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  • Help Repainting a Line

    - by serhio
    I am doing a custom control (inherited from VisualBasic.PowerPacks.LineShape), that should be painted like as standard one, but also having a Icon displayed near it. So, I just overrided OnPaint like this: protected override void OnPaint(System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs e) { e.Graphics.DrawIcon(myIcon, StartPoint.X, StartPoint.Y); base.OnPaint(e); } Now, everything is OK, but when my control moves, the icon still remains drawn on the ancient place. Is there a way to paint it properly? The sample code for tests using Microsoft.VisualBasic.PowerPacks; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Drawing; namespace LineShapeTest { /// /// Test Form /// public class Form1 : Form { IconLineShape myLine = new IconLineShape(); ShapeContainer shapeContainer1 = new ShapeContainer(); Panel panel1 = new Panel(); public Form1() { this.panel1.Dock = DockStyle.Fill; // load your back image here this.panel1.BackgroundImage = global::WindowsApplication22.Properties.Resources._13820t; this.panel1.Controls.Add(shapeContainer1); this.myLine.StartPoint = new Point(20, 30); this.myLine.EndPoint = new Point(80, 120); this.myLine.Parent = this.shapeContainer1; MouseEventHandler panelMouseMove = new MouseEventHandler(this.panel1_MouseMove); this.panel1.MouseMove += panelMouseMove; this.shapeContainer1.MouseMove += panelMouseMove; this.Controls.Add(panel1); } private void panel1_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left) { myLine.StartPoint = e.Location; } } } /// /// Test LineShape /// public class IconLineShape : LineShape { Icon myIcon = SystemIcons.Exclamation; protected override void OnPaint(System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs e) { e.Graphics.DrawIcon(myIcon, StartPoint.X, StartPoint.Y); base.OnPaint(e); } } } Nota Bene, for the lineShape: Parent = ShapeContainer Parent.Parent = Panel Update 1 TRACES In this variant of OnPaint, we have traces: protected override void OnPaint(System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs e) { Graphics g = Parent.Parent.CreateGraphics(); g.DrawIcon(myIcon, StartPoint.X, StartPoint.Y); base.OnPaint(e); } Update 2 BLINKS In this variant of OnPaint, we have a blinking image: protected override void OnPaint(System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs e) { Parent.Parent.Invalidate(this.Region, true); Graphics g = Parent.Parent.CreateGraphics(); g.DrawIcon(myIcon, StartPoint.X, StartPoint.Y); base.OnPaint(e); } Update 3: External Invalidation This variant works well, but... from exterior of IconLineShape class: private void panel1_MouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) { if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left) { Region r = myLine.Region; myLine.StartPoint = e.Location; panel1.Invalidate(r); } } /// /// Test LineShape /// public class IconLineShape : LineShape { Icon myIcon = SystemIcons.Exclamation; Graphics parentGraphics; protected override void OnPaint(System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs e) { parentGraphics.DrawIcon(myIcon, StartPoint.X, StartPoint.Y); base.OnPaint(e); } protected override void OnParentChanged(System.EventArgs e) { // Parent is a ShapeContainer // Parent.Parent is a Panel parentGraphics = Parent.Parent.CreateGraphics(); base.OnParentChanged(e); } } Even this resolves the problem of the test example, I need this control to be done inside the control, because I can't force the external "clients" of this control do not forget to save the old region and invalidate the parent each time changing a location...

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  • AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

    - by Robz / Fervent Coder
    Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next? Heroku Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service). I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack).  So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on. AppHarbor Enters The Scene I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor. Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done. The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder  After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it. From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less) Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time. And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize. Ground rules: .NET Application with a valid database connection Start from Zero Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST. Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th) From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2 From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

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  • FAQ&ndash;Highlight GridView Row on Click and Retain Selected Row on Postback

