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• How can I save my university's Computer Science & Engineering department? [closed]

  - by Blake

  I'm currently pursuing a B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, and we're having a bit of a problem right now... The state recently passed a budget plan that cuts funding for higher education in Florida. The dean of UF's College of Engineering decided that the best way for us to absorb the blow is by executing the following plan: All of the Computer Engineering Degree programs, BS, MS and PhD, would be moved from the Computer & Information Science and Engineering Dept. to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. along with most of the advising staff. Roughly half of the faculty would be offered the opportunity to move to Electrical/Computer Eng., Biomedical Eng., or Industrial/Systems Eng. Staff positions in CISE which are currently supporting research and graduate programs would be eliminated. The activities currently covered by TAs would be reassigned to faculty and the TA budget for CISE would be eliminated. Any faculty member who wishes to stay in CISE may do so, but with a revised assignment focused on teaching and advising. In short: our department (at least as we know it) is being decimated. Computer & Information Sciences & Engineering (one of 9 departments in the College of Engineering) is taking more than 50% of the cuts. If you're interested in reading the full proposal, you can access it here. A vast, VAST majority of the students and faculty in the department are vehemently opposed to this plan, however the dean is already taking measures to implement it. This is the only proposal on the table right now, and she has not entertained our requests for alternatives. She sees it as an obvious (albeit drastic) solution to our budget problem, citing that many other universities have combined Computer and Electrical Engineering departments. I'll bet those universities didn't have to eliminate an established department to get there, though. The budget goes into effect July 1, 2012 (this is non-negotiable), and the dean's proposal is currently set to be finalized some time next week. We don't have much time! My question to everyone here is this: Are we overreacting to this plan, or are we justified? And could you explain why or why not? It's obvious that CISE students will resist any cuts to our department, but I'm curious to see what other people in the field have to say. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. I will select the answer that saves our department. Just kidding, I'll pick the one that best explains why this is a good or bad decision for the dean to make. Please note that anything you say can and will be used to further our cause (and we might track you down if you provide a compelling argument against us).

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• Forced Learning

  - by Ben Griswold

  If you ask me, it can be a little intimidating to stand in front of a group and walkthrough anything remotely technical. Even if you know “Technical Thingy #52” inside and out, public speaking can be unsettling.  And if you don’t have your stuff together, well, it can be downright horrifying. With that said, if given the choice, I still like to schedule myself to present on unfamiliar topics. Over the past few months, I’ve talked about Aspect-Oriented Programming, Functional Programming, Lean Software Development and Kanban Systems, Domain-Driven Design and Behavior Driven Development.  What do these topics have in common? You guessed it: I was truly interested in them. I had only a superficial understanding of each. Huh?  Why in the world would I ever want to to put myself in that intimidating situation? Actually, I rarely want to put myself into that situation but I often do as I like the results.  There’s nothing remotely clever going on here.  All I’m doing is putting myself into a compromising situation knowing that I’ll likely work myself out of it by learning the topic prior to the presentation.  I’m simply time-boxing myself to learn something new while knowing there are negative repercussions if I fall short. So, I end up doing tons of research and I learn bunches to ensure I have my head firmly wrap around the material before my talk. I’m not saying I become an expert overnight (or over a couple of weeks) but I’ll definitely know enough to be confident and comfortable and I’ll know more than enough to ensure the audience will learn a thing or two from me. It’s forced learning and though it might sound a little scary to some, it works for me. Now I could very easily rename this post to something like Fear Is My Motivator because, in a sense, fear of failure and embarrassment is what’s driving my learning. However, I’m the guy signing up for the presentation and since the entire process is self-imposed I’m not sure Fear deserves too much credit.  Anyway…

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• Be Careful When Referencing SPList.Items

  - by Brian Jackett

  Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  I’ll say it again.  Be very careful how you reference your SPListItem objects through the SharePoint API.  Ok, now that you get the point that this will be a “learn from my mistakes and don’t do unsmart things like I did” post, let’s dig into what it was that I did poorly. Scenario     For the past year I’ve been building custom .Net applications that are hosted through SharePoint.  These application involve a number of SharePoint lists, external databases, custom web parts, and other SharePoint elements to provide functionality.  About two weeks ago I received a message from one of our end users that a custom application was performing slowly.  Specifically performance was slow when users were performing actions that interacted with the primary SharePoint list storing data for that app. The Problem     I took a copy of the production site into a dev environment to investigate the code that was executing.  After attaching the debugger and running through the code I quickly found pieces of code referencing SPListItem objects (like below) that were performing very poorly: SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].Items.GetItemById(value); // do updates on SPListItem retrieved     As it turns out the SPList I was referencing was fairly large at ~1000 items and weighing in over 150 MB.  You see the problem with my above code is that I retrieved the SPListItem by first (unnecessarily) going through the Items member of the list.  As I understand it, when doing so the executing code will attempt to resolve that entity and pull it from the database and into RAM (all 150 MB.)  This causes the equivalent of a 50 car pile up in terms of performance with a single update taking more than 15 seconds. The Solution     The solution is actually quite simple and I wish I had realized this during development.  Instead of going through the Items member it is possible to call GetItemById(…) directly on the SPList as in the example below: SPListItem myItem = SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["List Name"].GetItemById(value); // do updates on SPListItem retrieved     After making this simple change performance skyrocketed and updates were back to less than a second.   Conclusion     When given the option between two solutions, usually the simplest is the best solution.  In my scenario I was adding extra complexity going through the API the long way around to get to the objects I needed and it ended up hurting performance greatly.  Luckily we were able to find and resolve the performance issue in a relatively short amount of time.  Like I said at the beginning of the post, learn from my mistakes and hope it helps you.         -Frog Out   Image linked from http://www.freespirit.com/files/IMAGE/COVER/LARGE/BeCarefulSafe.jpg

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• NetBeans Podcast 62

  - by TinuA

  Download mp3: 49 minutes – 39.5 MB Subscribe to the NetBeans Podcast on iTunes NetBeans Community News with Geertjan and Tinu What's NEW? Recap of a SUCCESSFUL NetBeans Community Day at JavaOne2012! Want to know what you missed? Download slides for: NetBeans Community Keynote NetBeans and JavaFX panel NetBeans and Java EE panel NetBeans Platform panel Visit the JavaOne Content Catalog for slides, and audio and video recordings of all NetBeans sessions at JavaOne 2012. (Type in keyword "NetBeans".) NetBeans Governance Board elections are done. Congratulations to Anton Epple and Hermien Pellissier, the new members of the 20th Board! How would you grade the NetBeans team on NetBeans IDE 7.2? Take the NetBeans 7.2 Satisfaction Survey. NetBeans IDE 7.3 Beta 2 is available for download. The first beta debuted at JavaOne with support for HTML5. Watch videos of HTML5 support in NetBeans and visit Geertjan's blog for a beginner's guide to HTML5 development. It's a busy Fall on the NetBeans Calendar with stops at Devoxx 2012, JavaOne Latin America, Jay Day Munich, Jay Days Sweden  JavaOne 2012 Reflections NetBeans had a fantastic showing at JavaOne 2012--from the full-day lineup of NetBeans Community Day to the numerous BOFs, Labs, and sessions at the main conference. But better to hear it in these short interviews with members of the community who attended JavaOne 2012. Veteran attendees and first-timers, panel participants and award winners, the interviewees share their experience of the conference, from highlights and insights, to new discoveries and inspiration. Listen in to why attending JavaOne is a tech pilgrimage every Java developer ought to make.   07:50   Anton Epple - Eppleton Consulting (Germany); Recipient of 2012 NetBeans Community Recognition Award 17:10   Henry Arousell and Thomas Boqvist - Bjorn Lunden Information (Sweden) 24:45   Glenn Holmer - Weyco Group, Inc. (USA); Recipient of 2012 NetBeans Community Recognition Award 33:09   Timon Veenstra - Agrosense (The Netherlands); 2012 Duke's Choice Award winner (Agrosense in the Nov/Dec '12 issue of Java Magazine.) 40:19   Rob Terplowski, - Linden, Inc. (USA) More thoughts about NetBeans Day and JavaOne can also be found in two recent NetBeans Zone articles: "Reflections on JavaOne 2012 by the NetBeans Community: Part 1 and Part 2". *Have ideas for NetBeans Podcast topics? Send them to nbpodcast at netbeans dot org. *Subscribe to the official NetBeans page on Facebook! Check us out as well on Twitter, YouTube, and Google+.

