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• SQL SERVER – A Quick Look at Logging and Ideas around Logging

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday post on Logging. When someone talks about logging, personally I get lots of ideas about it. I have seen logging as a very generic term. Let me ask you this question first before I continue writing about logging. What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear word “Logging”? Now ask the same question to the guy standing next to you. I am pretty confident that you will get  a different answer from different people. I decided to do this activity and asked 5 SQL Server person the same question. Question: What is the first thing comes to your mind when you hear the word “Logging”? Strange enough I got a different answer every single time. Let me just list what answer I got from my friends. Let us go over them one by one. Output Clause The very first person replied output clause. Pretty interesting answer to start with. I see what exactly he was thinking. SQL Server 2005 has introduced a new OUTPUT clause. OUTPUT clause has access to inserted and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. Here are some references for Output Clause: OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE Reasons for Using Output Clause – Quiz Tips from the SQL Joes 2 Pros Development Series – Output Clause in Simple Examples Error Logs I was expecting someone to mention Error logs when it is about logging. The error log is the most looked place when there is any error either with the application or there is an error with the operating system. I have kept the policy to check my server’s error log every day. The reason is simple – enough time in my career I have figured out that when I am looking at error logs I find something which I was not expecting. There are cases, when I noticed errors in the error log and I fixed them before end user notices it. Other common practices I always tell my DBA friends to do is that when any error happens they should find relevant entries in the error logs and document the same. It is quite possible that they will see the same error in the error log  and able to fix the error based on the knowledge base which they have created. There can be many different kinds of error log files exists in SQL Server as well – 1) SQL Server Error Logs 2) Windows Event Log 3) SQL Server Agent Log 4) SQL Server Profile Log 5) SQL Server Setup Log etc. Here are some references for Error Logs: Recycle Error Log – Create New Log file without Server Restart SQL Error Messages Change Data Capture I got surprised with this answer. I think more than the answer I was surprised by the person who had answered me this one. I always thought he was expert in HTML, JavaScript but I guess, one should never assume about others. Indeed one of the cool logging feature is Change Data Capture. Change Data Capture records INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs applied to SQL Server tables, and makes a record available of what changed, where, and when, in simple relational ‘change tables’ rather than in an esoteric chopped salad of XML. These change tables contain columns that reflect the column structure of the source table you have chosen to track, along with the metadata needed to understand the changes that have been made. Here are some references for Change Data Capture: Introduction to Change Data Capture (CDC) in SQL Server 2008 Tuning the Performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008 Download Script of Change Data Capture (CDC) CDC and TRUNCATE – Cannot truncate table because it is published for replication or enabled for Change Data Capture Dynamic Management View (DMV) I like this answer. If asked I would have not come up with DMV right away but in the spirit of the original question, I think DMV does log the data. DMV logs or stores or records the various data and activity on the SQL Server. Dynamic management views return server state information that can be used to monitor the health of a server instance, diagnose problems, and tune performance. One can get plethero of information from DMVs – High Availability Status, Query Executions Details, SQL Server Resources Status etc. Here are some references for Dynamic Management View (DMV): SQL SERVER – Denali – DMV Enhancement – sys.dm_exec_query_stats – New Columns DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System DMV – sys.dm_os_wait_stats Explanation – Wait Type – Day 3 of 28 DMV sys.dm_exec_describe_first_result_set_for_object – Describes the First Result Metadata for the Module Transaction Log Impact Detection Using DMV – dm_tran_database_transactions Log Files I almost flipped with this final answer from my friend. This should be probably the first answer. Yes, indeed log file logs the SQL Server activities. One can write infinite things about log file. SQL Server uses log file with the extension .ldf to manage transactions and maintain database integrity. Log file ensures that valid data is written out to database and system is in a consistent state. Log files are extremely useful in case of the database failures as with the help of full backup file database can be brought in the desired state (point in time recovery is also possible). SQL Server database has three recovery models – 1) Simple, 2) Full and 3) Bulk Logged. Each of the model uses the .ldf file for performing various activities. It is very important to take the backup of the log files (along with full backup) as one never knows when backup of the log file come into the action and save the day! How to Stop Growing Log File Too Big Reduce the Virtual Log Files (VLFs) from LDF file Log File Growing for Model Database – model Database Log File Grew Too Big master Database Log File Grew Too Big SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008 Can I just say I loved this month’s T-SQL Tuesday Question. It really provoked very interesting conversation around me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Updating a SharePoint master page via a solution (WSP)

  - by Kelly Jones

  In my last blog post, I wrote how to deploy a SharePoint theme using Features and a solution package.  As promised in that post, here is how to update an already deployed master page. There are several ways to update a master page in SharePoint.  You could upload a new version to the master page gallery, or you could upload a new master page to the gallery, and then set the site to use this new page.  Manually uploading your master page to the master page gallery might be the best option, depending on your environment.  For my client, I did these steps in code, which is what they preferred. (Image courtesy of: http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2007/08/sharepoint-and-quick-launch.html ) Before you decide which method you need to use, take a look at your existing pages.  Are they using the SharePoint dynamic token or the static token for the master page reference?  The wha, huh? SO, there are four ways to tell an .aspx page hosted in SharePoint which master page it should use: “~masterurl/default.master” – tells the page to use the default.master property of the site “~masterurl/custom.master” – tells the page to use the custom.master property of the site “~site/default.master” – tells the page to use the file named “default.master” in the site’s master page gallery “~sitecollection/default.master” – tells the page to use the file named “default.master” in the site collection’s master page gallery For more information about these tokens, take a look at this article on MSDN. Once you determine which token your existing pages are pointed to, then you know which file you need to update.  So, if the ~masterurl tokens are used, then you upload a new master page, either replacing the existing one or adding another one to the gallery.  If you’ve uploaded a new file with a new name, you’ll just need to set it as the master page either through the UI (MOSS only) or through code (MOSS or WSS Feature receiver code – or using SharePoint Designer). If the ~site or ~sitecollection tokens were used, then you’re limited to either replacing the existing master page, or editing all of your existing pages to point to another master page.  In most cases, it probably makes sense to just replace the master page. For my project, I’m working with WSS and the existing pages are set to the ~sitecollection token.  Based on this, I decided to just upload a new version of the existing master page (and not modify the dozens of existing pages). Also, since my client prefers Features and solutions, I created a master page Feature and a corresponding Feature Receiver.  For information on creating the elements and feature files, check out this post: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/development/deploying-the-master-page . This works fine, unless you are overwriting an existing master page, which was my case.  You’ll run into errors because the master page file needs to be checked out, replaced, and then checked in.  I wrote code in my Feature Activated event handler to accomplish these steps. Here are the steps necessary in code: Get the file name from the elements file of the Feature Check out the file from the master page gallery Upload the file to the master page gallery Check in the file to the master page gallery Here’s the code in my Feature Receiver: 1: public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) 2: { 3: try 4: { 5:   6: SPElementDefinitionCollection col = properties.Definition.GetElementDefinitions(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); 7:   8: using (SPWeb curweb = GetCurWeb(properties)) 9: { 10: foreach (SPElementDefinition ele in col) 11: { 12: if (string.Compare(ele.ElementType, "Module", true) == 0) 13: { 14: // <Module Name="DefaultMasterPage" List="116" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" RootWebOnly="FALSE"> 15: // <File Url="myMaster.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="TRUE" 16: // Path="MasterPages/myMaster.master" /> 17: // </Module> 18: string Url = ele.XmlDefinition.Attributes["Url"].Value; 19: foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode file in ele.XmlDefinition.ChildNodes) 20: { 21: string Url2 = file.Attributes["Url"].Value; 22: string Path = file.Attributes["Path"].Value; 23: string fileType = file.Attributes["Type"].Value; 24:   25: if (string.Compare(fileType, "GhostableInLibrary", true) == 0) 26: { 27: //Check out file in document library 28: SPFile existingFile = curweb.GetFile(Url + "/" + Url2); 29:   30: if (existingFile != null) 31: { 32: if (existingFile.CheckOutStatus != SPFile.SPCheckOutStatus.None) 33: { 34: throw new Exception("The master page file is already checked out. Please make sure the master page file is checked in, before activating this feature."); 35: } 36: else 37: { 38: existingFile.CheckOut(); 39: existingFile.Update(); 40: } 41: } 42:   43: //Upload file to document library 44: string filePath = System.IO.Path.Combine(properties.Definition.RootDirectory, Path); 45: string fileName = System.IO.Path.GetFileName(filePath); 46: char slash = Convert.ToChar("/"); 47: string[] folders = existingFile.ParentFolder.Url.Split(slash); 48:   49: if (folders.Length > 2) 50: { 51: Logger.logMessage("More than two folders were detected in the library path for the master page. Only two are supported.", 52: Logger.LogEntryType.Information); //custom logging component 53: } 54:   55: SPFolder myLibrary = curweb.Folders[folders[0]].SubFolders[folders[1]]; 56:   57: FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(filePath); 58:   59: SPFile newFile = myLibrary.Files.Add(fileName, fs, true); 60:   61: myLibrary.Update(); 62: newFile.CheckIn("Updated by Feature", SPCheckinType.MajorCheckIn); 63: newFile.Update(); 64: } 65: } 66: } 67: } 68: } 69: } 70: catch (Exception ex) 71: { 72: string msg = "Error occurred during feature activation"; 73: Logger.logException(ex, msg, ""); 74: } 75:   76: } 77:   78: /// <summary> 79: /// Using a Feature's properties, get a reference to the Current Web 80: /// </summary> 81: /// <param name="properties"></param> 82: public SPWeb GetCurWeb(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) 83: { 84: SPWeb curweb; 85:   86: //Check if the parent of the web is a site or a web 87: if (properties != null && properties.Feature.Parent.GetType().ToString() == "Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb") 88: { 89:   90: //Get web from parent 91: curweb = (SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent; 92: 93: } 94: else 95: { 96: //Get web from Site 97: using (SPSite cursite = (SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent) 98: { 99: curweb = (SPWeb)cursite.OpenWeb(); 100: } 101: } 102:   103: return curweb; 104: } This did the trick.  It allowed me to update my existing master page, through an easily repeatable process (which is great when you are working with more than one environment and what to do things like TEST it!).  I did run into what I would classify as a strange issue with one of my subsites, but that’s the topic for another blog post.

