TESTING ONLY, OU=Windows Azure DevFabric 2. 3. Once you register the application, make a note of the values shown in the portal for Client Secret,Package Name and Package SID. 4. Configure the app - double-click the SetupSample.cmd file located inside the Samples\PNWorker folder to launch a tool that will guide you through the process of configuring the sample. setup runs a PowerShell script that requires running with administration privileges to allow the scripts to execute in your machine. When prompted, enter the Client Secret, Package Name, and Package Security Identifier you obtained previously and wait until the tool finishes configuring your sample. Running the PNWorker Sample To run this sample, you must run both the client and the server application projects. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 as an administrator. Open the WATWindows.Azure.sln solution. Set the start-up project of the solution as the cloud project. Run the app in the dev fabric to test. 2. Open Visual Studio 11 and open the WATWindows.Client.sln solution. Run the Metro client application. In the client application, click Reopen channel and send to server. à the application opens the channel and registers it with the cloud application, & the Output area shows the channel URI. 3. Refresh the WebRole's Push Notifications page to see the UI list the newly registered client. 4. Send notifications to the client application by clicking the Send Notification button. Setup 3 command files + 1 powershell script: SetupSample.cmd –> SetupWPNS.vbs –> SetupWPNS.cmd –> SetupWPNS.UpdateWPNSCredentialsInServiceConfiguration.ps1 appears to set PackageName – from manifest Client Id package security id (SID) – from registration Client Secret – from registration The following configs are modified: WATWindows\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg WATWindows\ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg WATWindows.Client\package.appxmanifest WatWindows.Notifications A class library – it references the following WNS DLL: C:\WorkDev\CountdownValue\AzureToolkits\WATWindows8\Samples\PNWorker\packages\WnsRecipe.0.0.3.0\lib\net40\WnsRecipe.dll NotificationJobRequest A DataContract for triggering notifications:     using System.Runtime.Serialization; using Microsoft.Windows.Samples.Notifications;     [DataContract]     [KnownType(typeof(WnsAccessTokenProvider))] public class NotificationJobRequest     {               [DataMember] public bool ProcessAsync { get; set; }          [DataMember] public string Payload { get; set; }         [DataMember] public string ChannelUrl { get; set; }         [DataMember] public NotificationType NotificationType { get; set; }         [DataMember] public IAccessTokenProvider AccessTokenProvider { get; set; }         [DataMember] public NotificationSendOptions NotificationSendOptions{ get; set; }     } Investigated these types: WnsAccessTokenProvider – a DataContract that contains the client Id and client secret NotificationType – an enum that can be: Tile, Toast, badge, Raw IAccessTokenProvider – get or reset the access token NotificationSendOptions – SecondsTTL, NotificationPriority (enum), isCache, isRequestForStatus, Tag   There is also a NotificationJobSerializer class which basically wraps a DataContractSerializer serialization / deserialization of NotificationJobRequest The WNSNotificationJobProcessor class This class wraps the NotificationSendUtils API – it periodically extracts any NotificationJobRequest objects from a CloudQueue and submits them to WNS. The ProcessJobMessageRequest method – this is the punchline: it will deserialize a CloudQueueMessage into a NotificationJobRequest & send pass its contents to NotificationUtils to SendAsynchronously / SendSynchronously, (and then dequeue the message).     public override void ProcessJobMessageRequest(CloudQueueMessage notificationJobMessageRequest)         { Trace.WriteLine("Processing a new Notification Job Request", "Information"); NotificationJobRequest pushNotificationJob =                 NotificationJobSerializer.Deserialize(notificationJobMessageRequest.AsString); if (pushNotificationJob != null)             { if (pushNotificationJob.ProcessAsync)                 { Trace.WriteLine("Sending the notification asynchronously", "Information"); NotificationSendUtils.SendAsynchronously( new Uri(pushNotificationJob.ChannelUrl),                         pushNotificationJob.AccessTokenProvider,                         pushNotificationJob.Payload,                         result => this.ProcessSendResult(pushNotificationJob, result),                         result => this.ProcessSendResultError(pushNotificationJob, result),                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationType,                