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• Auto Mocking using JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  Auto mocking containers are designed to reduce the friction of keeping unit test beds in sync with the code being tested as systems are updated and evolve over time. This is one sentence how you define auto mocking. Of course this is a more or less formal. In a more informal way auto mocking containers are nothing but a tool to keep your tests synced so that you don’t have to go back and change tests every time you add a new dependency to your SUT or System Under Test. In Q3 2012 JustMock is shipped with built in auto mocking container. This will help developers to have all the existing fun they are having with JustMock plus they can now mock object with dependencies in a more elegant way and without needing to do the homework of managing the graph. If you are not familiar with auto mocking then I won't go ahead and educate you rather ask you to do so from contents that is already made available out there from community as this is way beyond the scope of this post. Moving forward, getting started with Justmock auto mocking is pretty simple. First, I have to reference Telerik.JustMock.Container.DLL from the installation folder along with Telerik.JustMock.DLL (of course) that it uses internally and next I will write my tests with mocking container. It's that simple! In this post first I will mock the target with dependencies using current method and going forward do the same with auto mocking container. In short the sample is all about a report builder that will go through all the existing reports, send email and log any exception in that process. This is somewhat my  report builder class looks like: Reporter class depends on the following interfaces: IReporBuilder: used to  create and get the available reports IReportSender: used to send the reports ILogger: used to log any exception. Now, if I just write the test without using an auto mocking container it might end up something like this: Now, it looks fine. However, the only issue is that I am creating the mock of each dependency that is sort of a grunt work and if you have ever changing list of dependencies then it becomes really hard to keep the tests in sync. The typical example is your ASP.NET MVC controller where the number of service dependencies grows along with the project. The same test if written with auto mocking container would look like: Here few things to observe: I didn't created mock for each dependencies There is no extra step creating the Reporter class and sending in the dependencies Since ILogger is not required for the purpose of this test therefore I can be completely ignorant of it. How cool is that ? Auto mocking in JustMock is just released and we also want to extend it even further using profiler that will let me resolve not just interfaces but concrete classes as well. But that of course starts the debate of code smell vs. working with legacy code. Feel free to send in your expert opinion in that regard using one of telerik’s official channels. Hope that helps

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• Algorithm for spreading labels in a visually appealing and intuitive way

  - by mac

  Short version Is there a design pattern for distributing vehicle labels in a non-overlapping fashion, placing them as close as possible to the vehicle they refer to? If not, is any of the method I suggest viable? How would you implement this yourself? Extended version In the game I'm writing I have a bird-eye vision of my airborne vehicles. I also have next to each of the vehicles a small label with key-data about the vehicle. This is an actual screenshot: Now, since the vehicles could be flying at different altitudes, their icons could overlap. However I would like to never have their labels overlapping (or a label from vehicle 'A' overlap the icon of vehicle 'B'). Currently, I can detect collisions between sprites and I simply push away the offending label in a direction opposite to the otherwise-overlapped sprite. This works in most situations, but when the airspace get crowded, the label can get pushed very far away from its vehicle, even if there was an alternate "smarter" alternative. For example I get: B - label A -----------label C - label where it would be better (= label closer to the vehicle) to get: B - label label - A C - label EDIT: It also has to be considered that beside the overlapping vehicles case, there might be other configurations in which vehicles'labels could overlap (the ASCII-art examples show for example three very close vehicles in which the label of A would overlap the icon of B and C). I have two ideas on how to improve the present situation, but before spending time implementing them, I thought to turn to the community for advice (after all it seems like a "common enough problem" that a design pattern for it could exist). For what it's worth, here's the two ideas I was thinking to: Slot-isation of label space In this scenario I would divide all the screen into "slots" for the labels. Then, each vehicle would always have its label placed in the closest empty one (empty = no other sprites at that location. Spiralling search From the location of the vehicle on the screen, I would try to place the label at increasing angles and then at increasing radiuses, until a non-overlapping location is found. Something down the line of: try 0°, 10px try 10°, 10px try 20°, 10px ... try 350°, 10px try 0°, 20px try 10°, 20px ...

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• MDM Poised for Growth

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  David Nixon, an Oracle colleague of mine, was doing some research on MDM the other day. He came up with some well founded insights that I thought I’d share with you. Gartner recently published a note asking “Should Organizations Using ERP 'Do' Master Data Management?”  It may seem a bit strange but that’s a question Gartner has been asked by a number of companies as organizations are beginning to understand the importance of data governance and data stewardship.  That’s because ERP Suites typically “focus on integrating their own applications within suites, but have little interest in making their suites interoperate with the applications or suites of other vendors.”  Therefore, Gartner is advising customers that “have deployed or plan to support multiple packaged application suites (even from the same vendor) that have different semantic data and/or process models” to add an MDM solution. And it appears that customers are taking note.  In a more recent note entitled “Search Analytics Trends: Master Data Management”, Gartner noted that MDM searches on gartner.com in November 2010 “were 300% higher than [in] May 2009, indicating the increased interest an importance that businesses are placing on MDM.”  Why the increased interest?  Moving towards a single version of the truth is a familiar theme, but customers are talking more about the underlying business value that this enables.  For example, businesses are talking about the need to fix master data before they can successfully move forward on SOA initiatives.  And the growing demands for compliance continue to be a major driver.  In short, companies are talking more about specific and tangible business value, and they are looking for help creating business cases for an MDM initiative. Why This Matters Gartner’s notes make three things clear.  First, MDM is poised for growth as organizations gain a greater understanding for it and the need they have.  Many are still sorting it out, but the demand is growing and is sure to rise.  Second, any organization with a heterogeneous computing environment should invest in MDM.  Even solutions from the same vendor may have different data models and could benefit from MDM.  But the key to growth, or which vendors will benefit the most from it, is the third and perhaps most critical point: companies need help with the business case for MDM. Oracle can help your organization build a compelling business case for MDM. We have seen our 1100+ MDM customers gain competitive advantages in a wide variety of implementations. Give us a ring.

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• “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on GDSE and also on the regular Stackoverflow site, and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? (* With the exception of Flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with Flash, but I'm worried that Flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.) For simple & short games the Newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "OK, I'm going to download and play that"?

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• Culture Shmulture?

  - by steve.diamond

  I've been thinking about "Customer Experience Management" lately. Here at Oracle, we arguably have the most complete suite of applications for managing the customer experience across and in the context of multiple channels -- from marketing to loyalty to contact center to self-service to analytics offerings, and more. And stay tuned, because in coming months let's just say we'll have even more to talk about on this front. But that said............ Last weekend my wife and I stayed at one of the premiere hotel chains on the planet. I won't name them, but we all know the short list. It could have been the St. Regis or the Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons or Hyatt Park or....This stay, at this particular hotel, was simply outstanding. Within a chain known for providing "above and beyond" levels of service, this particular hotel, under this particular manager, exceeded expectations on so many fronts. For example, at the Spa we mentioned to the two attendants that my wife is seven months pregnant and that we had previously had a lot of trouble conceiving. We then went to our room. Ten minutes later we heard a knock at the door and received a plate of chocolate covered strawberries with a heartfelt note and an inspiring quote, signed by the two spa attendees. The following day we arranged to have a bellhop drive us to the beach. Although they had a pre-arranged beach shuttle service with time limits, etc., he greeted us by saying, "I'm yours for the day until 4 p.m. Whatever you want to do is fine by me, as long as it's legal!" The morning that we left we arranged to have a taxi drive us to the airport--a nearly 40 mile drive. What showed up was a private coach complete with navy blue suited driver dude. And we were charged the taxi fare price. And there were many other awesome exchanges I won't mention here, although I did email the GM of this hotel two nights ago and expressed our effusive praise and gratitude. I'd submit that this hotel chain would have a definitive advantage using even more Oracle software to manage and optimize its customer interactions (yes, they are a customer). But WITHOUT the culture--that management team--and that instillation of aligned values across all employees of exemplifying 'the golden rule,' I wonder how much technology really matters in providing a distinctively positive and memorable customer experience. Lest you think I'm alone in these pontifications, have you read Paul Greenberg's blog lately? Have you seen one of his most recent posts? Now this SPECIFIC post is NOT about customer service per se. But it is about people. So yes, please think long and hard about the technology you seek to deploy. But never forget who will be interacting with your systems, and your customers.

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• SSIS Reporting Pack update

  - by jamiet

  Its been a while since I last posted anything in regard to SSIS Reporting Pack, the most recent release being on 27th May 2012, so here is a short update. There is still lots of work to do on SSIS Reporting Pack; lots more features to add, lots of performance work to be done, and a few bug fixes too. I have also been (fairly) hard at work on a framework to be used in conjunction with SSIS 2012 that I refer to as the Restart Framework (currently residing at http://ssisrestartframework.codeplex.com/). There is still much work to be done on the Restart Framework (not least some useful documentation on how to use it) which is why I haven’t mentioned it publicly before now although I am actively checking in changes. One thing I am considering is amalgamating the two projects into one; this would mean I could build a suite of reports that both work against the SSIS Catalog (what you currently know as “SSIS Reporting Pack”) and also against this Restart Framework thing. No decision has been made as yet though. There have been a number of bug reports and feature suggestions for SSIS Reporting Pack added to the Issue Tracker. Thank you to everyone that has submitted something, rest assured I am not going to ignore them forever; my time is at a premium right now unfortunately due to … well … life… so working on these items isn’t near the top of my priority list. Lastly, I am actively using SSIS Reporting Pack in a production environment right now and I’m happy to report that it is proving to be very useful. One of the reports that I have put a lot of time into is execution executable duration.rdl and its proving very adept at easily identifying bottlenecks in our SSIS 2012 executions: The report allows you to browse through the hierarchy of executables in each execution and each bar represents the duration of each executable in relation to all the other executables; longer bars being a good indication of where problems might lie. The colour of the bar indicates whether it was successful or not (green=success). Hovering over a bar brings up a tooltip showing more information about that executable. Clicking on a bar allows you to compare this particular instance of the executable against other executions. Please do let me know if you are using SSIS Reporting Pack. I would like to hear any anecdotes you might have, good or bad. @Jamiet

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• Getting from a user-story to code while using TDD (scrum)

  - by Ittai

  I'm getting into scrum and TDD and I think I have some confusion which I'd like to get your feedback about. Let's assume I have a user-story in my backlog, in order for me to start developing it as part of TDD I need to have requirements, right so far? Is it true to say that the product manager and the QA should be responsible for taking the user-story and breaking it down to acceptance tests? I think the above is true since the acceptance tests need to be formal, so they can be used as tests, but also human readable so that the product can approve they are the requirements, right? Is it also true that I later take these acceptance tests and use them as my requirements, i.e. they are a set of use-cases which I implement (through TDD)? I hope I'm not making too much of a mess but that's the current flow I have in mind right now. Update I think my initial intentions were unclear so I'll try to rephrase. I want to know more details about the scrum flow of turning a user-story into code while using TDD. The starting point is obvious, a user surfaces a need (or the user's representative as the product) which is a short 1-2 lines description in the known format and that is added to the product backlog. When there is a spring planning meeting user-stories are taken from the backlog and assigned to developers. In order for a developer to write code they need requirements (especially in TDD since the requirements are what the tests are derived from). When, by whom and to which format are the requirements compiled? What I had in mind was that the product and QA define the requirements via acceptance tests (I'm thinking of automatic using FitNesse or the sort but that's not the core I think) which help to serve 2 purposes at the same time: They define "Done" properly. They give a developer something to derive tests from. I wasn't sure when these were written (before the sprint they're picked then that might be a waste since additional information will arrive or the story won't be picked, during the iteration then the developer might get stuck waiting for them...)