    - by Vincent Maverick Durano
    A couple of months ago I’ve written a simple demo about “Highlighting GridView Row on MouseOver”. I’ve noticed many members in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) are asking how to highlight row in GridView and retain the selected row across postbacks. So I’ve decided to write this post to demonstrate how to implement it as reference to others who might need it. In this demo I going to use a combination of plain JavaScript and jQuery to do the client-side manipulation. I presumed that you already know how to bind the grid with data because I will not include the codes for populating the GridView here. For binding the gridview you can refer this post: Binding GridView with Data the ADO.Net way or this one: GridView Custom Paging with LINQ. To get started let’s implement the highlighting of GridView row on row click and retain the selected row on postback.  For simplicity I set up the page like this: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>You have selected Row: (<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />)</h2> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfCurrentRowIndex" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfParentContainer" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Trigger Postback" /> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomer" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="grdCustomer_RowDataBound"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Company" HeaderText="Company" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Title" HeaderText="Title" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </asp:Content>   Note: Since the action is done at the client-side, when we do a postback like (clicking on a button) the page will be re-created and you will lose the highlighted row. This is normal because the the server doesn't know anything about the client/browser not unless if you do something to notify the server that something has changed. To persist the settings we will use some HiddenFields control to store the data so that when it postback we can reference the value from there. Now here’s the JavaScript functions below: <asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="HeadContent"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript">       var prevRowIndex;       function ChangeRowColor(row, rowIndex) {           var parent = document.getElementById(row);           var currentRowIndex = parseInt(rowIndex) + 1;                 if (prevRowIndex == currentRowIndex) {               return;           }           else if (prevRowIndex != null) {               parent.rows[prevRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFFF";           }                 parent.rows[currentRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFD6";                 prevRowIndex = currentRowIndex;                 $('#<%= Label1.ClientID %>').text(currentRowIndex);                 $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(row);           $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(rowIndex);       }             $(function () {           RetainSelectedRow();       });             function RetainSelectedRow() {           var parent = $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val();           var currentIndex = $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val();           if (parent != null) {               ChangeRowColor(parent, currentIndex);           }       }          </script> </asp:content>   The ChangeRowColor() is the function that sets the background color of the selected row. It is also where we set the previous row and rowIndex values in HiddenFields.  The $(function(){}); is a short-hand for the jQuery document.ready function. This function will be fired once the page is posted back to the server that’s why we call the function RetainSelectedRow(). The RetainSelectedRow() function is where we referenced the current selected values stored from the HiddenFields and pass these values to the ChangeRowColor) function to retain the highlighted row. Finally, here’s the code behind part: protected void grdCustomer_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", string.Format("ChangeRowColor('{0}','{1}');", e.Row.ClientID, e.Row.RowIndex)); } } The code above is responsible for attaching the javascript onclick event for each row and call the ChangeRowColor() function and passing the e.Row.ClientID and e.Row.RowIndex to the function. Here’s the sample output below:   That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: jQuery,GridView,JavaScript,TipTricks

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  • Silverlight Reporting Application Part 3.5 - Prism Background and WCF RIA [Series Intermission]

    Taking a step back before I dive into the details and full-on coding fun, I wanted to once again respond to a comment on my last post to clear up some things in regards to how I'm setting up my project and some of the choices I've made. Aka, thanks Ben. :) Prism Project Setup For starters, I'm not the ideal use case for a Prism application. In most cases where you've got a one-man team, Prism can be overkill as it is more intended for large teams who are geographically dispersed or in applications that have a larger scale than my Recruiting application in which you'll greatly benefit from modularity, delayed loading of xaps, etc. What Prism offers, though, is a manner for handling UI, commands, and events with the idea that, through a modular approach in which no parts really need to know about one another, I can update this application bit by bit as hiring needs change or requirements differ between offices without having to worry that changing something in the Jobs module will break something in, say, the Scheduling module. All that being said, here's a look at how our project breakdown for Recruit (MVVM/Prism implementation) looks: This could be a little misleading though, as each of those modules is actually another project in the overall Recruit solution. As far as what the projects actually are, that looks a bit like this: Recruiting Solution Recruit (Shell up there) - Main Silverlight Application .Web - Default .Web application to host the Silverlight app Infrastructure - Silverlight Class Library Project Modules - Silverlight Class Library Projects Infrastructure &Modules The Infrastructure project is probably something you'll see to some degree in any composite application. In this application, it is going to contain custom commands (you'll see the joy of these in a post or two down the road), events, helper classes, and any custom classes I need to share between different modules. Think of this as a handy little crossroad between any parts of your application. Modules on the other hand are the bread and butter of this application. Besides the shell, which holds the UI skeleton, and the infrastructure, which holds all those shared goodies, the modules are self-contained bundles of functionality to handle different concerns. In my scenario, I need a way to look up and edit Jobs, Applicants, and Schedule interviews, a Notification module to handle telling the user when different things are happening (i.e., loading from database), and a Menu to control interaction and moving between different views. All modules are going to follow the following pattern: The module class will inherit from IModule and handle initialization and loading the correct view into the correct region, whereas the Views and ViewModels folders will contain paired Silverlight user controls and ViewModel class backings. WCF RIA Services Since we've got all the projects in a single solution, we did not have to go the route of creating a WCR RIA Services Class Library. Every module has it's WCF RIA link back to the main .Web project, so the single Linq-2-SQL (yes, I said Linq-2-SQL, but I'll soon be switching to OpenAccess due to the new visual designer) context I'm using there works nicely with the scope of my project. If I were going for completely separating this project out and doing different, dynamically loaded elements, I'd probably go for the separate class library. Hope that clears that up. In the future though, I will be using that in a project that I've got in the "when I've got enough time to work on this" pipeline, so we'll get into that eventually- and hopefully when WCF RIA is in full release! Why Not use Silverlight Navigation/Business Template? The short answer- I'm a creature of habit, and having used Silverlight for a few years now, I'm used to doing lots of things manually. :) Plus, starting with a blank slate of a project I'm able to set up things exactly as I want them to be. In this case, rather than the navigation frame we would see in one of the templates, the MainRegion/ContentControl is working as our main navigation window. In many cases I will use theSilverlight navigation template to start things off, however in this case I did not need those features so I opted out of using that. Next time when I actually hit post #4, we're going to get into the modules and starting to get functionality into this application. Next week is also release week for the Q1 2010 release, so be sure to check out our annualWebinar Week (I might be biased, but Wednesday is my favorite out of the group). 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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  • Particle and Physics problem.