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationSendOptions);                 } else                 { Trace.WriteLine("Sending the notification synchronously", "Information"); NotificationSendResult result = NotificationSendUtils.Send( new Uri(pushNotificationJob.ChannelUrl),                         pushNotificationJob.AccessTokenProvider,                         pushNotificationJob.Payload,                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationType,                         pushNotificationJob.NotificationSendOptions); this.ProcessSendResult(pushNotificationJob, result);                 }             } else             { Trace.WriteLine("Could not deserialize the notification job", "Error");             } this.queue.DeleteMessage(notificationJobMessageRequest);         } Investigation of NotificationSendUtils class - This is the engine – it exposes Send and a SendAsyncronously overloads that take the following params from the NotificationJobRequest: Channel Uri AccessTokenProvider Payload NotificationType NotificationSendOptions WebRole WebRole is a large MVC project – it references WatWindows.Notifications as well as the following WNS DLL: \AzureToolkits\WATWindows8\Samples\PNWorker\packages\WnsRecipe.0.0.3.0\lib\net40\NotificationsExtensions.dll Controllers\PushNotificationController.cs Notification related namespaces:     using Notifications;     using NotificationsExtensions;     using NotificationsExtensions.BadgeContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.RawContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.TileContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.ToastContent;     using Windows.Samples.Notifications; TokenProvider – initialized from the Azure RoleEnvironment:   IAccessTokenProvider tokenProvider = new WnsAccessTokenProvider(         RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("WNSPackageSID"),         RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("WNSClientSecret")); SendNotification method – calls QueuePushMessage method to create and serialize a NotificationJobRequest and enqueue it in a CloudQueue [HttpPost]         public ActionResult SendNotification(             [ModelBinder(typeof(NotificationTemplateModelBinder))] INotificationContent notification,             string channelUrl,             NotificationPriority priority = NotificationPriority.Normal)         {             var payload = notification.GetContent();             var options = new NotificationSendOptions()             {                 Priority = priority             };             var notificationType =                 notification is IBadgeNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Badge :                 notification is IRawNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Raw :                 notification is ITileNotificationContent ? NotificationType.Tile :                 NotificationType.Toast;             this.QueuePushMessage(payload, channelUrl, notificationType, options);             object response = new             {                 Status = "Queued for delivery to WNS"             };             return this.Json(response);         } GetSendTemplate method: Create the cshtml partial rendering based on the notification type     [HttpPost]         public ActionResult GetSendTemplate(NotificationTemplateViewModel templateOptions)         {             PartialViewResult result = null;             switch (templateOptions.NotificationType)             {                 case "Badge":                     templateOptions.BadgeGlyphValueContent = Enum.GetNames(typeof( GlyphValue));                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType);                     break;                 case "Raw":                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_Raw");                     break;                 case "Toast":                     templateOptions.TileImages = this.blobClient.GetAllBlobsInContainer(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("TileImagesContainer")).OrderBy(i => i.FileName).ToList();                     templateOptions.ToastAudioContent = Enum.GetNames(typeof( ToastAudioContent));                     templateOptions.Priorities = Enum.GetNames(typeof( NotificationPriority));                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType);                     break;                 case "Tile":                     templateOptions.TileImages = this.blobClient.GetAllBlobsInContainer(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("TileImagesContainer")).OrderBy(i => i.FileName).ToList();                     ViewBag.ViewData = templateOptions;                     result = PartialView("_" + templateOptions.NotificationTemplateType);                     break;             }             return result;         } Investigated