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• Game development: “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

  - by Inside

  Heyo, I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on gamedev and also on the regular stackoverflow and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). For simple & short games the newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "ok, I'm going to download and play that"? Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? Thanks! (* With the exception of flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have these downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with flash, but I'm worried that flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.)

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• Digital Agenda in the EU means open standards after all

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes speech on Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda at Open Forum Europe 2010 Summit in Brussels refocuses the EU Digital Agenda on open standards. I say the speech scores a 90/100, smooth, smart, a little vicious at the fringes, maybe? Anyway, it shows the strategy might age and implement well. This is Dutch pragmatism at its best. The EU Digital Agenda (I give it an 85/100 score), while laudable, stops short of using the term. The next step for the European Commission is defining the term open standards. If they do that, and do it right, Vice President Kroes will go into history as having made a significant contribution towards global progress in e-government by possibly eradicating lock-in forever. Moreover, she will put Europe's SMEs in a better position to succeed in a global IT market filled with barriers to entry from players not fully understanding, using, or unpacking standards. Kroes' interesting suggestion that she will now explore a "legal proposal" on interoperability that will have an impact on all IT companies operating in the European market is more up for debate. An interoperability directive? One run by DG COMP or one run by DG INFSO, telecom style? Would something like that work? Would the industry like it? Would it help European governments? Possibly, if done right. The good thing was, Kroes pointed out that she will look for input from the industry. Kroes' track record is one of not being scared of taking on the Titans. She also wants to enact real, positive, lasting change. "I will not go anywhere", she said. All of that is good. And she does understand the importance of open standards. Let's now start discussing the details. Implementing the Digital Agenda is not simple. It requires collaboration across the various Directorates in the European Commission. Mounting a new Interoperability directive is also never attempted before. Getting it right is important. Even possibly finding out it cannot be done right and choosing a more light weight approach that is equally effective would be bold. Go Kroes!

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• Finance: Friends, not foes!

  - by red@work

  After reading Phil's blog post about his experiences of working on reception, I thought I would let everyone in on one of the other customer facing roles at Red Gate... When you think of a Credit Control team, most might imagine money-hungry (and often impolite) people, who will do nothing short of hunting people down until they pay up. Well, as with so many things, not at Red Gate! Here we do things a little bit differently.   Since joining the Licensing, Invoicing and Credit Control team at Red Gate (affectionately nicknamed LICC!), I have found it fantastic to work with people who know that often the best way to get what you want is by being friendly, reasonable and as helpful as possible. The best bit about this is that, because everyone is in a good mood, we have a great working atmosphere! We are definitely a very happy team. We laugh a lot, even when dealing with the serious matter of playing table football after lunch. The most obvious part of my job is bringing in money. There are few things quite as satisfying as receiving a big payment or one that you've been chasing for a long time. That being said, it's just as nice to encounter the companies that surprise you with a payment bang on time after little or no chasing. It's always a pleasure to find these people who are generous and easy to work with, and so they always make me smile, too. As I'm in one of the few customer facing roles here, I get to experience firsthand just how much Red Gate customers love our software and are equally impressed with our customer service. We regularly get replies from people thanking us for our help in resolving a problem or just to simply say that they think we're great. Or, as is often the case, that we 'rock and are awesome'! When those are the kinds of emails you have to deal with for most of the day, I would challenge anyone to be unhappy! The best thing about my work is that, much like Phil and his counterparts on reception, I get to talk to people from all over the world, and experience their unique (and occasionally unusual) personality traits. I deal predominantly with customers in the US, so I'll be speaking to someone from a high flying multi-national in New York one minute, and then the next phone call will be to a small office on the outskirts of Alabama. This level of customer involvement has led to a lot of interesting anecdotes and plenty of in-jokes to keep us amused! Obviously there are customers who are infuriating, like those who simply tell us that they will pay "one day", and that we should stop chasing them. Then there are the people who say that they ordered the tools because they really like them, but they just can't afford to actually pay for them at the moment. Thankfully these situations are relatively few and far between, and for every one customer that makes you want to scream, there are far, far more that make you smile!

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• Oracle releases new Java Embedded products

  - by Henrik Stahl

  With less than one week to go to JavaOne 2012, we've spiced things up a little by releasing not one but two net new embedded Java products. This is an important step towards realizing the vision of Java as the standard platform for the Internet of Things that I outlined in a recent blog post. The two new products are: Java ME Embedded 3.2. Based on same code as the widely deployed Oracle Java Wireless Client for feature phones, this new product provides a Java ME implementation optimized for very small microcontroller-based devices and adds - among other things - a new Device Access API that enables interaction with peripherals common in edge devices such as various types of sensors. In addition to the new Java ME Embedded platform, we have also released an update of the Java ME SDK which adds support for the development of small embedded devices. Java Embedded Suite 7.0. This is an integrated middleware stack for embedded devices, incorporating Java SE Embedded and versions of JavaDB, GlassFish and a Web Services stack optimized for remote operation and small footprint. A typical Internet of Things (or M2M) infrastructure contains three types of compute nodes: The edge device which is typically a sensor or control point of some kind. These devices can be connected directly to a backend through a mobile network if they are installed in - for example - a remote vending machine; or, they can be part of a local short-range network and be connected to the backend through a more powerful gateway device. A gateway is the second type of compute node and acts as an aggregator and control point for a local network. A good example of this could be a generalized home Internet access point, or home gateway. Gateways are mostly using normal wall power and are used for multiple applications, deployed by multiple service providers. Finally, the last type of compute node is the normal enterprise or cloud backend. Java ME Embedded and Java Embedded Suite are perfect base software stacks for the edge devices and the gateway respectively, providing the Java promise of a platform independent runtime and a complete set of libraries as well as allowing a programmer to focus on the business logic rather than plumbing. We are very thrilled with these new releases that open up exciting opportunities for Java developers to extend services and enterprise applications in ways that will make organizations more efficient and touch our daily lives. To find out more, come to the JavaOne conference (for technical content) and to the Java Embedded @ JavaOne subconference (for business content). There will be plenty of cool demos showing complete end-to-end applications, provided by Oracle and our partners, as well as keynotes and numerous sessions where you can learn more about the technology and business opportunities.

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• Dynamically loading Assemblies to reduce Runtime Depencies