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• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

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• Conversion of BizTalk Projects to Use the New WCF-SAP Adaptor

  - by Geordie

  We are in the process of upgrading our BizTalk Environment from BizTalk 2006 R2 to BizTalk 2010. The SAP adaptor in BizTalk 2010 is an all new and more powerful WCF-SAP adaptor. When my colleagues tested out the new adaptor they discovered that the format of the data extracted from SAP was not identical to the old adaptor. This is not a big deal if the structure of the messages from SAP is simple. In this case we were receiving the delivery and invoice iDocs. Both these structures are complex especially the delivery document. Over the past few years I have tweaked the delivery mapping to remove bugs from original mapping. The idea of redoing these maps did not appeal and due to the current work load was not even an option. I opted for a rather crude alternative of pulling in the iDoc in the new typed format and then adding a static map at the start of the orchestration to convert the data to the old schema.  Note WCF-SAP data formats (on the binding tab of the configuration dialog box is the ‘RecieiveIdocFormat’ field): Typed:  Returns a XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML and all fields being represented by XML tags. RFC: Returns an XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML but the iDoc lines in flat file format. String: This returns the iDoc in a format that is closest to the original flat file format but is still wrapped with some top level XML tags. The files also contained some strange characters at the end of each line. I started with the invoice document and it was quite straight forward to add the mapping but this is where my problems started. The orchestrations for these documents are dynamic and so require the identity of the partner to be able to correctly configure the orchestration. The partner identity is in the EDI_DC40 segment of the iDoc. In the old project the RECPRN node of the segment was promoted. The code to set a variable to the partner ID was now failing. After lot of head scratching I discovered the problem was due to the addition of Namespaces to the fields in the EDI_DC40 segment. To overcome this I needed to use an xPath query with a Namespace Manager. This had to be done in custom code. I now tried to repeat the process with the delivery document. Unfortunately when we tried to get sample typed data from SAP an exception was thrown. The adapter "WCF-SAP" raised an error message. Details "Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.XmlReaderGenerationException: The segment or group definition E2EDKA1001 was not found in the IDoc metadata. The UniqueId of the IDoc type is: IDOCTYP/3/DESADV01/ZASNEXT1/640. For Receive operations, the SAP adapter does not support unreleased segments.   Our guess is that when the WCF-SAP adaptor tries to down load the data it retrieves a data schema from SAP. For some reason the schema does not match the data. This may be due to the version of SAP we are running or due to a customization. Either way resolving this problem did not look easy. When doing some research on this problem I found an article showing me how to get the data from SAP using the WCF-SAP adaptor without any XML tags. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adapters/archive/2007/10/05/receiving-idocs-getting-the-raw-idoc-data.aspx Reproduction of Mustansir blog: Since the WCF based SAP Adapter is ... well, WCF based, all data flowing in and out of the adapter is encapsulated within a SOAP message. Which means there are those pesky xml tags all over the place. If you want to receive an Idoc from SAP, you can receive it in "Typed" format (in which case each column in each segment of the idoc appears within its own xml tag), or you can receive it in "String" format (in which case there are just 2 xml tags at the top, the raw xml data in string/flat file format, and the 2 closing xml tags). In "String" format, an incoming idoc (for ORDERS05, containing 5 data records) would look like: <ReceiveIdoc ><idocData>EDI_DC40 8000000000001064985620 E2EDK01005 800000000000106498500000100000001 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000002000000020111000 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000003000000020081000 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000040000000200710 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000050000000200600</idocData></ReceiveIdoc> (I have trimmed part of the control record so that it fits cleanly here on one line). Now, you're only interested in the IDOC data, and don't care much for the XML tags. It isn't that difficult to write your own pipeline component, or even some logic in the orchestration to remove the tags, right? Well, you don't need to write any extra code at all - the WCF Adapter can help you here! During the configuration of your one-way Receive Location using WCF-Custom, navigate to the Messages tab. Under the section "Inbound BizTalk Messge Body", select the "Path" radio button, and: (a) Enter the body path expression as: /*[local-name()='ReceiveIdoc']/*[local-name()='idocData'] (b) Choose "String" for the Node Encoding. What we've done is, used an XPATH to pull out the value of the "idocData" node from the XML. Your Receive Location will now emit text containing only the idoc data. You can at this point, for example, put the Flat File Pipeline component to convert the flat text into a different xml format based on some other schema you already have, and receive your version of the xml formatted message in your orchestration.   This was potentially a much easier solution than adding the static maps to the orchestrations and overcame the issue with ‘Typed’ delivery documents. Not quite so fast… Note: When I followed Mustansir’s blog the characters at the end of each line disappeared. After configuring the adaptor and passing the iDoc data into the original flat file receive pipelines I was receiving exceptions. There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "PAPINETPipelines.DeliveryFlatFileReceive, CustomerIntegration2.PAPINET.Pipelines, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4ca3635fbf092bbb" Source: "Pipeline " Receive Port: "recSAP_Delivery" URI: "D:\CustomerIntegration2\SAP\Delivery\*.xml" Reason: An error occurred when parsing the incoming document: "Unexpected data found while looking for: 'Z2EDPZ7' The current definition being parsed is E2EDP07GRP. The stream offset where the error occured is 8859. The line number where the error occured is 23. The column where the error occured is 0.". Although the new flat file looked the same as the old one there was a differences. In the original file all lines in the document were exactly 1064 character long. In the new file all lines were truncated to the last alphanumeric character. The final piece of the puzzle was to add a custom pipeline component to pad all the lines to 1064 characters. This component was added to the decode node of the custom delivery and invoice flat file disassembler pipelines. Execute method of the custom pipeline component: public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pc, IBaseMessage inmsg) { //Convert Stream to a string Stream s = null; IBaseMessagePart bodyPart = inmsg.BodyPart;   // NOTE inmsg.BodyPart.Data is implemented only as a setter in the http adapter API and a //getter and setter for the file adapter. Use GetOriginalDataStream to get data instead. if (bodyPart != null) s = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream();   string newMsg = string.Empty; string strLine; try { StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s); strLine = sr.ReadLine(); while (strLine != null) { //Execute padding code if (strLine != null) strLine = strLine.PadRight(1064, ' ') + "\r\n"; newMsg += strLine; strLine = sr.ReadLine(); } sr.Close(); } catch (IOException ex) { throw new Exception("Error occured trying to pad the message to 1064 charactors"); }   //Convert back to stream and set to Data property inmsg.BodyPart.Data = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(newMsg)); ; //reset the position of the stream to zero inmsg.BodyPart.Data.Position = 0; return inmsg; }

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• Sliding collision response

  - by dbostream

  I have been reading plenty of tutorials about sliding collision responses yet I am not able to implement it properly in my project. What I want to do is make a puck slide along the rounded corner boards of a hockey rink. In my latest attempt the puck does slide along the boards but there are some strange velocity behaviors. First of all the puck slows down a lot pretty much right away and then it slides for awhile and stops before exiting the corner. Even if I double the speed I get a similar behavior and the puck does not make it out of the corner. I used some ideas from this document http://www.peroxide.dk/papers/collision/collision.pdf. This is what I have: Update method called from the game loop when it is time to update the puck (I removed some irrelevant parts). I use two states (current, previous) which are used to interpolate the position during rendering. public override void Update(double fixedTimeStep) { /* Acceleration is set to 0 for now. */ Acceleration.Zero(); PreviousState = CurrentState; _collisionRecursionDepth = 0; CurrentState.Position = SlidingCollision(CurrentState.Position, CurrentState.Velocity * fixedTimeStep + 0.5 * Acceleration * fixedTimeStep * fixedTimeStep); /* Should not this be affected by a sliding collision? and not only the position. */ CurrentState.Velocity = CurrentState.Velocity + Acceleration * fixedTimeStep; Heading = Vector2.NormalizeRet(CurrentState.Velocity); } private Vector2 SlidingCollision(Vector2 position, Vector2 velocity) { if(_collisionRecursionDepth > 5) return position; bool collisionFound = false; Vector2 futurePosition = position + velocity; Vector2 intersectionPoint = new Vector2(); Vector2 intersectionPointNormal = new Vector2(); /* I did not include the collision detection code, if a collision is detected the intersection point and normal in that point is returned. */ if(!collisionFound) return futurePosition; /* If no collision was detected it is safe to move to the future position. */ /* It is not exactly the intersection point, but slightly before. */ Vector2 newPosition = intersectionPoint; /* oldVelocity is set to the distance from the newPosition(intersection point) to the position it had moved to had it not collided. */ Vector2 oldVelocity = futurePosition - newPosition; /* Project the distance left to move along the intersection normal. */ Vector2 newVelocity = oldVelocity - intersectionPointNormal * oldVelocity.DotProduct(intersectionPointNormal); if(newVelocity.LengthSq() < 0.001) return newPosition; /* If almost no speed, no need to continue. */ _collisionRecursionDepth++; return SlidingCollision(newPosition, newVelocity); } What am I doing wrong with the velocity? I have been staring at this for very long so I have gone blind. I have tried different values of recursion depth but it does not seem to make it better. Let me know if you need more information. I appreciate any help. EDIT: A combination of Patrick Hughes' and teodron's answers solved the velocity problem (I think), thanks a lot! This is the new code: I decided to use a separate recursion method now too since I don't want to recalculate the acceleration in each recursion. public override void Update(double fixedTimeStep) { Acceleration.Zero();// = CalculateAcceleration(fixedTimeStep); PreviousState = new MovingEntityState(CurrentState.Position, CurrentState.Velocity); CurrentState = SlidingCollision(CurrentState, fixedTimeStep); Heading = Vector2.NormalizeRet(CurrentState.Velocity); } private MovingEntityState SlidingCollision(MovingEntityState state, double timeStep) { bool collisionFound = false; /* Calculate the next position given no detected collision. */ Vector2 futurePosition = state.Position + state.Velocity * timeStep; Vector2 intersectionPoint = new Vector2(); Vector2 intersectionPointNormal = new Vector2(); /* I did not include the collision detection code, if a collision is detected the intersection point and normal in that point is returned. */ /* If no collision was detected it is safe to move to the future position. */ if (!collisionFound) return new MovingEntityState(futurePosition, state.Velocity); /* Set new position to the intersection point (slightly before). */ Vector2 newPosition = intersectionPoint; /* Project the new velocity along the intersection normal. */ Vector2 newVelocity = state.Velocity - 1.90 * intersectionPointNormal * state.Velocity.DotProduct(intersectionPointNormal); /* Calculate the time of collision. */ double timeOfCollision = Math.Sqrt((newPosition - state.Position).LengthSq() / (futurePosition - state.Position).LengthSq()); /* Calculate new time step, remaining time of full step after the collision * current time step. */ double newTimeStep = timeStep * (1 - timeOfCollision); return SlidingCollision(new MovingEntityState(newPosition, newVelocity), newTimeStep); } Even though the code above seems to slide the puck correctly please have a look at it. I have a few questions, if I don't multiply by 1.90 in the newVelocity calculation it doesn't work (I get a stack overflow when the puck enters the corner because the timeStep decreases very slowly - a collision is found early in every recursion), why is that? what does 1.90 really do and why 1.90? Also I have a new problem, the puck does not move parallell to the short side after exiting the curve; to be more exact it moves outside the rink (I am not checking for any collisions with the short side at the moment). When I perform the collision detection I first check that the puck is in the correct quadrant. For example bottom-right corner is quadrant four i.e. circleCenter.X < puck.X && circleCenter.Y puck.Y is this a problem? or should the short side of the rink be the one to make the puck go parallell to it and not the last collision in the corner? EDIT2: This is the code I use for collision detection, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I can't make the puck slide (-1.0) but only reflect (-2.0): /* Point is the current position (not the predicted one) and quadrant is 4 for the bottom-right corner for example. */ if (GeometryHelper.PointInCircleQuadrant(circleCenter, circleRadius, state.Position, quadrant)) { /* The line is: from = state.Position, to = futurePosition. So a collision is detected when from is inside the circle and to is outside. */ if (GeometryHelper.LineCircleIntersection2d(state.Position, futurePosition, circleCenter, circleRadius, intersectionPoint, quadrant)) { collisionFound = true; /* Set the intersection point to slightly before the real intersection point (I read somewhere this was good to do because of floting point precision, not sure exactly how much though). */ intersectionPoint = intersectionPoint - Vector2.NormalizeRet(state.Velocity) * 0.001; /* Normal at the intersection point. */ intersectionPointNormal = Vector2.NormalizeRet(circleCenter - intersectionPoint) } } When I set the intersection point, if I for example use 0.1 instead of 0.001 the puck travels further before it gets stuck, but for all values I have tried (including 0 - the real intersection point) it gets stuck somewhere (but I necessarily not get a stack overflow). Can something in this part be the cause of my problem? I can see why I get the stack overflow when using -1.0 when calculating the new velocity vector; but not how to solve it. I traced the time steps used in the recursion (initial time step is always 1/60 ~ 0.01666): Recursion depth Time step next recursive call [Start recursion, time step ~ 0.016666] 0 0,000985806527246773 [No collision, stop recursion] [Start recursion, time step ~ 0.016666] 0 0,0149596704364629 1 0,0144883449376379 2 0,0143155612984837 3 0,014224925727213 4 0,0141673917461608 5 0,0141265435314026 6 0,0140953966184117 7 0,0140704653746625 ...and so on. As you can see the collision is detected early in every recursive call which means the next time step decreases very slowly thus the recursion depth gets very big - stack overflow.