these types: ToastAudioContent – an enum of different Win8 sound effects for toast notifications GlyphValue – an enum of different Win8 icons for badge notifications · Infrastructure\NotificationTemplateModelBinder.cs WNS Namespace references     using NotificationsExtensions.BadgeContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.RawContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.TileContent;     using NotificationsExtensions.ToastContent; Various NotificationFactory derived types can server as bindable models in MVC for creating INotificationContent types. Default values are also set for IWideTileNotificationContent & IToastNotificationContent. Type factoryType = null;             switch (notificationType)             {                 case "Badge":                     factoryType = typeof(BadgeContentFactory);                     break;                 case "Tile":                     factoryType = typeof(TileContentFactory);                     break;                 case "Toast":                     factoryType = typeof(ToastContentFactory);                     break;                 case "Raw":                     factoryType = typeof(RawContentFactory);                     break;             } Investigated these types: BadgeContentFactory – CreateBadgeGlyph, CreateBadgeNumeric (???) TileContentFactory – many notification content creation methods , apparently one for every tile layout type ToastContentFactory – many notification content creation methods , apparently one for every toast layout type RawContentFactory – passing strings WorkerRole WNS Namespace references using Notifications; using Notifications.WNS; using Windows.Samples.Notifications; OnStart() Method – on Worker Role startup, initialize the NotificationJobSerializer, the CloudQueue, and the WNSNotificationJobProcessor _notificationJobSerializer = new NotificationJobSerializer(); _cloudQueueClient = this.account.CreateCloudQueueClient(); _pushNotificationRequestsQueue = _cloudQueueClient.GetQueueReference(ConfigReader.GetConfigValue("RequestQueueName")); _processor = new WNSNotificationJobProcessor(_notificationJobSerializer, _pushNotificationRequestsQueue); Run() Method – poll the Azure Queue for NotificationJobRequest messages & process them:   while (true)             { Trace.WriteLine("Checking for Messages", "Information"); try                 { Parallel.ForEach( this.pushNotificationRequestsQueue.GetMessages(this.batchSize), this.processor.ProcessJobMessageRequest);                 } catch (Exception e)                 { Trace.WriteLine(e.ToString(), "Error");                 } Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("Sleeping for {0} seconds", this.pollIntervalMiliseconds / 1000)); Thread.Sleep(this.pollIntervalMiliseconds);                                            } How I learned to appreciate Win8 There is really only one application architecture for Windows 8 apps: Metro client side and Azure backend – and that is a good thing. With WNS, tier integration is so automated that you don’t even have to leverage a HTTP push API such as SignalR. This is a pretty powerful development paradigm, and has changed the way I look at Windows 8 for RAD business apps. When I originally looked at Win8 and the WinRT API, my first opinion on Win8 dev was as follows – GOOD:WinRT, WRL, C++/CX, WinJS, XAML (& ease of Direct3D integration); BAD: low projected market penetration,.NET lobotomized (Only 8% of .NET 4.5 classes can be used in Win8 non-desktop apps - http://bit.ly/HRuJr7); UGLY:Metro pascal tiles! Perhaps my 80s teenage years gave me a punk reactionary sense of revulsion towards the Partridge Family 70s style that Metro UX seems to have appropriated: On second thought though, it simplifies UI dev to a single paradigm (although UX guys will need to change career) – you will not find an easier app dev environment. Speculation: If LightSwitch is going to support HTML5 client app generation, then its a safe guess to say that vnext will support Win8 Metro XAML - a much easier port from Silverlight XAML. Given the VS2012 LightSwitch integration as a thumbs up from the powers that be at MS, and given that Win8 C#/XAML Metro apps tend towards a streamlined 'golden straight-jacket' cookie cutter app dev style with an Azure back-end supporting Win8 push notifications... --> its easy to extrapolate than LightSwitch vnext could well be the Win8 Metro XAML to Azure RAD tool of choice! The hook is already there - :) Why else have the space next to the HTML Client box? This high level of application development abstraction will facilitate rapid app cookie-cutter architecture-infrastructure frameworks for wrapping any app. This will allow me to avoid too much XAML code-monkeying around & focus on my area of interest: Technical Computing.