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working on a request to the West Wind Application Configuration library to add JSON support. The config library is a very easy to use code-first approach to configuration: You create a class that holds the configuration data that inherits from a base configuration class, and then assign a persistence provider at runtime that determines where and how the configuration data is store. Currently the library supports .NET Configuration stores (web.config/app.config), XML files, SQL records and string storage.About once a week somebody asks me about JSON support and I've deflected this question for the longest time because frankly I think that JSON as a configuration store doesn't really buy a heck of a lot over XML. Both formats require the user to perform some fixup of the plain configuration data - in XML into XML tags, with JSON using JSON delimiters for properties and property formatting rules. Sure JSON is a little less verbose and maybe a little easier to read if you have hierarchical data, but overall the differences are pretty minor in my opinion. And yet - the requests keep rolling in.Hard Link Issues in a Component LibraryAnother reason I've been hesitant is that I really didn't want to pull in a dependency on an external JSON library - in this case JSON.NET - into the core library. If you're not using JSON.NET elsewhere I don't want a user to have to require a hard dependency on JSON.NET unless they want to use the JSON feature. JSON.NET is also sensitive to versions and doesn't play nice with multiple versions when hard linked. For example, when you have a reference to V4.4 in your project but the host application has a reference to version 4.5 you can run into assembly load problems. NuGet's Update-Package can solve some of this *if* you can recompile, but that's not ideal for a component that's supposed to be just plug and play. This is no criticism of JSON.NET - this really applies to any dependency that might change.  So hard linking the DLL can be problematic for a number reasons, but the primary reason is to not force loading of JSON.NET unless you actually need it when you use the JSON configuration features of the library.Enter Dynamic LoadingSo rather than adding an assembly reference to the project, I decided that it would be better to dynamically load the DLL at runtime and then use dynamic typing to access various classes. This allows me to run without a hard assembly reference and allows more flexibility with version number differences now and in the future.But there are also a couple of downsides:No assembly reference means only dynamic access - no compiler type checking or IntellisenseRequirement for the host application to have reference to JSON.NET or else get runtime errorsThe former is minor, but the latter can be problematic. Runtime errors are always painful, but in this case I'm willing to live with this. If you want to use JSON configuration settings JSON.NET needs to be loaded in the project. If this is a Web project, it'll likely be there already.So there are a few things that are needed to make this work:Dynamically create an instance and optionally attempt to load an Assembly (if not loaded)Load types into dynamic variablesUse Reflection for a few tasks like statics/enumsThe dynamic keyword in C# makes the formerly most difficult Reflection part - method calls and property assignments - fairly painless. But as cool as dynamic is it doesn't handle all aspects of Reflection. Specifically it doesn't deal with object activation, truly dynamic (string based) member activation or accessing of non instance members, so there's still a little bit of work left to do with Reflection.Dynamic Object InstantiationThe first step in getting the process rolling is to instantiate the type you need to work with. This might be a two step process - loading the instance from a string value, since we don't have a hard type reference and potentially having to load the assembly. Although the host project might have a reference to JSON.NET, that instance might have not been loaded yet since it hasn't been accessed yet. In ASP.NET this won't be a problem, since ASP.NET preloads all referenced assemblies on AppDomain startup, but in other executable project, assemblies are just in time loaded only when they are accessed.Instantiating a type is a two step process: Finding the type reference and then activating it. Here's the generic code out of my ReflectionUtils library I use for this:/// <summary> /// Creates an instance of a type based on a string. Assumes that the type's /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName">Common name of the type</param> /// <param name="args">Any constructor parameters</param> /// <returns></returns> public static object CreateInstanceFromString(string typeName, params object[] args) { object instance = null; Type type = null; try { type = GetTypeFromName(typeName); if (type == null) return null; instance = Activator.CreateInstance(type, args); } catch { return null; } return instance; } /// <summary> /// Helper routine that looks up a type name and tries to retrieve the /// full type reference in the actively executing assemblies. /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Type GetTypeFromName(string typeName) { Type type = null; // Let default name binding find it type = Type.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) return type; // look through assembly list var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); // try to find manually foreach (Assembly asm in assemblies) { type = asm.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) break; } return type; } To use this for loading JSON.NET I have a small factory function that instantiates JSON.NET and sets a bunch of configuration settings on the generated object. The startup code also looks for failure and tries loading up the assembly when it fails since that's the main reason the load would fail. Finally it also caches the loaded instance for reuse (according to James the JSON.NET instance is thread safe and quite a bit faster when cached). Here's what the factory function looks like in JsonSerializationUtils:/// <summary> /// Dynamically creates an instance of JSON.NET /// </summary> /// <param name="throwExceptions">If true throws exceptions otherwise returns null</param> /// <returns>Dynamic JsonSerializer instance</returns> public static dynamic CreateJsonNet(bool throwExceptions = true) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; lock (SyncLock) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; // Try to create instance dynamic json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); if (json == null) { try { var ass = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load("Newtonsoft.Json"); json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); } catch (Exception ex) { if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } } if (json == null) return null; json.ReferenceLoopHandling = (dynamic) ReflectionUtils.GetStaticProperty("Newtonsoft.Json.ReferenceLoopHandling", "Ignore"); // Enums as strings in JSON dynamic enumConverter = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.Converters.StringEnumConverter"); json.Converters.Add(enumConverter); JsonNet = json; } return JsonNet; }This code's purpose is to return a fully configured JsonSerializer instance. As you can see the code tries to create an instance and when it fails tries to load the assembly, and then re-tries loading.Once the instance is loaded some configuration occurs on it. Specifically I set the ReferenceLoopHandling option to not blow up immediately when circular references are encountered. There are a host of other small config setting that might be useful to set, but the default seem to be good enough in recent versions. Note that I'm setting ReferenceLoopHandling which requires an Enum value to be set. There's no real easy way (short of using the cardinal numeric value) to set a property or pass parameters from static values or enums. This means I still need to use Reflection to make this work. I'm using the same ReflectionUtils class I previously used to handle this for me. The function looks up the type and then uses Type.InvokeMember() to read the static property.Another feature I need is have Enum values serialized as strings rather than numeric values which is the default. To do this I can use the StringEnumConverter to convert enums to strings by adding it to the Converters collection.As you can see there's still a bit of Reflection to be done even in C# 4+ with dynamic, but with a few helpers this process is relatively painless.Doing the actual JSON ConversionFinally I need to actually do my JSON conversions. For the Utility class I need serialization that works for both strings and files so I created four methods that handle these tasks two each for serialization and deserialization for string and file.Here's what the File Serialization looks like:/// <summary> /// Serializes an object instance to a JSON file. /// </summary> /// <param name="value">the value to serialize</param> /// <param name="fileName">Full path to the file to write out with JSON.</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">Determines whether exceptions are thrown or false is returned</param> /// <param name="formatJsonOutput">if true pretty-formats the JSON with line breaks</param> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public static bool SerializeToFile(object value, string fileName, bool throwExceptions = false, bool formatJsonOutput = false) { dynamic writer = null; FileStream fs = null; try { Type type = value.GetType(); var json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return false; fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create); var sw = new StreamWriter(fs, Encoding.UTF8); writer = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextWriterType, sw); if (formatJsonOutput) writer.Formatting = (dynamic)Enum.Parse(FormattingType, "Indented"); writer.QuoteChar = '"'; json.Serialize(writer, value); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonSerializer Serialize error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return false; } finally { if (writer != null) writer.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return true; }You can see more of the dynamic invocation in this code. First I grab the dynamic JsonSerializer instance using the CreateJsonNet() method shown earlier which returns a dynamic. I then create a JsonTextWriter and configure a couple of enum settings on it, and then call Serialize() on the serializer instance with the JsonTextWriter that writes the output to disk. Although this code is dynamic it's still fairly short and readable.For full circle operation here's the DeserializeFromFile() version:/// <summary> /// Deserializes an object from file and returns a reference. /// </summary> /// <param name="fileName">name of the file to serialize to</param> /// <param name="objectType">The Type of the object. Use typeof(yourobject class)</param> /// <param name="binarySerialization">determines whether we use Xml or Binary serialization</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">determines whether failure will throw rather than return null on failure</param> /// <returns>Instance of the deserialized object or null. Must be cast to your object type</returns> public static object DeserializeFromFile(string fileName, Type objectType, bool throwExceptions = false) { dynamic json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return null; object result = null; dynamic reader = null; FileStream fs = null; try { fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); var sr = new StreamReader(fs, Encoding.UTF8); reader = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextReaderType, sr); result = json.Deserialize(reader, objectType); reader.Close(); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonNetSerialization Deserialization Error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } finally { if (reader != null) reader.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return result; }This code is a little more compact since there are no prettifying options to set. Here JsonTextReader is created dynamically and it receives the output from the Deserialize() operation on the serializer.You can take a look at the full JsonSerializationUtils.cs file on GitHub to see the rest of the operations, but the string operations are very similar - the code is fairly repetitive.These generic serialization utilities isolate the dynamic serialization logic that has to deal with the dynamic nature of JSON.NET, and any code that uses these functions is none the wiser that JSON.NET is dynamically loaded.Using the JsonSerializationUtils WrapperThe final consumer of the SerializationUtils wrapper is an actual ConfigurationProvider, that is responsible for handling reading and writing JSON values to and from files. The provider is simple a small wrapper around the SerializationUtils component and there's very little code to make this work now:The whole provider looks like this:/// <summary> /// Reads and Writes configuration settings in .NET config files and /// sections. Allows reading and writing to default or external files /// and specification of the configuration section that settings are /// applied to. /// </summary> public class JsonFileConfigurationProvider<TAppConfiguration> : ConfigurationProviderBase<TAppConfiguration> where TAppConfiguration: AppConfiguration, new() { /// <summary> /// Optional - the Configuration file where configuration settings are /// stored in. If not specified uses the default Configuration Manager /// and its default store. /// </summary> public string JsonConfigurationFile { get { return _JsonConfigurationFile; } set { _JsonConfigurationFile = value; } } private string _JsonConfigurationFile = string.Empty; public override bool Read(AppConfiguration config) { var newConfig = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfiguration)) as TAppConfiguration; if (newConfig == null) { if(Write(config)) return true; return false; } DecryptFields(newConfig); DataUtils.CopyObjectData(newConfig, config, "Provider,ErrorMessage"); return true; } /// <summary> /// Return /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TAppConfig"></typeparam> /// <returns></returns> public override TAppConfig Read<TAppConfig>() { var result = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfig)) as TAppConfig; if (result != null) DecryptFields(result); return result; } /// <summary> /// Write configuration to XmlConfigurationFile location /// </summary> /// <param name="config"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool Write(AppConfiguration config) { EncryptFields(config); bool result = JsonSerializationUtils.SerializeToFile(config, JsonConfigurationFile,false,true); // Have to decrypt again to make sure the properties are readable afterwards DecryptFields(config); return result; } }This incidentally demonstrates how easy it is to create a new provider for the West Wind Application Configuration component. Simply implementing 3 methods will do in most cases.Note this code doesn't have any dynamic dependencies - all that's abstracted away in the JsonSerializationUtils(). From here on, serializing JSON is just a matter of calling the static methods on the SerializationUtils class.Already, there are several other places in some other tools where I use JSON serialization this is coming in very handy. With a couple of lines of code I was able to add JSON.NET support to an older AJAX library that I use replacing quite a bit of code that was previously in use. And for any other manual JSON operations (in a couple of apps I use JSON Serialization for 'blob' like document storage) this is also going to be handy.Performance?Some of you might be thinking that using dynamic and Reflection can't be good for performance. And you'd be right… In performing some informal testing it looks like the performance of the native code is nearly twice as fast as the dynamic code. Most of the slowness is attributable to type lookups. To test I created a native class that uses an actual reference to JSON.NET and performance was consistently around 85-90% faster with the referenced code. That being said though - I serialized 10,000 objects in 80ms vs. 45ms so this isn't hardly slouchy. For the configuration component speed is not that important because both read and write operations typically happen once on first access and then every once in a while. But for other operations - say a serializer trying to handle AJAX requests on a Web Server one would be well served to create a hard dependency.Dynamic Loading - Worth it?On occasion dynamic loading makes sense. But there's a price to be paid in added code complexity and a performance hit. But for some operations that are not pivotal to a component or application and only used under certain circumstances dynamic loading can be beneficial to avoid having to ship extra files and loading down distributions. These days when you create new projects in Visual Studio with 30 assemblies before you even add your own code, trying to keep file counts under control seems a good idea. It's not the kind of thing you do on a regular basis, but when needed it can be a useful tool. Hopefully some of you find this information useful…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in .NET  C#   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Error compiling GLib in Ubuntu 14.04 (trying to install GimpShop)