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• Routes on a sphere surface - Find geodesic?

  - by CaNNaDaRk

  I'm working with some friends on a browser based game where people can move on a 2D map. It's been almost 7 years and still people play this game so we are thinking of a way to give them something new. Since then the game map was a limited plane and people could move from (0, 0) to (MAX_X, MAX_Y) in quantized X and Y increments (just imagine it as a big chessboard). We believe it's time to give it another dimension so, just a couple of weeks ago, we began to wonder how the game could look with other mappings: Unlimited plane with continous movement: this could be a step forward but still i'm not convinced. Toroidal World (continous or quantized movement): sincerely I worked with torus before but this time I want something more... Spherical world with continous movement: this would be great! What we want Users browsers are given a list of coordinates like (latitude, longitude) for each object on the spherical surface map; browsers must then show this in user's screen rendering them inside a web element (canvas maybe? this is not a problem). When people click on the plane we convert the (mouseX, mouseY) to (lat, lng) and send it to the server which has to compute a route between current user's position to the clicked point. What we have We began writing a Java library with many useful maths to work with Rotation Matrices, Quaternions, Euler Angles, Translations, etc. We put it all together and created a program that generates sphere points, renders them and show them to the user inside a JPanel. We managed to catch clicks and translate them to spherical coords and to provide some other useful features like view rotation, scale, translation etc. What we have now is like a little (very little indeed) engine that simulates client and server interaction. Client side shows points on the screen and catches other interactions, server side renders the view and does other calculus like interpolating the route between current position and clicked point. Where is the problem? Obviously we want to have the shortest path to interpolate between the two route points. We use quaternions to interpolate between two points on the surface of the sphere and this seemed to work fine until i noticed that we weren't getting the shortest path on the sphere surface: We though the problem was that the route is calculated as the sum of two rotations about X and Y axis. So we changed the way we calculate the destination quaternion: We get the third angle (the first is latitude, the second is longitude, the third is the rotation about the vector which points toward our current position) which we called orientation. Now that we have the "orientation" angle we rotate Z axis and then use the result vector as the rotation axis for the destination quaternion (you can see the rotation axis in grey): What we got is the correct route (you can see it lays on a great circle), but we get to this ONLY if the starting route point is at latitude, longitude (0, 0) which means the starting vector is (sphereRadius, 0, 0). With the previous version (image 1) we don't get a good result even when startin point is 0, 0, so i think we're moving towards a solution, but the procedure we follow to get this route is a little "strange" maybe? In the following image you get a view of the problem we get when starting point is not (0, 0), as you can see starting point is not the (sphereRadius, 0, 0) vector, and as you can see the destination point (which is correctly drawn!) is not on the route. The magenta point (the one which lays on the route) is the route's ending point rotated about the center of the sphere of (-startLatitude, 0, -startLongitude). This means that if i calculate a rotation matrix and apply it to every point on the route maybe i'll get the real route, but I start to think that there's a better way to do this. Maybe I should try to get the plane through the center of the sphere and the route points, intersect it with the sphere and get the geodesic? But how? Sorry for being way too verbose and maybe for incorrect English but this thing is blowing my mind! EDIT: This code version is related to the first image: public void setRouteStart(double lat, double lng) { EulerAngles tmp = new EulerAngles ( Math.toRadians(lat), 0, -Math.toRadians(lng)); //set route start Quaternion qtStart.setInertialToObject(tmp); //do other stuff like drawing start point... } public void impostaDestinazione(double lat, double lng) { EulerAngles tmp = new AngoliEulero( Math.toRadians(lat), 0, -Math.toRadians(lng)); qtEnd.setInertialToObject(tmp); //do other stuff like drawing dest point... } public V3D interpolate(double totalTime, double t) { double _t = t/totalTime; Quaternion q = Quaternion.Slerp(qtStart, qtEnd, _t); RotationMatrix.inertialQuatToIObject(q); V3D p = matInt.inertialToObject(V3D.Xaxis.scale(sphereRadius)); //other stuff, like drawing point ... return p; } //mostly taken from a book! public static Quaternion Slerp(Quaternion q0, Quaternion q1, double t) { double cosO = q0.dot(q1); double q1w = q1.w; double q1x = q1.x; double q1y = q1.y; double q1z = q1.z; if (cosO < 0.0f) { q1w = -q1w; q1x = -q1x; q1y = -q1y; q1z = -q1z; cosO = -cosO; } double sinO = Math.sqrt(1.0f - cosO*cosO); double O = Math.atan2(sinO, cosO); double oneOverSinO = 1.0f / senoOmega; k0 = Math.sin((1.0f - t) * O) * oneOverSinO; k1 = Math.sin(t * O) * oneOverSinO; // Interpolate return new Quaternion( k0*q0.w + k1*q1w, k0*q0.x + k1*q1x, k0*q0.y + k1*q1y, k0*q0.z + k1*q1z ); } A little dump of what i get (again check image 1): Route info: Sphere radius and center: 200,000, (0.0, 0.0, 0.0) Route start: lat 0,000 °, lng 0,000 ° @v: (200,000, 0,000, 0,000), |v| = 200,000 Route end: lat 30,000 °, lng 30,000 ° @v: (150,000, 86,603, 100,000), |v| = 200,000 Qt dump: (w, x, y, z), rot. angle°, (x, y, z) rot. axis Qt start: (1,000, 0,000, -0,000, 0,000); 0,000 °; (1,000, 0,000, 0,000) Qt end: (0,933, 0,067, -0,250, 0,250); 42,181 °; (0,186, -0,695, 0,695) Route start: lat 30,000 °, lng 10,000 ° @v: (170,574, 30,077, 100,000), |v| = 200,000 Route end: lat 80,000 °, lng -50,000 ° @v: (22,324, -26,604, 196,962), |v| = 200,000 Qt dump: (w, x, y, z), rot. angle°, (x, y, z) rot. axis Qt start: (0,962, 0,023, -0,258, 0,084); 31,586 °; (0,083, -0,947, 0,309) Qt end: (0,694, -0,272, -0,583, -0,324); 92,062 °; (-0,377, -0,809, -0,450)

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• ASP.NET WebAPI Security 5: JavaScript Clients

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  All samples I showed in my last post were in C#. Christian contributed another client sample in some strange language that is supposed to work well in browsers ;) JavaScript client scenarios There are two fundamental scenarios when it comes to JavaScript clients. The most common is probably that the JS code is originating from the same web application that also contains the web APIs. Think a web page that does some AJAX style callbacks to an API that belongs to that web app – Validation, data access etc. come to mind. Single page apps often fall in that category. The good news here is that this scenario just works. The typical course of events is that the user first logs on to the web application – which will result in an authentication cookie of some sort. That cookie will get round-tripped with your AJAX calls and ASP.NET does its magic to establish a client identity context. Since WebAPI inherits the security context from its (web) host, the client identity is also available here. The other fundamental scenario is JavaScript code *not* running in the context of the WebAPI hosting application. This is more or less just like a normal desktop client – either running in the browser, or if you think of Windows 8 Metro style apps as “real” desktop apps. In that scenario we do exactly the same as the samples did in my last post – obtain a token, then use it to call the service. Obtaining a token from IdentityServer’s resource owner credential OAuth2 endpoint could look like this: thinktectureIdentityModel.BrokeredAuthentication = function (stsEndpointAddress, scope) {     this.stsEndpointAddress = stsEndpointAddress;     this.scope = scope; }; thinktectureIdentityModel.BrokeredAuthentication.prototype = function () {     getIdpToken = function (un, pw, callback) {         $.ajax({             type: 'POST',             cache: false,             url: this.stsEndpointAddress,             data: { grant_type: "password", username: un, password: pw, scope: this.scope },             success: function (result) {                 callback(result.access_token);             },             error: function (error) {                 if (error.status == 401) {                     alert('Unauthorized');                 }                 else {                     alert('Error calling STS: ' + error.responseText);                 }             }         });     };     createAuthenticationHeader = function (token) {         var tok = 'IdSrv ' + token;         return tok;     };     return {         getIdpToken: getIdpToken,         createAuthenticationHeader: createAuthenticationHeader     }; } (); Calling the service with the requested token could look like this: function getIdentityClaimsFromService() {     authHeader = authN.createAuthenticationHeader(token);     $.ajax({         type: 'GET',         cache: false,         url: serviceEndpoint,         beforeSend: function (req) {             req.setRequestHeader('Authorization', authHeader);         },         success: function (result) {              $.each(result.Claims, function (key, val) {                 $('#claims').append($('<li>' + val.Value + '</li>'))             });         },         error: function (error) {             alert('Error: ' + error.responseText);         }     }); I updated the github repository, you can can play around with the code yourself.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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• 3D picking lwjgl