    - by Quincy
    This was originally a forum post so I hope you guys don't mind it being 2 questions in one. I am making a game and I got some basic physics implemented. I have 2 problems, 1 with particles being drawn in the wrong place and one with going through walls while jumping in corners. Skip over to about 15 sec video showing the 2 problems : http://youtube.com/watch?v=Tm9nfWsWfiM So the problem with the particles seems to be coming from the removal, as soon as I remove that piece of code it instantly works, but there shouldn't be a problem since they shouldn't even draw when their energy gets to 0 (and then they get removed) So my first question is, how are these particles getting warped all over the screen ? Relevant code : Particle class : class Particle { //Physics public Vector2 position = new Vector2(0,0); public float direction = 180; public float speed = 100; public float energy = 1; protected float startEnergy = 1; //Visual public Sprite sprite; public float rotation = 0; public float scale = 1; public byte alpha = 255; public BlendMode blendMode { get { return sprite.BlendMode; } set { sprite.BlendMode = value; } } public Particle() { } public virtual void Think(float frameTime) { if (energy - frameTime < 0) energy = 0; else energy -= frameTime; position += new Vector2((float)Math.Cos(MathHelper.DegToRad(direction)), (float)Math.Sin(MathHelper.DegToRad(direction))) * speed * frameTime; alpha = (byte)(255 * energy / startEnergy); sprite.Rotation = rotation; sprite.Position = position; sprite.Color = new Color(sprite.Color.R, sprite.Color.G, sprite.Color.B, alpha); } public virtual void Draw(float frameTime) { if (energy > 0) { World.camera.DrawSprite(sprite); } } // Basic particle implementation class BasicSprite : Particle { public BasicSprite(Sprite _sprite) { sprite = _sprite; } } Emitter : class Emitter { protected static Random rand = new Random(); protected List<Particle> particles = new List<Particle>(); public BaseEntity target = null; public Vector2 position = new Vector2(0, 0); public bool Active = true; public float timeAlive = 0; public int particleCount = 0; public int ParticlesPerSeccond { get { return (int)(1 / particleSpawnTime); } set { particleSpawnTime = 1 / (float)value; } } public float dieTime = float.MaxValue; float particleSpawnTime = 0.05f; float spawnTime = 0; public Emitter() { } public virtual void Think(float frametime) { spawnTime += frametime; if (dieTime != float.MaxValue) { timeAlive += frametime; if (timeAlive >= dieTime) Active = false; } if (Active) { if (target != null) position = target.Position; while (spawnTime > particleSpawnTime) { spawnTime -= particleSpawnTime; AddParticle(); particleCount++; } } for (int i = 0; i < particles.Count; i++) { particles[i].Think(frametime); if (particles[i].energy <= 0) { particles.Remove(particles[i]); // As soon as this is removed, it works particleCount--; } } } public virtual void AddParticle() { } public virtual void Draw(float frametime) { foreach (Particle particle in particles) { particle.Draw(frametime); } } } class BloodEmitter : Emitter { Image image; public BloodEmitter() { image = new Image(@"Content/Particles/TinyCircle.png"); image.CreateMaskFromColor(new Color(255, 0, 255, 255)); this.dieTime = 0.5f; this.ParticlesPerSeccond = 100; } public override void AddParticle() { Sprite sprite = new Sprite(image); sprite.Color = new Color((byte)(rand.NextDouble() * 255), (byte)(rand.NextDouble() * 255), (byte)(rand.NextDouble() * 255)); BasicSprite particle = new BasicSprite(sprite); particle.direction = (float)rand.NextDouble() * 360; particle.position = position; particle.blendMode = BlendMode.Alpha; particles.Add(particle); } } The seccond problem is the physics problem, for some reason I can get through the right bottom corner while jumping. I think this is coming from me switching animations but I thought I made it compensate for that. Relevant code : PhysicsEntity : class PhysicsEntity : BaseEntity { // Horizontal movement constants protected const float maxHorizontalSpeed = 1000; protected const float horizontalAcceleration = 15; protected const float horizontalDragAir = 0.95f; protected const float horizontalDragGround = 0.95f; // Vertical movement constants protected const float maxVerticalSpeed = 1000; protected const float verticalAcceleration = 20; // Everything needed for movement and correct animations protected float movement = 0; protected bool onGround = false; protected Vector2 Velocity = new Vector2(0, 0); protected float maxSpeed = 0; float lastThink = 0; float thinkTime = 1f/60f; public PhysicsEntity(Vector2 position, Sprite sprite) : base(position, sprite) { } public override void Draw(float frameTime) { base.Draw(frameTime); } public override void Think(float frameTime) { CalculateMovement(frameTime); base.Think(frameTime); } protected void CalculateMovement(float frameTime) { lastThink += frameTime; while (lastThink > thinkTime) { onGround = false; Velocity.X = MathHelper.Clamp(Velocity.X + horizontalAcceleration * movement, -maxHorizontalSpeed, maxHorizontalSpeed); if (onGround) Velocity.X *= horizontalDragGround; else Velocity.X *= horizontalDragAir; if (maxSpeed < Velocity.X) maxSpeed = Velocity.X; Velocity.Y = MathHelper.Clamp(Velocity.Y + verticalAcceleration, -maxVerticalSpeed, maxVerticalSpeed); lastThink -= thinkTime; DoCollisions(thinkTime); DoAnimations(thinkTime); } } public virtual void DoAnimations(float frameTime) { } public void DoCollisions(float frameTime) { Position.Y += Velocity.Y * frameTime; Vector2 tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.Y += collisionDepth.Y; if (collisionDepth.Y < 0) onGround = true; Velocity.Y = 0; } Position.X += Velocity.X * frameTime; tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.X += collisionDepth.X; Velocity.X = 0; } } public void DoCollisions(Vector2 difference) { CollisionRectangle.Y = Position.Y - difference.Y; CollisionRectangle.Height += difference.Y; Vector2 tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.Y += collisionDepth.Y; if (collisionDepth.Y < 0) onGround = true; Velocity.Y = 0; } CollisionRectangle.X = Position.X - difference.X; CollisionRectangle.Width += difference.X; tileCollision = GetTileCollision(); if (tileCollision.X != -1 || tileCollision.Y != -1) { Vector2 collisionDepth = CollisionRectangle.DepthIntersection( new Rectangle( tileCollision.X * World.tileEngine.TileWidth, tileCollision.Y * World.tileEngine.TileHeight, World.tileEngine.TileWidth, World.tileEngine.TileHeight ) ); Position.X += collisionDepth.X; Velocity.X = 0; } } Vector2 GetTileCollision() { int topLeftTileX = (int)(CollisionRectangle.TopLeft.X / World.tileEngine.TileWidth); int topLeftTileY = (int)(CollisionRectangle.TopLeft.Y / World.tileEngine.TileHeight); int BottomRightTileX = (int)(CollisionRectangle.DownRight.X / World.tileEngine.TileWidth); int BottomRightTileY = (int)(CollisionRectangle.DownRight.Y / World.tileEngine.TileHeight); if (CollisionRectangle.DownRight.Y % World.tileEngine.TileHeight == 0) // If your exactly against the tile don't count that as being inside the tile BottomRightTileY -= 1; if (CollisionRectangle.DownRight.X % World.tileEngine.TileWidth == 0) // If your exactly against the tile don't count that as being inside the tile BottomRightTileX -= 1; for (int i = topLeftTileX; i <= BottomRightTileX; i++) { for (int j = topLeftTileY; j <= BottomRightTileY; j++) { if (World.tileEngine.TileIsSolid(i, j)) { return new Vector2(i, j); } } } return new Vector2(-1, -1); } } Player : enum State { Standing, Running, Jumping, Falling, Sliding, WallSlide } class Player : PhysicsEntity { private State state { get { return currentState; } set { if (currentState != value) { currentState = value; animationChanged = true; } } } private State currentState = State.Standing; private BasicEmitter basicEmitter = new BasicEmitter(); public bool flipped; public bool animationChanged = false; protected const float jumpPower = 600; AnimationManager animationManager; Rectangle DrawRectangle; public override Rectangle CollisionRectangle { get { return new Rectangle( Position.X - DrawRectangle.Width / 2f, Position.Y - DrawRectangle.Height / 2f, DrawRectangle.Width, DrawRectangle.Height ); } } public Player(Vector2 position, Sprite sprite) : base(position, sprite) { // Only posted the relevant bit DrawRectangle = animationManager.currentAnimation.drawingRectangle; } public override void Draw(float frameTime) { World.camera.DrawSprite( Sprite, Position + new Vector2(DrawRectangle.X, DrawRectangle.Y), animationManager.currentAnimation.drawingRectangle ); } public override void Think(float frameTime) { //I only posted the relevant stuff if (animationChanged) { // if the animation has changed make sure we compensate for the change in with and height animationChanged = false; DoCollisions(animationManager.getSizeDifference()); } DoCustomMovement(); base.Think(frameTime); if (!onGround && Velocity.Y > 0) { state = State.Falling; } } void DoCustomMovement() { if (onGround) { if (World.renderWindow.Input.IsKeyDown(KeyCode.W)) { Velocity.Y = -jumpPower; state = State.Jumping; } } } public override void DoAnimations(float frameTime) { string stateName = Enum.GetName(typeof(State), state); if (!animationManager.currentAnimationIs(stateName)) { animationManager.PlayAnimation(stateName); } animationManager.Think(frameTime); DrawRectangle = animationManager.currentAnimation.drawingRectangle; Sprite.Center = new Vector2( DrawRectangle.X + DrawRectangle.Width / 2, DrawRectangle.Y + DrawRectangle.Height / 2 ); Sprite.FlipX(flipped); } So why am I warping through walls ? I have given this some thought but I just can't seem to find out why this is happening. Full source if needed : source : http://www.mediafire.com/?rc7ddo09gnr68zd (download link)