  - by Nicolás Salvarrey

  I'm kinda new in Linux, so please take it easy on the most complicated stuff. I'm trying to install GimpShop. Installation guide asks me to install GLib first, and when I try to compile it using the make command I get errors. When I run the ./configure --prefix=/usr command, I get this: checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking for gawk... no checking for mawk... mawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking host system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu checking for the BeOS... no checking for Win32... no checking whether to enable garbage collector friendliness... no checking whether to disable memory pools... no checking for gcc... gcc checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out checking whether the C compiler works... yes checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of executables... checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes checking for gcc option to accept ANSI C... none needed checking for style of include used by make... GNU checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3 checking for c++... no checking for g++... no checking for gcc... gcc checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... no checking whether gcc accepts -g... no checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3 checking for gcc option to accept ANSI C... none needed checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking for special C compiler options needed for large files... no checking for _FILE_OFFSET_BITS value needed for large files... no checking for _LARGE_FILES value needed for large files... no checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config checking for gawk... (cached) mawk checking for perl5... no checking for perl... perl checking for indent... no checking for perl... /usr/bin/perl checking for iconv_open... yes checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E checking for egrep... grep -E checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking for sys/types.h... yes checking for sys/stat.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for memory.h... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking locale.h usability... yes checking locale.h presence... yes checking for locale.h... yes checking for LC_MESSAGES... yes checking libintl.h usability... yes checking libintl.h presence... yes checking for libintl.h... yes checking for ngettext in libc... yes checking for dgettext in libc... yes checking for bind_textdomain_codeset... yes checking for msgfmt... /usr/bin/msgfmt checking for dcgettext... yes checking for gmsgfmt... /usr/bin/msgfmt checking for xgettext... /usr/bin/xgettext checking for catalogs to be installed... am ar az be bg bn bs ca cs cy da de el en_CA en_GB eo es et eu fa fi fr ga gl gu he hi hr id is it ja ko lt lv mk mn ms nb ne nl nn no or pa pl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sl sq sr sr@ije sr@Latn sv ta tl tr uk vi wa xh yi zh_CN zh_TW checking for a sed that does not truncate output... /bin/sed checking for ld used by gcc... /usr/bin/ld checking if the linker (/usr/bin/ld) is GNU ld... yes checking for /usr/bin/ld option to reload object files... -r checking for BSD-compatible nm... /usr/bin/nm -B checking whether ln -s works... yes checking how to recognise dependent libraries... pass_all checking dlfcn.h usability... yes checking dlfcn.h presence... yes checking for dlfcn.h... yes checking for g77... no checking for f77... no checking for xlf... no checking for frt... no checking for pgf77... no checking for fort77... no checking for fl32... no checking for af77... no checking for f90... no checking for xlf90... no checking for pgf90... no checking for epcf90... no checking for f95... no checking for fort... no checking for xlf95... no checking for ifc... no checking for efc... no checking for pgf95... no checking for lf95... no checking for gfortran... no checking whether we are using the GNU Fortran 77 compiler... no checking whether accepts -g... no checking the maximum length of command line arguments... 32768 checking command to parse /usr/bin/nm -B output from gcc object... ok checking for objdir... .libs checking for ar... ar checking for ranlib... ranlib checking for strip... strip checking if gcc static flag works... yes checking if gcc supports -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions... no checking for gcc option to produce PIC... -fPIC checking if gcc PIC flag -fPIC works... yes checking if gcc supports -c -o file.o... yes checking whether the gcc linker (/usr/bin/ld -m elf_x86_64) supports shared libraries... yes checking whether -lc should be explicitly linked in... no checking dynamic linker characteristics... GNU/Linux ld.so checking how to hardcode library paths into programs... immediate checking whether stripping libraries is possible... yes checking if libtool supports shared libraries... yes checking whether to build shared libraries... yes checking whether to build static libraries... no configure: creating libtool appending configuration tag "CXX" to libtool appending configuration tag "F77" to libtool checking for extra flags to get ANSI library prototypes... none needed checking for extra flags for POSIX compliance... none needed checking for ANSI C header files... (cached) yes checking for vprintf... yes checking for _doprnt... no checking for working alloca.h... yes checking for alloca... yes checking for atexit... yes checking for on_exit... yes checking for char... yes checking size of char... 1 checking for short... yes checking size of short... 2 checking for long... yes checking size of long... 8 checking for int... yes checking size of int... 4 checking for void *... yes checking size of void *... 8 checking for long long... yes checking size of long long... 8 checking for __int64... no checking size of __int64... 0 checking for format to printf and scanf a guint64... %llu checking for an ANSI C-conforming const... yes checking if malloc() and friends prototypes are gmem.h compatible... no checking for growing stack pointer... yes checking for __inline... yes checking for __inline__... yes checking for inline... yes checking if inline functions in headers work... yes checking for ISO C99 varargs macros in C... yes checking for ISO C99 varargs macros in C++... no checking for GNUC varargs macros... yes checking for GNUC visibility attribute... yes checking whether byte ordering is bigendian... no checking dirent.h usability... yes checking dirent.h presence... yes checking for dirent.h... yes checking float.h usability... yes checking float.h presence... yes checking for float.h... yes checking limits.h usability... yes checking limits.h presence... yes checking for limits.h... yes checking pwd.h usability... yes checking pwd.h presence... yes checking for pwd.h... yes checking sys/param.h usability... yes checking sys/param.h presence... yes checking for sys/param.h... yes checking sys/poll.h usability... yes checking sys/poll.h presence... yes checking for sys/poll.h... yes checking sys/select.h usability... yes checking sys/select.h presence... yes checking for sys/select.h... yes checking for sys/types.h... (cached) yes checking sys/time.h usability... yes checking sys/time.h presence... yes checking for sys/time.h... yes checking sys/times.h usability... yes checking sys/times.h presence... yes checking for sys/times.h... yes checking for unistd.h... (cached) yes checking values.h usability... yes checking values.h presence... yes checking for values.h... yes checking for stdint.h... (cached) yes checking sched.h usability... yes checking sched.h presence... yes checking for sched.h... yes checking langinfo.h usability... yes checking langinfo.h presence... yes checking for langinfo.h... yes checking for nl_langinfo... yes checking for nl_langinfo and CODESET... yes checking whether we are using the GNU C Library 2.1 or newer... yes checking stddef.h usability... yes checking stddef.h presence... yes checking for stddef.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... (cached) yes checking for string.h... (cached) yes checking for setlocale... yes checking for size_t... yes checking size of size_t... 8 checking for the appropriate definition for size_t... unsigned long checking for lstat... yes checking for strerror... yes checking for strsignal... yes checking for memmove... yes checking for mkstemp... yes checking for vsnprintf... yes checking for stpcpy... yes checking for strcasecmp... yes checking for strncasecmp... yes checking for poll... yes checking for getcwd... yes checking for nanosleep... yes checking for vasprintf... yes checking for setenv... yes checking for unsetenv... yes checking for getc_unlocked... yes checking for readlink... yes checking for symlink... yes checking for C99 vsnprintf... yes checking whether printf supports positional parameters... yes checking for signed... yes checking for long long... (cached) yes checking for long double... yes checking for wchar_t... yes checking for wint_t... yes checking for size_t... (cached) yes checking for ptrdiff_t... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for snprintf... yes checking for C99 snprintf... yes checking for sys_errlist... yes checking for sys_siglist... yes checking for sys_siglist declaration... yes checking for fd_set... yes, found in sys/types.h checking whether realloc (NULL,) will work... yes checking for nl_langinfo (CODESET)... yes checking for OpenBSD strlcpy/strlcat... no checking for an implementation of va_copy()... yes checking for an implementation of __va_copy()... yes checking whether va_lists can be copied by value... no checking for dlopen... no checking for NSLinkModule... no checking for dlopen in -ldl... yes checking for dlsym in -ldl... yes checking for RTLD_GLOBAL brokenness... no checking for preceeding underscore in symbols... no checking for dlerror... yes checking for the suffix of shared libraries... .so checking for gspawn implementation... gspawn.lo checking for GIOChannel implementation... giounix.lo checking for platform-dependent source... checking whether to compile timeloop... yes checking if building for some Win32 platform... no checking for thread implementation... posix checking thread related cflags... -pthread checking for sched_get_priority_min... yes checking thread related libraries... -pthread checking for localtime_r... yes checking for posix getpwuid_r... yes checking size of pthread_t... 8 checking for pthread_attr_setstacksize... yes checking for minimal/maximal thread priority... sched_get_priority_min(SCHED_OTHER)/sched_get_priority_max(SCHED_OTHER) checking for pthread_setschedparam... yes checking for posix yield function... sched_yield checking size of pthread_mutex_t... 40 checking byte contents of PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER... 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 checking whether to use assembler code for atomic operations... x86_64 checking value of POLLIN... 1 checking value of POLLOUT... 4 checking value of POLLPRI... 2 checking value of POLLERR... 8 checking value of POLLHUP... 16 checking value of POLLNVAL... 32 checking for EILSEQ... yes configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating glib-2.0.pc config.status: creating glib-2.0-uninstalled.pc config.status: creating gmodule-2.0.pc config.status: creating gmodule-no-export-2.0.pc config.status: creating gmodule-2.0-uninstalled.pc config.status: creating gthread-2.0.pc config.status: creating gthread-2.0-uninstalled.pc config.status: creating gobject-2.0.pc config.status: creating gobject-2.0-uninstalled.pc config.status: creating glib-zip config.status: creating glib-gettextize config.status: creating Makefile config.status: creating build/Makefile config.status: creating build/win32/Makefile config.status: creating build/win32/dirent/Makefile config.status: creating glib/Makefile config.status: creating glib/libcharset/Makefile config.status: creating glib/gnulib/Makefile config.status: creating gmodule/Makefile config.status: creating gmodule/gmoduleconf.h config.status: creating gobject/Makefile config.status: creating gobject/glib-mkenums config.status: creating gthread/Makefile config.status: creating po/Makefile.in config.status: creating docs/Makefile config.status: creating docs/reference/Makefile config.status: creating docs/reference/glib/Makefile config.status: creating docs/reference/glib/version.xml config.status: creating docs/reference/gobject/Makefile config.status: creating docs/reference/gobject/version.xml config.status: creating tests/Makefile config.status: creating tests/gobject/Makefile config.status: creating m4macros/Makefile config.status: creating config.h config.status: config.h is unchanged config.status: executing depfiles commands config.status: executing default-1 commands config.status: executing glibconfig.h commands config.status: glibconfig.h is unchanged config.status: executing chmod-scripts commands nsalvarrey@Delleuze:~/glib-2.6.3$ ^C nsalvarrey@Delleuze:~/glib-2.6.3$ And then, with the make command, I get this: galias.h:83:39: error: 'g_ascii_digit_value' aliased to undefined symbol 'IA__g_ascii_digit_value' extern __typeof (g_ascii_digit_value) g_ascii_digit_value __attribute((alias("IA__g_ascii_digit_value"), visibility("default"))); ^ In file included from garray.c:35:0: galias.h:31:35: error: 'g_allocator_new' aliased to undefined symbol 'IA__g_allocator_new' extern __typeof (g_allocator_new) g_allocator_new __attribute((alias("IA__g_allocator_new"), visibility("default"))); ^ make[4]: *** [garray.lo] Error 1 make[4]: se sale del directorio «/home/nsalvarrey/glib-2.6.3/glib» make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[3]: se sale del directorio «/home/nsalvarrey/glib-2.6.3/glib» make[2]: *** [all] Error 2 make[2]: se sale del directorio «/home/nsalvarrey/glib-2.6.3/glib» make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: se sale del directorio «/home/nsalvarrey/glib-2.6.3» make: *** [all] Error 2 nsalvarrey@Delleuze:~/glib-2.6.3$ (it's actually a lot longer) Can somebody help me?