  - by Wirde

  I have written some code to preform 3D picking that for some reason dosn't work entirely correct! (Im using LWJGL just so you know.) I posted this at stackoverflow at first but after researching some more in to my problem i found this neat site and tought that you guys might be more qualified to answer this question. This is how the code looks like: if(Mouse.getEventButton() == 1) { if (!Mouse.getEventButtonState()) { Camera.get().generateViewMatrix(); float screenSpaceX = ((Mouse.getX()/800f/2f)-1.0f)*Camera.get().getAspectRatio(); float screenSpaceY = 1.0f-(2*((600-Mouse.getY())/600f)); float displacementRate = (float)Math.tan(Camera.get().getFovy()/2); screenSpaceX *= displacementRate; screenSpaceY *= displacementRate; Vector4f cameraSpaceNear = new Vector4f((float) (screenSpaceX * Camera.get().getNear()), (float) (screenSpaceY * Camera.get().getNear()), (float) (-Camera.get().getNear()), 1); Vector4f cameraSpaceFar = new Vector4f((float) (screenSpaceX * Camera.get().getFar()), (float) (screenSpaceY * Camera.get().getFar()), (float) (-Camera.get().getFar()), 1); Matrix4f tmpView = new Matrix4f(); Camera.get().getViewMatrix().transpose(tmpView); Matrix4f invertedViewMatrix = (Matrix4f)tmpView.invert(); Vector4f worldSpaceNear = new Vector4f(); Matrix4f.transform(invertedViewMatrix, cameraSpaceNear, worldSpaceNear); Vector4f worldSpaceFar = new Vector4f(); Matrix4f.transform(invertedViewMatrix, cameraSpaceFar, worldSpaceFar); Vector3f rayPosition = new Vector3f(worldSpaceNear.x, worldSpaceNear.y, worldSpaceNear.z); Vector3f rayDirection = new Vector3f(worldSpaceFar.x - worldSpaceNear.x, worldSpaceFar.y - worldSpaceNear.y, worldSpaceFar.z - worldSpaceNear.z); rayDirection.normalise(); Ray clickRay = new Ray(rayPosition, rayDirection); Vector tMin = new Vector(), tMax = new Vector(), tempPoint; float largestEnteringValue, smallestExitingValue, temp, closestEnteringValue = Camera.get().getFar()+0.1f; Drawable closestDrawableHit = null; for(Drawable d : this.worldModel.getDrawableThings()) { // Calcualte AABB for each object... needs to be moved later... firstVertex = true; for(Surface surface : d.getSurfaces()) { for(Vertex v : surface.getVertices()) { worldPosition.x = (v.x+d.getPosition().x)*d.getScale().x; worldPosition.y = (v.y+d.getPosition().y)*d.getScale().y; worldPosition.z = (v.z+d.getPosition().z)*d.getScale().z; worldPosition = worldPosition.rotate(d.getRotation()); if (firstVertex) { maxX = worldPosition.x; maxY = worldPosition.y; maxZ = worldPosition.z; minX = worldPosition.x; minY = worldPosition.y; minZ = worldPosition.z; firstVertex = false; } else { if (worldPosition.x > maxX) { maxX = worldPosition.x; } if (worldPosition.x < minX) { minX = worldPosition.x; } if (worldPosition.y > maxY) { maxY = worldPosition.y; } if (worldPosition.y < minY) { minY = worldPosition.y; } if (worldPosition.z > maxZ) { maxZ = worldPosition.z; } if (worldPosition.z < minZ) { minZ = worldPosition.z; } } } } // ray/slabs intersection test... // clickRay.getOrigin().x + clickRay.getDirection().x * f = minX // clickRay.getOrigin().x - minX = -clickRay.getDirection().x * f // clickRay.getOrigin().x/-clickRay.getDirection().x - minX/-clickRay.getDirection().x = f // -clickRay.getOrigin().x/clickRay.getDirection().x + minX/clickRay.getDirection().x = f largestEnteringValue = -clickRay.getOrigin().x/clickRay.getDirection().x + minX/clickRay.getDirection().x; temp = -clickRay.getOrigin().y/clickRay.getDirection().y + minY/clickRay.getDirection().y; if(largestEnteringValue < temp) { largestEnteringValue = temp; } temp = -clickRay.getOrigin().z/clickRay.getDirection().z + minZ/clickRay.getDirection().z; if(largestEnteringValue < temp) { largestEnteringValue = temp; } smallestExitingValue = -clickRay.getOrigin().x/clickRay.getDirection().x + maxX/clickRay.getDirection().x; temp = -clickRay.getOrigin().y/clickRay.getDirection().y + maxY/clickRay.getDirection().y; if(smallestExitingValue > temp) { smallestExitingValue = temp; } temp = -clickRay.getOrigin().z/clickRay.getDirection().z + maxZ/clickRay.getDirection().z; if(smallestExitingValue < temp) { smallestExitingValue = temp; } if(largestEnteringValue > smallestExitingValue) { //System.out.println("Miss!"); } else { if (largestEnteringValue < closestEnteringValue) { closestEnteringValue = largestEnteringValue; closestDrawableHit = d; } } } if(closestDrawableHit != null) { System.out.println("Hit at: (" + clickRay.setDistance(closestEnteringValue).x + ", " + clickRay.getCurrentPosition().y + ", " + clickRay.getCurrentPosition().z); this.worldModel.removeDrawableThing(closestDrawableHit); } } } I just don't understand what's wrong, the ray are shooting and i do hit stuff that gets removed but the result of the ray are verry strange it sometimes removes the thing im clicking at, sometimes it removes things thats not even close to what im clicking at, and sometimes it removes nothing at all. Edit: Okay so i have continued searching for errors and by debugging the ray (by painting smal dots where it travles) i can now se that there is something oviously wrong with the ray that im sending out... it has its origin near the world center (nearer or further away depending on where on the screen im clicking) and always shots to the same position no matter where I direct my camera... My initial toughts is that there might be some error in the way i calculate my viewMatrix (since it's not possible to get the viewmatrix from the gluLookAt method in lwjgl; I have to build it my self and I guess thats where the problem is at)... Edit2: This is how i calculate it currently: private double[][] viewMatrixDouble = {{0,0,0,0}, {0,0,0,0}, {0,0,0,0}, {0,0,0,1}}; public Vector getCameraDirectionVector() { Vector actualEye = this.getActualEyePosition(); return new Vector(lookAt.x-actualEye.x, lookAt.y-actualEye.y, lookAt.z-actualEye.z); } public Vector getActualEyePosition() { return eye.rotate(this.getRotation()); } public void generateViewMatrix() { Vector cameraDirectionVector = getCameraDirectionVector().normalize(); Vector side = Vector.cross(cameraDirectionVector, this.upVector).normalize(); Vector up = Vector.cross(side, cameraDirectionVector); viewMatrixDouble[0][0] = side.x; viewMatrixDouble[0][1] = up.x; viewMatrixDouble[0][2] = -cameraDirectionVector.x; viewMatrixDouble[1][0] = side.y; viewMatrixDouble[1][1] = up.y; viewMatrixDouble[1][2] = -cameraDirectionVector.y; viewMatrixDouble[2][0] = side.z; viewMatrixDouble[2][1] = up.z; viewMatrixDouble[2][2] = -cameraDirectionVector.z; /* Vector actualEyePosition = this.getActualEyePosition(); Vector zaxis = new Vector(this.lookAt.x - actualEyePosition.x, this.lookAt.y - actualEyePosition.y, this.lookAt.z - actualEyePosition.z).normalize(); Vector xaxis = Vector.cross(upVector, zaxis).normalize(); Vector yaxis = Vector.cross(zaxis, xaxis); viewMatrixDouble[0][0] = xaxis.x; viewMatrixDouble[0][1] = yaxis.x; viewMatrixDouble[0][2] = zaxis.x; viewMatrixDouble[1][0] = xaxis.y; viewMatrixDouble[1][1] = yaxis.y; viewMatrixDouble[1][2] = zaxis.y; viewMatrixDouble[2][0] = xaxis.z; viewMatrixDouble[2][1] = yaxis.z; viewMatrixDouble[2][2] = zaxis.z; viewMatrixDouble[3][0] = -Vector.dot(xaxis, actualEyePosition); viewMatrixDouble[3][1] =-Vector.dot(yaxis, actualEyePosition); viewMatrixDouble[3][2] = -Vector.dot(zaxis, actualEyePosition); */ viewMatrix = new Matrix4f(); viewMatrix.load(getViewMatrixAsFloatBuffer()); } Would be verry greatfull if anyone could verify if this is wrong or right, and if it's wrong; supply me with the right way of doing it... I have read alot of threads and documentations about this but i can't seam to wrapp my head around it... Edit3: Okay with the help of Byte56 (thanks alot for the help) i have now concluded that it's not the viewMatrix that is the problem... I still get the same messedup result; anyone that think that they can find the error in my code, i certenly can't, have bean working on this for 3 days now :(

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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• Open GL stars are not rendering

  - by Darestium

  I doing Nehe's Open GL Lesson 9. I'm using SFML for windowing, the strange thing is no stars are rendering. #include <SFML/System.hpp> #include <SFML/Window.hpp> #include <SFML/Graphics.hpp> #include <iostream> void processEvents(sf::Window *app); void processInput(sf::Window *app); void renderGlScene(sf::Window *app); void init(); int loadResources(); const int NUM_OF_STARS = 50; float triRot = 0.0f; float quadRot = 0.0f; bool twinkle = false; bool tKey = false; float zoom = 15.0f; float tilt = 90.0f; float spin = 0.0f; unsigned int loop; unsigned int texture_handle[1]; typedef struct { int r, g, b; float distance; float angle; } stars; stars star[NUM_OF_STARS]; int main() { sf::Window app(sf::VideoMode(800, 600, 32), "Nehe Lesson 9"); app.UseVerticalSync(false); init(); if (loadResources() == -1) { return EXIT_FAILURE; } while (app.IsOpened()) { processEvents(&app); processInput(&app); renderGlScene(&app); app.Display(); } return EXIT_SUCCESS; } int loadResources() { sf::Image img_data; // Load Texture if (!img_data.LoadFromFile("data/images/star.bmp")) { std::cout << "Could not load data/images/star.bmp"; return -1; } // Generate 1 texture glGenTextures(1, &texture_handle[0]); // Linear filtering glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_handle[0]); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, img_data.GetWidth(), img_data.GetHeight(), 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, img_data.GetPixelsPtr()); return 0; } void processInput(sf::Window *app) { const sf::Input& input = app->GetInput(); if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::T) && !tKey) { tKey = true; twinkle = !twinkle; } if (!input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::T)) { tKey = false; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Up)) { tilt -= 0.05f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Down)) { tilt += 0.05f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::PageUp)) { zoom -= 0.02f; } if (input.IsKeyDown(sf::Key::Up)) { zoom += 0.02f; } } void init() { glClearDepth(1.f); glClearColor(0.f, 0.f, 0.f, 0.f); // Enable texturing glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); //glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); // Setup a perpective projection glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); gluPerspective(45.f, 1.f, 1.f, 500.f); glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE); glEnable(GL_BLEND); for (loop = 0; loop < NUM_OF_STARS; loop++) { star[loop].distance = (float)loop / NUM_OF_STARS * 5.0f; // Calculate distance from the centre // Give stars random rgb value star[loop].r = rand() % 256; star[loop].g = rand() % 256; star[loop].b = rand() % 256; } } void processEvents(sf::Window *app) { sf::Event event; while (app->GetEvent(event)) { if (event.Type == sf::Event::Closed) { app->Close(); } if (event.Type == sf::Event::KeyPressed && event.Key.Code == sf::Key::Escape) { app->Close(); } } } void renderGlScene(sf::Window *app) { app->SetActive(); // Clear color depth buffer glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // Apply some transformations glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // Select texture glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture_handle[0]); for (loop = 0; loop < NUM_OF_STARS; loop++) { glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The View Before We Draw Each Star glTranslatef(0.0f, 0.0f, zoom); // Zoom Into The Screen (Using The Value In 'zoom') glRotatef(tilt, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Tilt The View (Using The Value In 'tilt') glRotatef(star[loop].angle, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Rotate To The Current Stars Angle glTranslatef(star[loop].distance, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Move Forward On The X Plane glRotatef(-star[loop].angle,0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Cancel The Current Stars Angle glRotatef(-tilt,1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Cancel The Screen Tilt if (twinkle) { glColor4ub(star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop) - 1].r, star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop)-1].g, star[(NUM_OF_STARS - loop) - 1].b, 255); glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Begin Drawing The Textured Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glEnd(); // Done Drawing The Textured Quad } glRotatef(spin,0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Rotate The Star On The Z Axis // Assign A Color Using Bytes glColor4ub(star[loop].r, star[loop].g, star[loop].b, 255); glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Begin Drawing The Textured Quad glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glEnd(); // Done Drawing The Textured Quad spin += 0.01f; // Used To Spin The Stars star[loop].angle += (float)loop / NUM_OF_STARS; // Changes The Angle Of A Star star[loop].distance -= 0.01f; // Changes The Distance Of A Star if (star[loop].distance < 0.0f) { star[loop].distance += 5.0f; // Move The Star 5 Units From The Center star[loop].r = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Red Value star[loop].g = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Green Value star[loop].b = rand() % 256; // Give It A New Blue Value } } } I've looked over the code atleast 10 times now and I can't figure out the problem. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Find Table without Clustered Index – Find Table with no Primary Key Clustered index is very important concept for any table. They impact the performance very heavily. Here is a quick script to find tables without a clustered index. Replace TEXT with VARCHAR(MAX) – Stop using TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE Data Types Question: “Is VARCHAR (MAX) big enough to store the TEXT field?” Answer: “Yes, VARCHAR(MAX) is big enough to accommodate TEXT field. TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE data types of SQL Server 2000 will be deprecated in a future version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility to data types but it is recommended to use new data types which are VARHCAR (MAX), NVARCHAR (MAX) and VARBINARY (MAX).” Limiting Result Sets by Using TABLESAMPLE – Examples Introduced in SQL Server 2005, TABLESAMPLE allows you to extract a sampling of rows from a table in the FROM clause. The rows retrieved are random and they are are not in any order. This sampling can be based on a percentage of number of rows. You can use TABLESAMPLE when only a sampling of rows is necessary for the application instead of a full result set. User Defined Functions (UDF) Limitations UDF have its own advantage and usage but in this article we will see the limitation of UDF. Things UDF can not do and why Stored Procedure are considered as more flexible then UDFs. Stored Procedure are more flexibility then User Defined Functions(UDF). However, this blog post is a good read to know what are the limitations of UDF. Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility For a long time SQL Server stayed on the compatibility level of 80 which is of SQL Server 2000. However, as soon as SQL Server 2005 introduced the issue of compatibility was quite a major issue. Since that time MS has been releasing the versions at every 2-3 years, changing compatibility is a ever popular topic. In this blog post, we learn how we can do the same using T-SQL. We can also do the same using SSMS and here is the blog post for the same: Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility – Part 2 – Management Studio. Constraint on VARCHAR(MAX) Field To Limit It Certain Length How can I limit the VARCHAR(MAX) field with maximum length of 12500 characters only. His Question was valid as our application was allowed 12500 characters. First of all – this requirement is bit strange but if someone wants to do the same, they can do it as described in this blog post. 2008 UNPIVOT Table Example Understanding UNPIVOT can be very complicated at times. In this blog post, I have attempted to explain the same concept in very simple words. Create Default Constraint Over Table Column A simple straight to script blog post – I still use this blog quite many times for my own reference. UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function It took me 4 iteration to find this very simple function which can immediately get the day of the week in a single line. 2009 Find Hostname and Current Logged In User Name There are two tricks listed in this blog post where users can find out the hostname and current logged user name immediately and very easily. Interesting Observation of Logon Trigger On All Servers When I was doing a project, I made an interesting observation of executing a logon trigger multiple times. It was absolutely unexpected for me! As I was logging only once, naturally, I was expecting the entry only once. However, it did it multiple times on different threads – indeed an eccentric phenomenon at first sight! Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key One needs to be very careful in selecting the Primary Key as an incorrect selection can adversely impact the database architect and future normalization. For a Candidate Key to qualify as a Primary Key, it should be Non-NULL and unique in any domain. I have observed quite often that Primary Keys are seldom changed. I would like to have your feedback on not changing a Primary Key. Create Multiple Filegroup For Single Database Why should one create multiple file group for any database and what are the advantages of the same. In this blog post, I explain the same in detail. List All Objects Created on All Filegroups in Database In this blog post we discuss the essential question – “How can I find which object belongs to which filegroup. Is there any way to know this?” 2010 DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 When DATE is converted to DATETIME it adds the of midnight. When TIME is converted to DATETIME it adds the date of 1900 and it is something one wants to consider if you are going to run scripts from SQL Server 2008 to earlier version with CONVERT. Disabled Index and Update Statistics If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexes are also updated. Precision of SMALLDATETIME – A 1 Minute Precision The precision of the datatype SMALLDATETIME is 1 minute. It discards the seconds by rounding up or rounding down any seconds greater than zero. 2011 Getting Columns Headers without Result Data – SET FMTONLY ON SET FMTONLY ON returns only metadata to the client. It can be used to test the format of the response without actually running the query. When this setting is ON the resultset only have headers of the results but no data. Copy Database from Instance to Another Instance – Copy Paste in SQL Server SQL Server has a feature which copy database from one database to another database and it can be automated as well using SSIS. Make sure you have SQL Server Agent Turned on as this feature will create a job. Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*) If you have ever wondered SELECT * gives error when executed alone but SELECT COUNT(*) does not. Why? in that case, you should read this blog post. Creating All New Database with Full Recovery Model This blog post is very based on very interesting story where the user wants to do something by default for every single new database created. Model database is a secret weapon which should be used very carefully and with proper evalution. If used carefully this can be a very much beneficiary when we need a newly created database behave in certain fashion. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling?  This is probably a silly question because – of course you can!  Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life.  It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Read five part series on developer training subject Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Data-driven animation states