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• Write-error on swap-device, Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK

  - by Jan

  My root server at 1&1 was unresponsive on HTTP and SSH, so I logged into the serial console . It flooded my connection with endless error messages like quoted below. I initiated a reboot and now everything seems to work properly. After googling, I installed smartctl and ran a short self test, which told me the device was healthy. Is this likely a disk failure soon to happen or could it be just some program going wild? I assume, the swap device could also grow full when huge amounts of memory get consumed by a buggy program? How can I find out for sure? The sever was already unresponsive a week ago when I just restarted it without proper investigation. The server is running on CentOS. Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351055) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351063) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351071) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351079) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351087) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351095) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351103) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351111) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351119) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351127) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351135) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351143) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351151) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351159) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351167) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351175) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351183) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:8351191) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 9c 00 ef 00 00 08 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10223855 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10223863) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 9c 0e 97 00 00 10 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10227351 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10227359) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10227367) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 9c b0 1f 00 00 10 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10268703 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10268711) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10268719) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 a0 84 7f 00 00 08 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10519679 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10519687) sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_BAD_TARGET driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: Write(10): 2a 00 00 a7 26 af 00 04 00 00 end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 10954415 Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954423) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954431) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954439) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954447) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954455) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954463) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954471) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954479) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954487) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954495) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954503) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954511) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954519) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954527) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954535) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954543) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954551) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954559) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954567) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954575) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954583) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954591) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954599) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954607) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954615) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954623) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954631) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954639) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954647) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954655) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954663) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954671) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954679) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954687) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954695) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954703) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954711) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954719) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954727) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954735) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954743) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954751) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954759) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954767) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954775) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954783) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954791) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954799) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954807) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954815) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954823) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954831) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954839) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954847) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954855) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954863) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954871) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954879) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954887) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954895) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954903) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954911) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954919) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954927) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954935) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954943) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954951) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954959) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954967) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954975) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954983) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954991) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10954999) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955007) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955015) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955023) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955031) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955039) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955047) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955055) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955063) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955071) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955079) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955087) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955095) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955103) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955111) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955119) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955127) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955135) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955143) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955151) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955159) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955167) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955175) Write-error on swap-device (8:16:10955183)

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• Launching Intent.ACTION_VIEW intent not working on saved image file

  - by Savvas Dalkitsis

  First of all let me say that this questions is slightly connected to another question by me. Actually it was created because of that. I have the following code to write a bitmap downloaded from the net to a file in the sd card: // Get image from url URL u = new URL(url); HttpGet httpRequest = new HttpGet(u.toURI()); HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpResponse response = (HttpResponse) httpclient.execute(httpRequest); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); BufferedHttpEntity bufHttpEntity = new BufferedHttpEntity(entity); InputStream instream = bufHttpEntity.getContent(); Bitmap bmImg = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(instream); instream.close(); // Write image to a file in sd card File posterFile = new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getAbsolutePath()+"/Android/data/com.myapp/files/image.jpg"); posterFile.createNewFile(); BufferedOutputStream out = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(posterFile)); Bitmap mutable = Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(bmImg,bmImg.getWidth(),bmImg.getHeight(),true); mutable.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, 100, out); out.flush(); out.close(); // Launch default viewer for the file Intent intent = new Intent(); intent.setAction(android.content.Intent.ACTION_VIEW); intent.setDataAndType(Uri.parse(posterFile.getAbsolutePath()),"image/*"); ((Activity) getContext()).startActivity(intent); A few notes. I am creating the "mutable" bitmap after seeing someone using it and it seems to work better than without it. And i am using the parse method on the Uri class and not the fromFile because in my code i am calling these in different places and when i am creating the intent i have a string path instead of a file. Now for my problem. The file gets created. The intent launches a dialog asking me to select a viewer. I have 3 viewers installed. The Astro image viewer, the default media gallery (i have a milstone on 2.1 but on the milestone the 2.1 update did not include the 3d gallery so it's the old one) and the 3d gallery from the nexus one (i found the apk in the wild). Now when i launch the 3 viewers the following happen: Astro image viewer: The activity launches but i see nothing but a black screen. Media Gallery: i get an exception dialog shown "The application Media Gallery (process com.motorola.gallery) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again" with a force close option. 3D gallery: Everything works as it should. When i try to simply open the file using the Astro file manager (browse to it and simply click) i get the same option dialog but this time things are different: Astro image viewer: Everything works as it should. Media Gallery: Everything works as it should. 3D gallery: The activity launches but i see nothing but a black screen. As you can see everything is a complete mess. I have no idea why this happens but it happens like this every single time. It's not a random bug. Am i missing something when i am creating the intent? Or when i am creating the image file? Any ideas?

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