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• The Oracle Cash Management Secret Very Few Customers Know About

  - by Theresa Hickman

  Did you know that Oracle Cash Management has a robust positioning feature? I had no idea. I was under the mistaken impression that Oracle Cash Management only did bank statement reconciliations. It seems I am not alone. In fact, many Oracle Financials customers are also not aware of this even though it is delivered for free with the Oracle Financials license. Even better, last week, Oracle released an enhancement to Oracle Cash Management for Release 12 that will greatly help customers with their cash positioning needs. As we all know, credit is tight these days. Companies need better visibility of their cash and other liquidity positions to make better use of their cash resources. Today, many customers are managing their cash positions manually using spreadsheets. We also hear how many of them are maintaining larger than normal balances in numerous bank accounts because they just do not have the visibility, and therefore the comfort they need. Although spreadsheets may work in the short-term, they are not the best way to manage your cash positions for the long-term especially if you have dozens, or even hundreds of bank and brokerage accounts. Also, spreadsheets are a lot more risky because they can be overwritten, deleted, difficult to audit, etc. With the newly enhanced positioning feature in Oracle Cash Management, customers can manage their daily cash positions using an excel-like interface that is very flexible and user-configurable. You can link the worksheet to an unlimited number of bank accounts to automatically retrieve your opening balances, the current/intra-day cash inflows and outflows, as well as your expected cash flows from your Fx, Investment and Debt positions if you have Oracle's Treasury module . Oracle Cash Management also has direct integration with Oracle Receivables, Oracle Payables, and Payroll, which adds to the comprehensive picture of what's happening with your organizations' cash in real-time. Here's a screen shot of what the cash positioning page looks like: View image As you can see, your Treasurers can obtain a holistic view of all cash positions across any number of bank accounts as well as other sources of cash flow movements. Depending on how they manage their accounts, they can also use this feature to initiate or monitor bank account sweeps or transfers between their zero balance accounts (ZBA) or cash pools. The cash position worksheet provide drill down for more detail and the ability to manually enter items directly into the worksheet for even greater flexibility and control. The enhancements to this feature were released last week. The following list the patches for Release 12.0.6 and 12.1.1: For more information, visit the following website. http://launch.oracle.com. PIN: yes2try

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• Game timings and formats

  - by topright

  There are more or less standardized TV-show/movie formats and recommended timings: 1. By the early 1960s, television companies commonly presented half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to situation comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a live or artificial laugh track. One hour dramas included genre series such as police and detective series, westerns, science fiction, and, later, serialized prime time soap operas. Programs today still overwhelmingly conform to these half-hour and one hour guidelines. Source 2. In the United States, most medical dramas are one hour long. Source 3. Traditionally serials were broadcast as fifteen minute installments each weekday in daytime slots. In 1956 As the World Turns debuted as the first half-hour soap opera. All soap operas broadcast half-hour episodes by the end of the 1960s. With increased popularity in the 1970s most soap operas expanded to an hour (Another World even expanded to ninety minutes for a short time). More than half of the serials had expanded to one hour episodes by 1980. As of 2010, six of the seven US serials air one hour episodes each weekday. Source Interesting. Are there any standards of timing in game development? Well, 5-20 minutes casual games, of course. There is even a "5-minutes-game" site. And 1-hour-gamer site. Are there 1-week, 1-year, 1-eternity game formats? Chess and Go - deep games that you can study all your life; but they are played in hour or several days (pro games). Addictive long-term online role-playing games (without win-condition) are played in monthes and, possibly, years. Replayability is an important factor to consider. It's good when game design document contains a line: "A game is designed for solving in X hours". How can it be measured before there is any prototype or demo? When you know your game format, you know your audience (and vice versa). It is practical question. Are there psychological researches about dynamic of gaming interest and involvement? And is there a correlation between game format and game genre?

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• JWT Token Security with Fusion Sales Cloud

  - by asantaga

  When integrating SalesCloud with a 3rd party application you often need to pass the users identity to the 3rd party application so that  The 3rd party application knows who the user is The 3rd party application needs to be able to do WebService callbacks to Sales Cloud as that user.  Until recently without using SAML, this wasn't easily possible and one workaround was to pass the username, potentially even the password, from Sales Cloud to the 3rd party application using URL parameters.. With Oracle Fusion R8 we now have a proper solution and that is called "JWT Token support". This is based on the industry JSON Web Token standard , for more information see here JWT Works by allowing the user the ability to generate a token (lasts a short period of time) for a specific application. This token is then passed to the 3rd party application as a GET parameter.  The 3rd party application can then call into SalesCloud and use this token for all webservice calls, the calls will be executed as the user who generated the token in the first place, or they can call a special HR WebService (UserService-findSelfUserDetails() ) with the token and Fusion will respond with the users details. Some more details  The following will go through the scenario that you want to embed a 3rd party application within a WebContent frame (iFrame) within the opportunity screen.  1. Define your application using the topology manager in setup and maintenance  See this documentation link on topology manager 2. From within your groovy script which defines the iFrame you wish to embed, write some code which looks like this : def thirdpartyapplicationurl = oracle.topologyManager.client.deployedInfo.DeployedInfoProvider.getEndPoint("My3rdPartyApplication" )def crmkey= (new oracle.apps.fnd.applcore.common.SecuredTokenBean().getTrustToken())def url = thirdpartyapplicationurl +"param1="+OptyId+"&jwt ="+crmkeyreturn (url)  This snippet generates a URL which contains The Hostname/endpoint of the 3rd party application Two Parameters The opportunityId stored in parameter "param1" The JWT Token store in  parameter "jwt" 3. From your 3rd Party Application you now have two options Execute a webservice call by first setting the header parameter "Authentication" to the JWT token. The webservice call will be executed against Fusion Applications "As" the user who execute the process To find out "Who you are" , set the header parameter to "Authentication" and execute the special webservice call findSelfUserDetails(), in the UserDetailsService For more information  Oracle Sales Cloud Documentation , specific chapter on JWT Token OTN samples, specifically the Rich UI With JWT Token Sample Oracle Fusion Applications General Documentation

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• Unable to add users to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 after database restore

  - by Wes Weeks

  Working with a client in our Multi-tenant CRM environment who was doing a database migration into CRM and as part of the process, a backup of their Organization_MSCRM database was taken just prior to starting the migration in case it needed to be restored and run a second time. In this case it did, so I restored the database and let the client know he should be good to go.  A few hours later I received a call that they were unable to add some new users, they would appear as available when using the add multiple user wizard, but anyone added would not be added to CRM.  It was also disucussed that these users had been added to CRM initally AFTER the database backup had been taken. I turned on tracing and tried to add the users through both the single user form and multiple user interface and was unable to do so.  The error message in the logs wasn't much help: Unexpected error adding user [email protected]: Microsoft.Crm.CrmException: INVALID_WRPC_TOKEN: Validate WRPC Token: WRPCTokenState=Invalid, TOKEN_EXPIRY=4320, IGNORE_TOKEN=False Searching on Google or bing didn't offer any assitance.  Apparently not a very common problem, or no one has been able to resolve. I did some searching in the MSCRM_CONFIG database and found that their are several user tables there and after getting my head around the structure found that there were enties here for users that were not part of the restored DB.  It seems that new users are added to both the Orgnaization_MSCRM and MSCRM_CONFIG and after the restore these were out of sync. I needed to remove the extra entries in order to address.  Restoring the MSCRM_CONFIG database was not an option as other clients could have been adding users at this point and to restore would risk breaking their instances of CRM.  Long story short, I was finally able to generate a script to remove the bad entries and when I tried to add users again, I was succesful.  In case someone else out there finds themselves in a similar situation, here is the script I used to delete the bad entries. DECLARE @UsersToDelete TABLE (   UserId uniqueidentifier )   Insert Into @UsersToDelete(UserId) Select UserId from [MSCRM_CONFIG].[dbo].[SystemUserOrganizations] Where CrmuserId Not in (select systemuserid from Organization_MSCRM.dbo.SystemUserBase) And OrganizationId = '00000000-643F-E011-0000-0050568572A1' --Id From the Organization table for this instance   Delete From [MSCRM_CONFIG].[dbo].[SystemUserAuthentication]   Where UserId in (Select UserId From @UsersToDelete)   Delete From [MSCRM_CONFIG].[dbo].[SystemUserOrganizations] Where UserId in (Select UserId From @UsersToDelete)   Delete From [MSCRM_CONFIG].[dbo].[SystemUser] Where Id in (Select UserId From @UsersToDelete)