  - by user8363

  I'm trying to handle animations in a 2D game engine hobby project, without hard-coding them. Hard coding animation states seems like a common but very strange phenomenon, to me. A little background: I'm working with an entity system where components are bags of data and subsystems act upon them. I chose to use a polling system to update animation states. With animation states I mean: "walking_left", "running_left", "walking_right", "shooting", ... My idea to handle animations was to design it as a data driven model. Data could be stored in an xml file, a rdbms, ... And could be loaded at the start of a game / level/ ... This way you can easily edit animations and transitions without having to go change the code everywhere in your game. As an example I made an xml draft of the data definitions I had in mind. One very important piece of data would simply be the description of an animation. An animation would have a unique id (a descriptive name). It would hold a reference id to an image (the sprite sheet it uses, because different animations may use different sprite sheets). The frames per second to run the animation on. The "replay" here defines if an animation should be run once or infinitely. Then I defined a list of rectangles as frames. <animation id='WIZARD_WALK_LEFT'> <image id='WIZARD_WALKING' /> <fps>50</fps> <replay>true</replay> <frames> <rectangle> <x>0</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> <rectangle> <x>45</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> </frames> </animation> Animation data would be loaded and held in an animation resource pool and referenced by game entities that are using it. It would be treated as a resource like an image, a sound, a texture, ... The second piece of data to define would be a state machine to handle animation states and transitions. This defines each state a game entity can be in, which states it can transition to and what triggers that state change. This state machine would differ from entity to entity. Because a bird might have states "walking" and "flying" while a human would only have the state "walking". However it could be shared by different entities because multiple humans will probably have the same states (especially when you define some common NPCs like monsters, etc). Additionally an orc might have the same states as a human. Just to demonstrate that this state definition might be shared but only by a select group of game entities. <state id='IDLE'> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_LEFT'> <event trigger='LEFT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_RIGHT'> <event trigger='RIGHT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> </state> These states can be handled by a polling system. Each game tick it grabs the current state of a game entity and checks all triggers. If a condition is met it changes the entity's state to the "goto" state. The last part I was struggling with was how to bind animation data and animation states to an entity. The most logical approach seemed to me to add a pointer to the state machine data an entity uses and to define for each state in that machine what animation it uses. Here is an xml example how I would define the animation behavior and graphical representation of some common entities in a game, by addressing animation state and animation data id. Note that both "wizard" and "orc" have the same animation states but a different animation. Also, a different animation could mean a different sprite sheet, or even a different sequence of animations (an animation could be longer or shorter). <entity name="wizard"> <state id="IDLE" animation="WIZARD_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="WIZARD_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> <entity name="orc"> <state id="IDLE" animation="ORC_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="ORC_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> When the entity is being created it would add a list of states with state machine data and an animation data reference. In the future I would use the entity system to build whole entities by defining components in a similar xml format. -- This is what I have come up with after some research. However I had some trouble getting my head around it, so I was hoping op some feedback. Is there something here what doesn't make sense, or is there a better way to handle these things? I grasped the idea of iterating through frames but I'm having trouble to take it a step further and this is my attempt to do that.

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• Silverlight IConvertible TypeConverter

  - by codingbloke

  I recently answered the following question on stackoverflow:  Silverlight 3 custom control: only ‘int’ as numeric type for a property? [e.g. long or int64 seems to break] I quickly knocked up the class ConvertibleTypeConverter<T> that I posted in the question (listed later here as well). Afterward I fully expected to find that of the usual clever “bods who blog” to have covered this probably with a better solution than I.  So far though I’ve not found one so I thought I’d blog it myself. The Problem Here is a classic gotcha I’ve seen asked more than once on stackoverflow :- public class MyClass {     public float SomeValue { get; set; } } <local:MyClass SomeValue="45.15" /> This fails with the error  “Failed to create a 'System.Single' from the text '45.15'”  and results in much premature hair loss.  Fortunately this is SL4, in SL3 the error message is almost meaningless.  So what gives, how can it be that this fails when we can see other very similar values parsing happily all over the place? It comes down the fact that the Xaml parser only handles a few of the primitive data types namely: bool, int, string and double.  Since the parser has no idea how to convert a string to a float we get the above error. The Solution The sensible solution is “use double not float” but lets not dwell on that, there has to be occasions where such an answer isn’t acceptable. In order to achieve parsing of other types we need an implementation of TypeConverter for the type of the property and then we need to use the TypeConverterAttribute to decorate the property .  As an example the Silverlight SDK provides one for DateTime the DateTimeTypeConverter (yes I know DateTime isn’t really a primitive). The following class will parse in Xaml:- public class MyClass {     [TypeConverter(typeof(DateTimeTypeConverter))]     public DateTime SomeValue {get; set; } } So far though we would need to create a TypeConverter for each primitive type we are using, what if I had the following mad class to support in Xaml:- public class StrangePrimitives {     public Boolean BooleanProp { get; set; }     public Byte ByteProp { get; set; }     public Char CharProp { get; set; }     public DateTime DateTimeProp { get; set; }     public Decimal DecimalProp { get; set; }     public Double DoubleProp { get; set; }     public Int16 Int16Prop { get; set; }     public Int32 Int32Prop { get; set; }     public Int64 Int64Prop { get; set; }     public SByte SByteProp { get; set; }     public Single SingleProp { get; set; }     public String StringProp { get; set; }     public UInt16 UInt16Prop { get; set; }     public UInt32 UInt32Prop { get; set; }     public UInt64 UInt64Prop { get; set; } } Then I want to fill an instance of StrangePrimitives with the following Xaml which of course fails. <local:StrangePrimitives x:Key="MyStrangePrimitives"                          BooleanProp="True"                          ByteProp="156"                          CharProp="A"                          DateTimeProp="06 Jun 2010"                          DecimalProp="123.56"                          DoubleProp="8372.937803"                          Int16Prop="16532"                          Int32Prop="73738248"                          Int64Prop="12345678909298"                          SByteProp="-123"                          SingleProp="39.0"                          StringProp="Hello, World!"                          UInt16Prop="40000"                          UInt32Prop="4294967295"                          UInt64Prop="18446744073709551615"      /> I got to thinking, though, one thing all these primitive types have in common is that they all implement IConvertible so it should be possible to write just one converter to handle them all.  Here it is:- The ConvertibleTypeConverter public class ConvertibleTypeConverter<T> : TypeConverter where T : IConvertible {     public override bool CanConvertFrom(ITypeDescriptorContext context, Type sourceType)     {         return sourceType.GetInterface("IConvertible", false) != null;     }     public override bool CanConvertTo(ITypeDescriptorContext context, Type destinationType)     {         return destinationType.GetInterface("IConvertible", false) != null;     }     public override object ConvertFrom(ITypeDescriptorContext context, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture, object value)     {         return ((IConvertible)value).ToType(typeof(T), culture);     }     public override object ConvertTo(ITypeDescriptorContext context, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture, object value, Type destinationType)     {         return ((IConvertible)value).ToType(destinationType, culture);     } } I won’t bore you with an explanation of how it works, it simply adapts one existing interface (the IConvertible) and exposes it as another (the TypeConverter).   With that in place the previous strange primitives class can be modified as:- public class StrangePrimitives {     public Boolean BooleanProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Byte>))]     public Byte ByteProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Char>))]     public Char CharProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<DateTime>))]     public DateTime DateTimeProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Decimal>))]     public Decimal DecimalProp { get; set; }     public Double DoubleProp {get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Int16>))]     public Int16 Int16Prop { get; set; }     public Int32 Int32Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Int64>))]     public Int64 Int64Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<SByte>))]     public SByte SByteProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<Single>))]     public Single SingleProp { get; set; }     public String StringProp { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<UInt16>))]     public UInt16 UInt16Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<UInt32>))]     public UInt32 UInt32Prop { get; set; }     [TypeConverter(typeof(ConvertibleTypeConverter<UInt64>))]     public UInt64 UInt64Prop { get; set; } } This results in the previous Xaml parsing happily.  Now it seems such an obvious thing to do that one may wonder why such a class doesn’t already existing in Silverlight or at least in the SDK.   I would not be surprised if there were some very good reasons hence use the ConvertibleTypeConverter with caution.  It does seem to me to be a useful little class to have lying around in the toolbox for the odd occasion where it may be needed.