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• Free training at Northwest Cadence

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Even though I have only been at Northwest Cadence for a short time I have already done so much. What I really wanted to do was let you guys know about a bunch of FREE training that NWC offers. These sessions are at a fantastic time for the UK as 9am PST (Seattle time) is around 5pm GMT. Its a fantastic way to finish off your Fridays and with the lack of love for developers in the UK set to continue I would love some of you guys to get some from the US instead. There are really two offerings. The first is something called Coffee talks that take you through an hours worth of detail in a specific category. Coffee Talks These coffee talks have some superb topics and you can get excellent interaction with the presenter as they are kind of informal. Date Day Time Topic Register Here 01/04/11 Tuesday 8:30AM – 9:30AM PST Real World Business and Technical Benefits of ALM with TFS 2010 150656 01/28/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152810 02/11/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152844 02/25/11 Friday 2:00PM - 3:00PM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152816 03/11/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Lab Manager The Ultimate “No More No Repro” Tool 152809 03/25/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152838 04/08/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152846 04/22/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152839 05/06/11 Friday 2:00PM - 3:00PM PST Real World Business and Technical Benefits of ALM with TFS 2010 150657 05/20/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152842 06/03/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152847 06/17/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152843   ALM Training Engagement Program Microsoft has released a new program to bring free Visual Studio 2010 Training Sessions to select customers on Microsoft Visual Studio products and how Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions can help drive greater business impact. For more details on this program, please see the process chart below.  To get started send an email to us; This training is paid for by Microsoft and you would need to commit to 4 sessions in order to get accepted into the program. So these have more hoops to jump through to get them, but the content is much more formal and centres around adoption.

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• Dynamically loading Assemblies to reduce Runtime Dependencies

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working on a request to the West Wind Application Configuration library to add JSON support. The config library is a very easy to use code-first approach to configuration: You create a class that holds the configuration data that inherits from a base configuration class, and then assign a persistence provider at runtime that determines where and how the configuration data is store. Currently the library supports .NET Configuration stores (web.config/app.config), XML files, SQL records and string storage.About once a week somebody asks me about JSON support and I've deflected this question for the longest time because frankly I think that JSON as a configuration store doesn't really buy a heck of a lot over XML. Both formats require the user to perform some fixup of the plain configuration data - in XML into XML tags, with JSON using JSON delimiters for properties and property formatting rules. Sure JSON is a little less verbose and maybe a little easier to read if you have hierarchical data, but overall the differences are pretty minor in my opinion. And yet - the requests keep rolling in.Hard Link Issues in a Component LibraryAnother reason I've been hesitant is that I really didn't want to pull in a dependency on an external JSON library - in this case JSON.NET - into the core library. If you're not using JSON.NET elsewhere I don't want a user to have to require a hard dependency on JSON.NET unless they want to use the JSON feature. JSON.NET is also sensitive to versions and doesn't play nice with multiple versions when hard linked. For example, when you have a reference to V4.4 in your project but the host application has a reference to version 4.5 you can run into assembly load problems. NuGet's Update-Package can solve some of this *if* you can recompile, but that's not ideal for a component that's supposed to be just plug and play. This is no criticism of JSON.NET - this really applies to any dependency that might change.  So hard linking the DLL can be problematic for a number reasons, but the primary reason is to not force loading of JSON.NET unless you actually need it when you use the JSON configuration features of the library.Enter Dynamic LoadingSo rather than adding an assembly reference to the project, I decided that it would be better to dynamically load the DLL at runtime and then use dynamic typing to access various classes. This allows me to run without a hard assembly reference and allows more flexibility with version number differences now and in the future.But there are also a couple of downsides:No assembly reference means only dynamic access - no compiler type checking or IntellisenseRequirement for the host application to have reference to JSON.NET or else get runtime errorsThe former is minor, but the latter can be problematic. Runtime errors are always painful, but in this case I'm willing to live with this. If you want to use JSON configuration settings JSON.NET needs to be loaded in the project. If this is a Web project, it'll likely be there already.So there are a few things that are needed to make this work:Dynamically create an instance and optionally attempt to load an Assembly (if not loaded)Load types into dynamic variablesUse Reflection for a few tasks like statics/enumsThe dynamic keyword in C# makes the formerly most difficult Reflection part - method calls and property assignments - fairly painless. But as cool as dynamic is it doesn't handle all aspects of Reflection. Specifically it doesn't deal with object activation, truly dynamic (string based) member activation or accessing of non instance members, so there's still a little bit of work left to do with Reflection.Dynamic Object InstantiationThe first step in getting the process rolling is to instantiate the type you need to work with. This might be a two step process - loading the instance from a string value, since we don't have a hard type reference and potentially having to load the assembly. Although the host project might have a reference to JSON.NET, that instance might have not been loaded yet since it hasn't been accessed yet. In ASP.NET this won't be a problem, since ASP.NET preloads all referenced assemblies on AppDomain startup, but in other executable project, assemblies are just in time loaded only when they are accessed.Instantiating a type is a two step process: Finding the type reference and then activating it. Here's the generic code out of my ReflectionUtils library I use for this:/// <summary> /// Creates an instance of a type based on a string. Assumes that the type's /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName">Common name of the type</param> /// <param name="args">Any constructor parameters</param> /// <returns></returns> public static object CreateInstanceFromString(string typeName, params object[] args) { object instance = null; Type type = null; try { type = GetTypeFromName(typeName); if (type == null) return null; instance = Activator.CreateInstance(type, args); } catch { return null; } return instance; } /// <summary> /// Helper routine that looks up a type name and tries to retrieve the /// full type reference in the actively executing assemblies. /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Type GetTypeFromName(string typeName) { Type type = null; // Let default name binding find it type = Type.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) return type; // look through assembly list var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); // try to find manually foreach (Assembly asm in assemblies) { type = asm.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) break; } return type; } To use this for loading JSON.NET I have a small factory function that instantiates JSON.NET and sets a bunch of configuration settings on the generated object. The startup code also looks for failure and tries loading up the assembly when it fails since that's the main reason the load would fail. Finally it also caches the loaded instance for reuse (according to James the JSON.NET instance is thread safe and quite a bit faster when cached). Here's what the factory function looks like in JsonSerializationUtils:/// <summary> /// Dynamically creates an instance of JSON.NET /// </summary> /// <param name="throwExceptions">If true throws exceptions otherwise returns null</param> /// <returns>Dynamic JsonSerializer instance</returns> public static dynamic CreateJsonNet(bool throwExceptions = true) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; lock (SyncLock) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; // Try to create instance dynamic json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); if (json == null) { try { var ass = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load("Newtonsoft.Json"); json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); } catch (Exception ex) { if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } } if (json == null) return null; json.ReferenceLoopHandling = (dynamic) ReflectionUtils.GetStaticProperty("Newtonsoft.Json.ReferenceLoopHandling", "Ignore"); // Enums as strings in JSON dynamic enumConverter = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.Converters.StringEnumConverter"); json.Converters.Add(enumConverter); JsonNet = json; } return JsonNet; }This code's purpose is to return a fully configured JsonSerializer instance. As you can see the code tries to create an instance and when it fails tries to load the assembly, and then re-tries loading.Once the instance is loaded some configuration occurs on it. Specifically I set the ReferenceLoopHandling option to not blow up immediately when circular references are encountered. There are a host of other small config setting that might be useful to set, but the default seem to be good enough in recent versions. Note that I'm setting ReferenceLoopHandling which requires an Enum value to be set. There's no real easy way (short of using the cardinal numeric value) to set a property or pass parameters from static values or enums. This means I still need to use Reflection to make this work. I'm using the same ReflectionUtils class I previously used to handle this for me. The function looks up the type and then uses Type.InvokeMember() to read the static property.Another feature I need is have Enum values serialized as strings rather than numeric values which is the default. To do this I can use the StringEnumConverter to convert enums to strings by adding it to the Converters collection.As you can see there's still a bit of Reflection to be done even in C# 4+ with dynamic, but with a few helpers this process is relatively painless.Doing the actual JSON ConversionFinally I need to actually do my JSON conversions. For the Utility class I need serialization that works for both strings and files so I created four methods that handle these tasks two each for serialization and deserialization for string and file.Here's what the File Serialization looks like:/// <summary> /// Serializes an object instance to a JSON file. /// </summary> /// <param name="value">the value to serialize</param> /// <param name="fileName">Full path to the file to write out with JSON.</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">Determines whether exceptions are thrown or false is returned</param> /// <param name="formatJsonOutput">if true pretty-formats the JSON with line breaks</param> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public static bool SerializeToFile(object value, string fileName, bool throwExceptions = false, bool formatJsonOutput = false) { dynamic writer = null; FileStream fs = null; try { Type type = value.GetType(); var json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return false; fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create); var sw = new StreamWriter(fs, Encoding.UTF8); writer = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextWriterType, sw); if (formatJsonOutput) writer.Formatting = (dynamic)Enum.Parse(FormattingType, "Indented"); writer.QuoteChar = '"'; json.Serialize(writer, value); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonSerializer Serialize error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return false; } finally { if (writer != null) writer.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return true; }You can see more of the dynamic invocation in this code. First I grab the dynamic JsonSerializer instance using the CreateJsonNet() method shown earlier which returns a dynamic. I then create a JsonTextWriter and configure a couple of enum settings on it, and then call Serialize() on the serializer instance with the JsonTextWriter that writes the output to disk. Although this code is dynamic it's still fairly short and readable.For full circle operation here's the DeserializeFromFile() version:/// <summary> /// Deserializes an object from file and returns a reference. /// </summary> /// <param name="fileName">name of the file to serialize to</param> /// <param name="objectType">The Type of the object. Use typeof(yourobject class)</param> /// <param name="binarySerialization">determines whether we use Xml or Binary serialization</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">determines whether failure will throw rather than return null on failure</param> /// <returns>Instance of the deserialized object or null. Must be cast to your object type</returns> public static object DeserializeFromFile(string fileName, Type objectType, bool throwExceptions = false) { dynamic json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return null; object result = null; dynamic reader = null; FileStream fs = null; try { fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); var sr = new StreamReader(fs, Encoding.UTF8); reader = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextReaderType, sr); result = json.Deserialize(reader, objectType); reader.Close(); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonNetSerialization Deserialization Error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } finally { if (reader != null) reader.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return result; }This code is a little more compact since there are no prettifying options to set. Here JsonTextReader is created dynamically and it receives the output from the Deserialize() operation on the serializer.You can take a look at the full JsonSerializationUtils.cs file on GitHub to see the rest of the operations, but the string operations are very similar - the code is fairly repetitive.These generic serialization utilities isolate the dynamic serialization logic that has to deal with the dynamic nature of JSON.NET, and any code that uses these functions is none the wiser that JSON.NET is dynamically loaded.Using the JsonSerializationUtils WrapperThe final consumer of the SerializationUtils wrapper is an actual ConfigurationProvider, that is responsible for handling reading and writing JSON values to and from files. The provider is simple a small wrapper around the SerializationUtils component and there's very little code to make this work now:The whole provider looks like this:/// <summary> /// Reads and Writes configuration settings in .NET config files and /// sections. Allows reading and writing to default or external files /// and specification of the configuration section that settings are /// applied to. /// </summary> public class JsonFileConfigurationProvider<TAppConfiguration> : ConfigurationProviderBase<TAppConfiguration> where TAppConfiguration: AppConfiguration, new() { /// <summary> /// Optional - the Configuration file where configuration settings are /// stored in. If not specified uses the default Configuration Manager /// and its default store. /// </summary> public string JsonConfigurationFile { get { return _JsonConfigurationFile; } set { _JsonConfigurationFile = value; } } private string _JsonConfigurationFile = string.Empty; public override bool Read(AppConfiguration config) { var newConfig = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfiguration)) as TAppConfiguration; if (newConfig == null) { if(Write(config)) return true; return false; } DecryptFields(newConfig); DataUtils.CopyObjectData(newConfig, config, "Provider,ErrorMessage"); return true; } /// <summary> /// Return /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TAppConfig"></typeparam> /// <returns></returns> public override TAppConfig Read<TAppConfig>() { var result = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfig)) as TAppConfig; if (result != null) DecryptFields(result); return result; } /// <summary> /// Write configuration to XmlConfigurationFile location /// </summary> /// <param name="config"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool Write(AppConfiguration config) { EncryptFields(config); bool result = JsonSerializationUtils.SerializeToFile(config, JsonConfigurationFile,false,true); // Have to decrypt again to make sure the properties are readable afterwards DecryptFields(config); return result; } }This incidentally demonstrates how easy it is to create a new provider for the West Wind Application Configuration component. Simply implementing 3 methods will do in most cases.Note this code doesn't have any dynamic dependencies - all that's abstracted away in the JsonSerializationUtils(). From here on, serializing JSON is just a matter of calling the static methods on the SerializationUtils class.Already, there are several other places in some other tools where I use JSON serialization this is coming in very handy. With a couple of lines of code I was able to add JSON.NET support to an older AJAX library that I use replacing quite a bit of code that was previously in use. And for any other manual JSON operations (in a couple of apps I use JSON Serialization for 'blob' like document storage) this is also going to be handy.Performance?Some of you might be thinking that using dynamic and Reflection can't be good for performance. And you'd be right… In performing some informal testing it looks like the performance of the native code is nearly twice as fast as the dynamic code. Most of the slowness is attributable to type lookups. To test I created a native class that uses an actual reference to JSON.NET and performance was consistently around 85-90% faster with the referenced code. This will change though depending on the size of objects serialized - the larger the object the more processing time is spent inside the actual dynamically activated components and the less difference there will be. Dynamic code is always slower, but how much it really affects your application primarily depends on how frequently the dynamic code is called in relation to the non-dynamic code executing. In most situations where dynamic code is used 'to get the process rolling' as I do here the overhead is small enough to not matter.All that being said though - I serialized 10,000 objects in 80ms vs. 45ms so this is hardly slouchy performance. For the configuration component speed is not that important because both read and write operations typically happen once on first access and then every once in a while. But for other operations - say a serializer trying to handle AJAX requests on a Web Server one would be well served to create a hard dependency.Dynamic Loading - Worth it?Dynamic loading is not something you need to worry about but on occasion dynamic loading makes sense. But there's a price to be paid in added code  and a performance hit which depends on how frequently the dynamic code is accessed. But for some operations that are not pivotal to a component or application and are only used under certain circumstances dynamic loading can be beneficial to avoid having to ship extra files adding dependencies and loading down distributions. These days when you create new projects in Visual Studio with 30 assemblies before you even add your own code, trying to keep file counts under control seems like a good idea. It's not the kind of thing you do on a regular basis, but when needed it can be a useful option in your toolset… © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in .NET  C#   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Can one draw a cube using different method/drawing mode?