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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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• Nokia Windows Phone 8 App Collection

  - by Tim Murphy

  I recently upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 920.  Along with it came the availability of a number of Nokia developed apps or apps that Nokia has made available from other developers.  Below is a summary of some of the ones that I have used to this point.  There are quite a few of them so I won’t be covering everything that is available. Nokia Maps I am quite pleased with the accuracy of Nokia Maps and not having to tap the screen for each turn any more.  The information on the screen is quite good as well.  The couple of improvements I would like to see are for the voice directions to include which street or exit you need to use and improve the search accuracy.  Bing maps had much better search results in my opinion. Nokia Drive This one really had me confused when I first setup the phone.  I was driving down the road and suddenly I am getting notification tones, but there were no visual notifications on the phone.  It seems that in their infinite wisdom Nokia thinks I don’t know when I am going over the speed limit and need to be told. ESPN I really liked my ESPN app on Windows Phone 7.5, but I am not getting the type of experience I was looking for out of this app.  While it allows me to pick my favorite teams, but there isn’t a pivot page or panorama page that shows a summary of my favorite teams.  I have also found that the live tile don’t update very often.  Over all I am rather disappointed compared app produced by ESPN. Smart Shoot I really need to get the kids to let me use this on.  I like the concept, but I need to spend more time with it.  The idea how running the camera through a continuous shooting mode and then picking the best is something that I have done with my DSLR and am glad to see it available here. Cinemagraph Here is a fun filter.  It doesn’t have the most accurate editing features, but it is fun to stop certain parts of a scene and let other parts move.  As a test I stopped the traffic on the highway and let the traffic on the frontage road flow.  It makes for a fun effect.  If nothing else it could be great for sending prank animations to your friends. YouSendIt I have only briefly touched this application.  What I don’t understand is why it is needed.  Most of the functionality seems to be similar to SkyDrive and it gives you less storage.  They only feature that seems to differentiate the app is the signature capability. Creative Studio This app has some nice quick edits, but it is not very comprehensive.  I am also not to thrilled with the user experience.  It puts you though an initial color cast series that I’m not sure why it is there.  Discovery of the remaining adjustments isn’t that great.  In the end I found myself wanting Thumbia back. Panorama This is one of the apps that I like.  I found it easy to use as it guides you with a target circle that you center for it to take the next pictures.  It also stitches the images with amazing speed.  The one thing I wish it had was the capability to turn the phone into portrait orientation and do a taller panorama.  Perhaps we will see this in the future. Nokia Music After getting over the missing album art I found that there were a number of missing features with this app as well.  I have a Zune HD and I am used to being able to go through my collection and adding songs, albums or artists to my now playing.  There also doesn’t seem to be a way to manage playlists that I have seen yet.  Other than that the UI is familiar and it give Nokia City Lens Augmented reality is a cool concept, but I still haven’t seen it implemented in a compelling fashion beyond a demo at TED a couple of years ago.  The app still leaves me wanting as well.  It does give an interesting toy.  It gives you the ability to look for general categories and see general direction and clusters of locations.  I think as this concept is better thought out it will become more compelling. Nokia Trailers I don’t know how often I will use this app, but I do like being able to see what movies are being promoted.  I can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out and the trailer was just what the doctor ordered.  I can see coming back to this app from time to time. PhotoBeamer PhotoBeamer is a strange beast that needs a better instruction manual.  It seems a lot like magic but very confusing.  I need some more testing, but I don’t think this is something that most people are going to understand quickly and may give up before getting it to work.  I may put an update here after playing with it further. Ringtone Maker The app was just published and it didn’t work very well for me. It couldn’t find 95% of the songs that Nokia Music was playing for me and crashed several times.  It also had songs named wrong that when I checked them in Nokia Music they were fine.  This app looks like it has a long way to go. Summary In all I think that Nokia is offering a well rounded set of initial applications that can get any new owner started.  There is definitely room for improvement in all of these apps.  The main need is usability upgrades.  I would guess that with feedback from users they will come up to acceptable levels.  Try them out and see if you agree. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Nokia,Lumia,Nokia Apps,ESPN,PhotoBeamer,City Lens,YouSendIt,Drive,Maps

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• b2Body moves without stopping

  - by SentineL

  I got a quite strange bug. It is difficult to explain it in two words, but i'll try to do this in short. My b2Body has restitution, friction, density, mass and collision group. I controlling my b2Body via setting linear velocity to it (called on every iteration): (void)moveToDirection:(CGPoint)direction onlyHorizontal:(BOOL)horizontal { b2Vec2 velocity = [controlledObject getBody]-GetLinearVelocity(); double horizontalSpeed = velocity.x + controlledObject.acceleration * direction.x; velocity.x = (float32) (abs((int) horizontalSpeed) < controlledObject.runSpeed ? horizontalSpeed : controlledObject.maxSpeed * direction.x); if (!horizontal) { velocity.y = velocity.y + controlledObject.runSpeed * direction.y; } [controlledObject getBody]->SetLinearVelocity(velocity); } My floor is static b2Body, it has as restitution, friction, density, mass and same collision group in some reason, I'm setting b2Body's friction of my Hero to zero when it is moving, and returning it to 1 when he stops. When I'm pushing run button, hero runs. when i'm releasing it, he stops. All of this works perfect. On jumping, I'm setting linear velocity to my Hero: (void)jump { b2Vec2 velocity = [controlledObject getBody]->GetLinearVelocity(); velocity.y = velocity.y + [[AppDel cfg] getHeroJumpVlelocity]; [controlledObject getBody]->SetLinearVelocity(velocity); } If I'll run, jump, and release run button, while he is in air, all will work fine. And here is my problem: If I'll run, jump, and continue running on landing (or when he goes from one static body to another: there is small fall, probably), Hero will start move, like he has no friction, but he has! I checked this via beakpoints: he has friction, but I can move left of right, and he will never stop, until i'll jump (or go from one static body to another), with unpressed running button. I allready tried: Set friction to body on every iteration double-check am I setting friction to right fixture. set Linear Damping to Hero: his move slows down on gugged moveing. A little more code: I have a sensor and body fixtures in my hero: (void) addBodyFixture { b2CircleShape dynamicBox; dynamicBox.m_radius = [[AppDel cfg] getHeroRadius]; b2FixtureDef bodyFixtureDef; bodyFixtureDef.shape = &dynamicBox; bodyFixtureDef.density = 1.0f; bodyFixtureDef.friction = [[AppDel cfg] getHeroFriction]; bodyFixtureDef.restitution = [[AppDel cfg] getHeroRestitution]; bodyFixtureDef.filter.categoryBits = 0x0001; bodyFixtureDef.filter.maskBits = 0x0001; bodyFixtureDef.filter.groupIndex = 0; bodyFixtureDef.userData = [NSNumber numberWithInt:FIXTURE_BODY]; [physicalBody addFixture:bodyFixtureDef]; } (void) addSensorFixture { b2CircleShape sensorBox; sensorBox.m_radius = [[AppDel cfg] getHeroRadius] * 0.95; sensorBox.m_p.Set(0, -[[AppDel cfg] getHeroRadius] / 10); b2FixtureDef sensor; sensor.shape = &sensorBox; sensor.filter.categoryBits = 0x0001; sensor.filter.maskBits = 0x0001; sensor.filter.groupIndex = 0; sensor.isSensor = YES; sensor.userData = [NSNumber numberWithInt:FIXTURE_SENSOR]; [physicalBody addFixture:sensor]; } Here I'm tracking is hero in air: void FixtureContactListener::BeginContact(b2Contact* contact) { // We need to copy out the data because the b2Contact passed in // is reused. Squirrel *squirrel = (Squirrel *)contact->GetFixtureB()->GetBody()->GetUserData(); if (squirrel) { [squirrel addContact]; } } void FixtureContactListener::EndContact(b2Contact* contact) { Squirrel *squirrel = (Squirrel *)contact->GetFixtureB()->GetBody()->GetUserData(); if (squirrel) { [squirrel removeContact]; } } here is Hero's logic on contacts: - (void) addContact { if (contactCount == 0) [self landing]; contactCount++; } - (void) removeContact { contactCount--; if (contactCount == 0) [self flying]; if (contactCount <0) contactCount = 0; } - (void)landing { inAir = NO; acceleration = [[AppDel cfg] getHeroRunAcceleration]; [sprite stopAllActions]; (running ? [sprite runAction:[self runAction]] : [sprite runAction:[self standAction]]); } - (void)flying { inAir = YES; acceleration = [[AppDel cfg] getHeroAirAcceleration]; [sprite stopAllActions]; [self flyAction]; } here is Hero's moving logic: - (void)stop { running = NO; if (!inAir) { [sprite stopAllActions]; [sprite runAction:[self standAction]]; } } - (void)left { [physicalBody setFriction:0]; if (!running && !inAir) { [sprite stopAllActions]; [sprite runAction:[self runAction]]; } running = YES; moveingDirection = NO; [bodyControls moveToDirection:CGPointMake(-1, 0) onlyHorizontal:YES]; } - (void)right { [physicalBody setFriction:0]; if (!running && !inAir) { [sprite stopAllActions]; [sprite runAction:[self runAction]]; } running = YES; moveingDirection = YES; [bodyControls moveToDirection:CGPointMake(1, 0) onlyHorizontal:YES]; } - (void)jump { if (!inAir) { [bodyControls jump]; } } and here is my update method (called on every iteration): - (void)update:(NSMutableDictionary *)buttons { if (!isDead) { [self updateWithButtonName:BUTTON_LEFT inButtons:buttons whenPressed:@selector(left) whenUnpressed:@selector(stop)]; [self updateWithButtonName:BUTTON_RIGHT inButtons:buttons whenPressed:@selector(right) whenUnpressed:@selector(stop)]; [self updateWithButtonName:BUTTON_UP inButtons:buttons whenPressed:@selector(jump) whenUnpressed:@selector(nothing)]; [self updateWithButtonName:BUTTON_DOWN inButtons:buttons whenPressed:@selector(nothing) whenUnpressed:@selector(nothing)]; [sprite setFlipX:(moveingDirection)]; } [self checkPosition]; if (!running) [physicalBody setFriction:[[AppDel cfg] getHeroFriction]]; else [physicalBody setFriction:0]; } - (void)updateWithButtonName:(NSString *)buttonName inButtons:(NSDictionary *)buttons whenPressed:(SEL)pressedSelector whenUnpressed:(SEL)unpressedSelector { NSNumber *buttonNumber = [buttons objectForKey:buttonName]; if (buttonNumber == nil) return; if ([buttonNumber boolValue]) [self performSelector:pressedSelector]; else [self performSelector:unpressedSelector]; } - (void)checkPosition { b2Body *body = [self getBody]; b2Vec2 position = body->GetPosition(); CGPoint inWorldPosition = [[AppDel cfg] worldMeterPointFromScreenPixel:CGPointMake(position.x * PTM_RATIO, position.y * PTM_RATIO)]; if (inWorldPosition.x < 0 || inWorldPosition.x > WORLD_WIDGH / PTM_RATIO || inWorldPosition.y <= 0) { [self kill]; } }

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• Uncompiled WCF on IIS7: The type could not be found

  - by Jimmy

  Hello, I've been trying to follow this tutorial for deploying a WCF sample to IIS . I can't get it to work. This is a hosted site, but I do have IIS Manager access to the server. However, in step 2 of the tutorial, I can't "create a new IIS application that is physically located in this application directory". I can't seem to find a menu item, context menu item, or what not to create a new application. I've been right-clicking everywhere like crazy and still can't figure out how to create a new app. I suppose that's probably the root issue, but I tried a few other things (described below) just in case that actually is not the issue. This is "deployed" at http://test.com.cws1.my-hosting-panel.com/IISHostedCalcService/Service.svc . The error says: The type 'Microsoft.ServiceModel.Samples.CalculatorService', provided as the Service attribute value in the ServiceHost directive, or provided in the configuration element system.serviceModel/serviceHostingEnvironment/serviceActivations could not be found. I also tried to create a virtual dir (IISHostedCalc) in dotnetpanel that points to IISHostedCalcService . When I navigate to http://test.com.cws1.my-hosting-panel.com/IISHostedCalc/Service.svc , then there is a different error: This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection. As per the tutorial, there was no compiling involved; I just dropped the files on the server as follow inside the folder IISHostedCalcService: service.svc Web.config Service.cs service.svc contains: <%@ServiceHost language=c# Debug="true" Service="Microsoft.ServiceModel.Samples.CalculatorService"%> (I tried with quotes around the c# attribute, as this looks a little strange without quotes, but it made no difference) Web.config contains: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <services> <service name="Microsoft.ServiceModel.Samples.CalculatorService"> <!-- This endpoint is exposed at the base address provided by host: http://localhost/servicemodelsamples/service.svc --> <endpoint address="" binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="Microsoft.ServiceModel.Samples.ICalculator" /> <!-- The mex endpoint is explosed at http://localhost/servicemodelsamples/service.svc/mex --> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services> </system.serviceModel> <system.web> <customErrors mode="Off"/> </system.web> </configuration> Service.cs contains: using System; using System.ServiceModel; namespace Microsoft.ServiceModel.Samples { [ServiceContract] public interface ICalculator { [OperationContract] double Add(double n1, double n2); [OperationContract] double Subtract(double n1, double n2); [OperationContract] double Multiply(double n1, double n2); [OperationContract] double Divide(double n1, double n2); } public class CalculatorService : ICalculator { public double Add(double n1, double n2) { return n1 + n2; } public double Subtract(double n1, double n2) { return n1 - n2; } public double Multiply(double n1, double n2) { return n1 * n2; } public double Divide(double n1, double n2) { return n1 / n2; } } }

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• WCF client endpoint identity - configuration question

  - by Roel

  Hi all, I'm having a strange situation here. I got it working, but I don't understand why. Situation is as follows: There is a WCF service which my application (a website) has to call. The WCF service exposes a netTcpBinding and requires Transport Security (Windows). Client and server are in the same domain, but on different servers. So generating a client results in the following config (mostly defaults) <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <netTcpBinding> <binding name="MyTcpEndpoint" ...> <reliableSession ordered="true" inactivityTimeout="00:10:00" enabled="false" /> <security mode="Transport"> <transport clientCredentialType="Windows" protectionLevel="EncryptAndSign"/> <message clientCredentialType="Windows" /> </security> </binding> </netTcpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost:xxxxx/xxxx/xxx/1.0" binding="netTcpBinding" bindingConfiguration="MyTcpEndpoint" contract="Service.IMyService" name="TcpEndpoint"/> </client> </system.serviceModel> When I run the website and make the call to the service, I get the following error: System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: Either the target name is incorrect or the server has rejected the client credentials. ---> System.Security.Authentication.InvalidCredentialException: Either the target name is incorrect or the server has rejected the client credentials. ---> System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: The logon attempt failed --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Net.Security.NegoState.EndProcessAuthentication(IAsyncResult result) at System.Net.Security.NegotiateStream.EndAuthenticateAsClient(IAsyncResult asyncResult) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.WindowsStreamSecurityUpgradeProvider.WindowsStreamSecurityUpgradeInitiator.InitiateUpgradeAsyncResult.OnCompleteAuthenticateAsClient(IAsyncResult result) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.StreamSecurityUpgradeInitiatorAsyncResult.CompleteAuthenticateAsClient(IAsyncResult result) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- Server stack trace: at System.ServiceModel.AsyncResult.End[TAsyncResult](IAsyncResult result) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.SendAsyncResult.End(SendAsyncResult result) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.EndCall(String action, Object[] outs, IAsyncResult result) .... Now, if I just alter the configuration of the client like so: <endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost:xxxxx/xxxx/xxx/1.0" binding="netTcpBinding" bindingConfiguration="MyTcpEndpoint" contract="Service.IMyService" name="TcpEndpoint"> <identity> <dns /> </identity> </endpoint> everything works and my server happily reports that it got called by the service account which hosts the AppPool for my website. All good. My question now is: why does this work? What does this do? I got to this solution by mere trial-and-error. To me it seems that all the <dns /> tag does is tell the client to use the default DNS for authentication, but doesn't it do that anyway? Thanks for providing me with some insight.

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• mysql: Cannot load from mysql.proc. The table is probably corrupted

  - by Alex

  Mysql was started: /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --datadir=/srv/mysql/myDB --log-error=/srv/mysql/logs/mysqld-myDB.log --pid-file=/srv/mysql/pids/mysqld-myDB.pid --user=mysql --socket=/srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock --port=3700 but when I'm trying to do something: ERROR 1548 (HY000) at line 1: Cannot load from mysql.proc. The table is probably corrupted How to fix it? $ mysql -V mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.1.58, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.2 $ lsb_release -a Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 11.10 Release: 11.10 Codename: oneiric $ sudo mysql_upgrade -uroot -p<password> --force Looking for 'mysql' as: mysql Looking for 'mysqlcheck' as: mysqlcheck Running 'mysqlcheck' with connection arguments: '--port=3306' '--socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' Running 'mysqlcheck' with connection arguments: '--port=3306' '--socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' mysql.columns_priv OK mysql.db OK mysql.event OK mysql.func OK mysql.general_log Error : You can't use locks with log tables. status : OK mysql.help_category OK mysql.help_keyword OK mysql.help_relation OK mysql.help_topic OK mysql.host OK mysql.ndb_binlog_index OK mysql.plugin OK mysql.proc OK mysql.procs_priv OK mysql.servers OK mysql.slow_log Error : You can't use locks with log tables. status : OK mysql.tables_priv OK mysql.time_zone OK mysql.time_zone_leap_second OK mysql.time_zone_name OK mysql.time_zone_transition OK mysql.time_zone_transition_type OK mysql.user OK Running 'mysql_fix_privilege_tables'... OK $ mysqlcheck --port=3700 --socket=/srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-my-env.sock -A -udata_owner -pdata_owner <all tables> OK UPD1: for example I'm trying to remove procedure: mysql> DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS mysql.myproc; ERROR 1548 (HY000): Cannot load from mysql.proc. The table is probably corrupted mysql> UPD2: mysql> REPAIR TABLE mysql.proc; +------------+--------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Table | Op | Msg_type | Msg_text | +------------+--------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | mysql.proc | repair | error | 1 when fixing table | | mysql.proc | repair | Error | Can't change permissions of the file '/srv/mysql/myDB/mysql/proc.MYD' (Errcode: 1) | | mysql.proc | repair | status | Operation failed | +------------+--------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 3 rows in set (0.04 sec) This is strange, because: $ ls -l /srv/mysql/myDB/mysql/proc.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 3983252 2012-02-03 22:51 /srv/mysql/myDB/mysql/proc.MYD UPD3: $ ls -la /srv/mysql/myDB/mysql total 8930 drwxrwxrwx 2 mysql root 2480 2012-02-21 13:13 . drwxrwxrwx 13 mysql root 504 2012-02-21 19:01 .. -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8820 2012-02-20 15:50 columns_priv.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 columns_priv.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 4096 2012-02-20 15:50 columns_priv.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 9582 2012-02-20 15:50 db.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8360 2011-12-08 02:14 db.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 5120 2012-02-20 15:50 db.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 54 2011-11-12 15:42 db.opt -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 10223 2012-02-20 15:50 event.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 event.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 2048 2012-02-20 15:50 event.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8665 2012-02-20 15:50 func.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 func.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 func.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8700 2012-02-20 15:50 help_category.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 21497 2011-11-12 15:42 help_category.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 3072 2012-02-20 15:50 help_category.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8612 2012-02-20 15:50 help_keyword.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 88650 2011-11-12 15:42 help_keyword.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 16384 2012-02-20 15:50 help_keyword.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8630 2012-02-20 15:50 help_relation.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8874 2011-11-12 15:42 help_relation.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 16384 2012-02-20 15:50 help_relation.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8770 2012-02-20 15:50 help_topic.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 414320 2011-11-12 15:42 help_topic.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 20480 2012-02-20 15:50 help_topic.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 9510 2012-02-20 15:50 host.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 host.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 2048 2012-02-20 15:50 host.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8554 2011-11-12 15:42 innodb_monitor.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 98304 2011-11-12 15:55 innodb_monitor.ibd -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8592 2012-02-20 15:50 inventory.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 76 2011-11-12 15:42 inventory.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 2048 2012-02-20 15:50 inventory.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8778 2012-02-20 15:50 ndb_binlog_index.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 ndb_binlog_index.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 ndb_binlog_index.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8586 2012-02-20 15:50 plugin.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 plugin.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 plugin.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 9996 2012-02-20 15:50 proc.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 3983252 2012-02-03 22:51 proc.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 36864 2012-02-21 13:23 proc.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8875 2012-02-20 15:50 procs_priv.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1700 2011-11-12 15:42 procs_priv.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8192 2012-02-20 15:50 procs_priv.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 3977704 2012-02-21 13:23 proc.TMD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8800 2012-02-20 15:50 proxies_priv.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 693 2011-11-12 15:42 proxies_priv.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 5120 2012-02-20 15:50 proxies_priv.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8838 2012-02-20 15:50 servers.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 servers.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 servers.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8955 2012-02-20 15:50 tables_priv.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 5957 2011-11-12 15:42 tables_priv.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8192 2012-02-20 15:50 tables_priv.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8636 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8624 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_leap_second.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 time_zone_leap_second.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_leap_second.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 time_zone.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8606 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_name.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 time_zone_name.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_name.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8686 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_transition.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 time_zone_transition.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_transition.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 8748 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_transition_type.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 0 2011-11-12 15:42 time_zone_transition_type.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 1024 2012-02-20 15:50 time_zone_transition_type.MYI -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 10630 2012-02-20 15:50 user.frm -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 5456 2011-11-12 21:01 user.MYD -rwxrwxrwx 1 mysql root 4096 2012-02-20 15:50 user.MYI