  - by den-javamaniac

  Hi. I've just started learning gamedev (in particular android EGL based) and have ran over a code from Pro Android Games 2 that looks as follows: /* * Copyright (C) 2007 Google Inc. * * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. * You may obtain a copy of the License at * * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and * limitations under the License. */ package opengl.scenes.cubes; import java.nio.ByteBuffer; import java.nio.ByteOrder; import java.nio.IntBuffer; import javax.microedition.khronos.opengles.GL10; public class Cube { public Cube(){ int one = 0x10000; int vertices[] = { -one, -one, -one, one, -one, -one, one, one, -one, -one, one, -one, -one, -one, one, one, -one, one, one, one, one, -one, one, one, }; int colors[] = { 0, 0, 0, one, one, 0, 0, one, one, one, 0, one, 0, one, 0, one, 0, 0, one, one, one, 0, one, one, one, one, one, one, 0, one, one, one, }; byte indices[] = { 0, 4, 5, 0, 5, 1, 1, 5, 6, 1, 6, 2, 2, 6, 7, 2, 7, 3, 3, 7, 4, 3, 4, 0, 4, 7, 6, 4, 6, 5, 3, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2 }; // Buffers to be passed to gl*Pointer() functions // must be direct, i.e., they must be placed on the // native heap where the garbage collector cannot vbb.asIntBuffer() // move them. // // Buffers with multi-byte datatypes (e.g., short, int, float) // must have their byte order set to native order ByteBuffer vbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length*4); vbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mVertexBuffer = vbb.asIntBuffer(); mVertexBuffer.put(vertices); mVertexBuffer.position(0); ByteBuffer cbb = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(colors.length*4); cbb.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mColorBuffer = cbb.asIntBuffer(); mColorBuffer.put(colors); mColorBuffer.position(0); mIndexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); mIndexBuffer.put(indices); mIndexBuffer.position(0); } public void draw(GL10 gl) { gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FIXED, 0, mVertexBuffer); gl.glColorPointer(4, GL10.GL_FIXED, 0, mColorBuffer); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mIndexBuffer); } private IntBuffer mVertexBuffer; private IntBuffer mColorBuffer; private ByteBuffer mIndexBuffer;} So it suggests to draw a cube using triangles. My question is: can I draw the same cube using GL_TPOLYGON? If so, isn't that an easier/more understandable way to do things?

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• What&rsquo;s new in RadChart for 2010 Q1 (Silverlight / WPF)

  Greetings, RadChart fans! It is with great pleasure that I present this short highlight of our accomplishments for the Q1 release :). Weve worked very hard to make the best silverlight and WPF charting product even better. Here is some of what we did during the past few months.   1) Zooming&Scrolling and the new sampling engine: Without a doubt one of the most important things we did. This new feature allows you to bind your chart to a very large set of data with blazing performance. Dont take my word for it give it a try!   2) New Smart Label Positioning and Spider-like labels feature: This new feature really helps with very busy graphs. You can play with the different settings we offer in this example.   3) Sorting and Filtering. Much like our RadGridview control the chart now allows you to sort and filter your data out of the box with a single line of code!   4) Legend improvements Weve also been paying attention to those of you who wanted a much improved legend. It is now possible to customize the look and feel of legend items and legend position with a single click.   5) Custom palette brushes. You have told us that you want to easily customize all palette colors using a single clean API from both XAML and code behind. The new custom palette brushes API does exactly that.   There are numerous other improvements as well, as much improved themes, performance optimizations and other features that we did. If you want to dig in further check the release notes and changes and backwards compatibility topics.   Feel free to share the pains and gains of working with RadChart. Our team is always open to receiving constructive feedback and beer :-)Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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