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• git | error: Unable to append to .git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/master: Permission denied [SOLVED]

  - by Corbin Tarrant

  I am having a strange issue that I can't seem to resolve. Here is what happend: I had some log files in a github repository that I didn't want there. I found this script that removes files completely from git history like so: #!/bin/bash set -o errexit # Author: David Underhill # Script to permanently delete files/folders from your git repository. To use # it, cd to your repository's root and then run the script with a list of paths # you want to delete, e.g., git-delete-history path1 path2 if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then exit 0are still fi # make sure we're at the root of git repo if [ ! -d .git ]; then echo "Error: must run this script from the root of a git repository" exit 1 fi # remove all paths passed as arguments from the history of the repo files=$@ git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch $files" HEAD # remove the temporary history git-filter-branch otherwise leaves behind for a long time rm -rf .git/refs/original/ && git reflog expire --all && git gc --aggressive --prune I, of course, made a backup first and then tried it. It seemed to work fine. I then did a git push -f and was greeted with the following messages: error: Unable to append to .git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/master: Permission denied error: Cannot update the ref 'refs/remotes/origin/master'. Everything seems to have pushed fine though, because the files seem to be gone from the GitHub repository, if I try and push again I get the same thing: error: Unable to append to .git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/master: Permission denied error: Cannot update the ref 'refs/remotes/origin/master'. Everything up-to-date EDIT $ sudo chgrp {user} .git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/master $ sudo chown {user} .git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/master $ git push Everything up-to-date Thanks! EDIT Uh Oh. Problem. I've been working on this project all night and just went to commit my changes: error: Unable to append to .git/logs/refs/heads/master: Permission denied fatal: cannot update HEAD ref So I: sudo chown {user} .git/logs/refs/heads/master sudo chgrp {user} .git/logs/refs/heads/master I try the commit again and I get: error: Unable to append to .git/logs/HEAD: Permission denied fatal: cannot update HEAD ref So I: sudo chown {user} .git/logs/HEAD sudo chgrp {user} .git/logs/HEAD And then I try the commit again: 16 files changed, 499 insertions(+), 284 deletions(-) create mode 100644 logs/DBerrors.xsl delete mode 100644 logs/emptyPHPerrors.php create mode 100644 logs/trimXMLerrors.php rewrite public/codeCore/Classes/php/DatabaseConnection.php (77%) create mode 100644 public/codeSite/php/init.php $ git push Counting objects: 49, done. Delta compression using up to 2 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (27/27), done. Writing objects: 100% (27/27), 7.72 KiB, done. Total 27 (delta 15), reused 0 (delta 0) To [email protected]:IAmCorbin/MooKit.git 59da24e..68b6397 master -> master Hooray. I jump on http://GitHub.com and check out the repository, and my latest commit is no where to be found. ::scratch head:: So I push again: Everything up-to-date Umm...it doesn't look like it. I've never had this issue before, could this be a problem with github? or did I mess something up with my git project? EDIT Nevermind, I did a simple: git push origin master and it pushed fine.

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• IE8 losing session cookies in popup windows.

  - by HackedByChinese

  We have an ASP.NET application that uses Forms Auth. When users log in, a session ID cookie and a Forms Auth ticket (stored as a cookie) are generated. These are session cookies, not permanent cookies. It is intentional and desirable that when the browser closes, the user is effectively logged out. Once a user logs in, a new window is popped up using window.open('location here');. The page that is opened is effectively the workspace the user works in throughout the rest of their session. From this page, other pop-ups are also used. Lately, we've had a number of customers (all using latest versions of IE8) complaining that the when they log in, the initial pop-up takes them back to the log in screen rather than their homepage. Alternately, users can sometimes log in, get to the homepage (which again, is in a new pop up window), and it all seems fine, until any additional pop-ups are created, where it starts redirecting them to the log in screen again. In attempting to troubleshoot the issue, I've used good old Fiddler. When the problem starts manifesting, I've noticed that the browser is not sending up the ASP.NET session ID session cookie OR the Forms Auth ticket session cookie, even though the response to the log in POST clearly pushes down those cookies. What's more strange is if I CTRL+N to open a new window from the popped-up window that is missing the session cookies, then manually type in the URL to the home page, those cookies magically appear again. However, subsequent window.open(); calls will continue to be broken, not sending the session cookies and taking the user to the log in screen. It's important to note that sometimes, for seemingly no good reason, those same users can suddenly log in and work normally for a while, then it goes back to broken. Now, I've ensured that there are no browser add-ons, plug-ins, toolbars, etc. are running. I've added our site as a trusted site and dropped the security settings to Low, I've modified the Cookie Privacy policy to "accept all" and even disabled automatic policy settings, manually forcing it to accept everything and include session cookies. Nothing appears to affect it. Also note the web application resides on a single server. There is no load balancing, web gardens, server farms, clusters, etc. The server does reside behind an ISA server, but other than that it's pretty straight forward. I've been searching around for days and haven't found anything actionable. Heck, sometimes I can't even reproduce it reliably. I have found a few references to people having this same problem, but they seem to be referencing an issue that was allegedly fixed in a beta or RC release (example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/179260/ie8-loses-cookies-when-opening-a-new-window-after-a-redirect). These are release versions of IE, with up-to-date patches. I'm aware that I can try to set permanent cookies instead of session cookies. However, this has drastic security implications for our application. Update It seems that the problem automagically goes away when the user is added as a Local Administrator on the machine. Only time will tell if this change permanently (and positively) affects this problem. Time to bust out ProcMon and see if there is a resource access problem.

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• using Silverlight 3's HtmlPage.Window.Navigate method to reuse an already open browser window

  - by Phil

  Hi, I want to use an external browser window to implement a preview functionality in a silverlight application. There is a list of items and whenever the user clicks one of these items, it's opened in a separate browser window (the content is a pdf document, which is why it is handled ouside of the SL app). Now, to achieve this, I simply use HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com")); which works fine. Now my client doesn't like the fact that every click opens up a new browser window. He would like to see the browser window reused every time an item is clicked. So I went out and tried implementing this: Option 1 - Use the overload of the Navigate method, like so: HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "foo"); I was assuming that the window would be reused when the same target parameter value (foo) would be used in subsequent calls. This does not work. I get a new window every time. Option 2 - Use the PopupWindow method on the HtmlPage HtmlPage.PopupWindow(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "blah", new HtmlPopupWindowOptions()); This does not work. I get a new window every time. Option 3 - Get a handle to the opened window and reuse that in subsequent calls private HtmlWindow window; private void navigationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (window == null) window = HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "blah"); else window.Navigate(new Uri("http://www.bing.com"), "blah"); if (window == null) MessageBox.Show("it's null"); } This does not work. I tried the same for the PopupWindow() method and the window is null every time, so a new window is opened on every click. I have checked both the EnableHtmlAccess and the IsPopupWindowAllowed properties, and they return true, as they should. Option 4 - Use Eval method to execute some custom javascript private const string javascript = @"var popup = window.open('', 'blah') ; if(popup.location != 'http://www.bing.com' ){ popup.location = 'http://www.bing.com'; } popup.focus();"; private void navigationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { HtmlPage.Window.Eval(javascript); } This does not work. I get a new window every time. option 5 - Use CreateInstance to run some custom javascript on the page private void navigationButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { HtmlPage.Window.CreateInstance("thisIsPlainHell"); } and in my aspx I have function thisIsPlainHell() { var popup = window.open('http://www.bing.com', 'blah'); popup.focus(); } Guess what? This does work. The only thing is that the window behaves a little strange and I'm not sure why: I'm behind a proxy and in all other scenarios I'm being prompted for my password. In this case however I am not (and am thus not able to reach the external site - bing in this case). This is not really a huge issue atm, but I just don't understand what's goign on here. Whenever I type another url in the address bar of the popup window (eg www.google.com) and press enter, it opens up another window and prompts me for my proxy password. As a temporary solution option 5 could do, but I don't like the fact that Silverlight is not able to manage this. One of the main reasons my client has opted for Silverlight is to be protected against all the browser specific hacking that comes with javascript. Am I doing something wrong? I'm definitely no javascript expert, so I'm hoping it's something obvious I'm missing here. Cheers, Phil

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• I created a custom (WPF) DataGridBoundColumn and get unexpected behaviour, what am I missing?

  - by aspic

  Hi, I am using a DataGrid (from Microsoft.Windows.Controls.DataGrid) to display items on and on this DataGrid I use a custom Column which extends DataGridBoundColumn. I have bound an ObservableCollection to the ItemSource of the DataGrid. Conversation is one of my own custom datatypes which a (among other things) has a boolean called active. I bound this boolean to the DataGrid as follows: DataGridActiveImageColumn test = new DataGridActiveImageColumn(); test.Header = "Active"; Binding binding1 = new Binding("Active"); test.Binding = binding1; ConversationsDataGrid.Columns.Add(test); My custom DataGridBoundColumn DataGridActiveImageColumn overrides the GenerateElement method to let it return an Image depending on whether the conversation it is called for is active or not. The code for this is: namespace Microsoft.Windows.Controls { class DataGridActiveImageColumn : DataGridBoundColumn { protected override FrameworkElement GenerateElement(DataGridCell cell, object dataItem) { // Create Image Element Image myImage = new Image(); myImage.Width = 10; bool active=false; if (dataItem is Conversation) { Conversation c = (Conversation)dataItem; active = c.Active; } BitmapImage myBitmapImage = new BitmapImage(); // BitmapImage.UriSource must be in a BeginInit/EndInit block myBitmapImage.BeginInit(); if (active) { myBitmapImage.UriSource = new Uri(@"images\active.png", UriKind.Relative); } else { myBitmapImage.UriSource = new Uri(@"images\inactive.png", UriKind.Relative); } // To save significant application memory, set the DecodePixelWidth or // DecodePixelHeight of the BitmapImage value of the image source to the desired // height or width of the rendered image. If you don't do this, the application will // cache the image as though it were rendered as its normal size rather then just // the size that is displayed. // Note: In order to preserve aspect ratio, set DecodePixelWidth // or DecodePixelHeight but not both. myBitmapImage.DecodePixelWidth = 10; myBitmapImage.EndInit(); myImage.Source = myBitmapImage; return myImage; } protected override FrameworkElement GenerateEditingElement(DataGridCell cell, object dataItem) { throw new NotImplementedException(); } } } All this works as expected, and when during the running of the program the active boolean of conversations changes, this is automatically updated in the DataGrid. However: When there are more entries on the DataGrid then fit at any one time (and vertical scrollbars are added) the behavior with respect to the column for all the conversations is strange. The conversations that are initially loaded are correct, but when I use the scrollbar of the DataGrid conversations that enter the view seems to have a random status (although more inactive than active ones, which corresponds to the actual ratio). When I scroll back up, the active images of the Conversations initially shown (before scrolling) are not correct anymore as well. When I replace my custom DataGridBoundColumn class with (for instance) DataGridCheckBoxColumn it works as intended so my extension of the DataGridBoundColumn class must be incomplete. Personally I think it has something to do with the following: From the MSDN page on the GenerateElement method (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.datagridcolumn.generateelement%28VS.95%29.aspx): Return Value Type: System.Windows. FrameworkElement A new, read-only element that is bound to the column's Binding property value. I do return a new element (the image) but it is not bound to anything. I am not quite sure what I should do. Should I bind the Image to something? To what exactly? And why? (I have been experimenting, but was unsuccessful thus far, hence this post) Thanks in advance.

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