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  • Project of Projects with team Foundation Server 2010

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    It is pretty much accepted that you should use Areas instead of having many small Team Projects when you are using Team Foundation Server 2010. I have implemented this scenario many times and this is the current iteration of layout and considerations. If like me you work with many customers you will find that you get into a grove for how to set these things up to make them as easily understandable for everyone, while giving the best functionality. The trick is in making it as intuitive as possible for both you and the developers that need to work with it. There are five main places where you need to have the Product or Project name in prominence of any other value. Area Iteration Source Code Work Item Queries Build Once you decide how you are doing this in each of these places you need to keep to it religiously. Evan if you have one source code file to keep, make sure it is in the right place. This makes your developers and others working with the format familiar with where everything should go, as well as building up mussel memory. This prevents the neat system degenerating into a nasty mess. Areas Areas are traditionally used to separate out parts of your product / project so that you can see how much effort has gone into each. Figure: The top level areas are for reporting and work item separation There are massive advantages of using this method. You can: move work from one project to another rename a project / product It is far more likely that a project or product gets renamed than a department. Tip: If you have many projects, over 100, you should consider categorising them here, but make sure that the actual project name always sits at the same level so you know which is which. Figure: Always keep things that are the same at the same level Note: You may use these categories only at the Area/Iteration level to make it easier to select on drop down lists. You may not want to use them everywhere. On the other hand, for consistency it would be better to. Iterations Iterations are usually used to some sort of time based consideration. Here I am splitting into Iterations with periodic releases. Figure: Each product needs to be able to have its own cadence The ability to have each project run at its own pace and to enable them to have their own release schedule is often of paramount importance and you don’t want to fix your 100+ projects to all be released on the same date. Source Code Having a good structure for your source even if you are not branching or having multiple products under the same structure is always a good idea. Figure: Separate out your products source You need to think about both your branches as well as the structure of your source. All your code should be under “Source” and everything you need to build your solution including Build Scripts and 3rd party tools should be under your “Main” (branch) folder. This should them be branched by “Quality”, “Release” or both to get the most out of your branching structure. The important thing is to make sure you branch (or be able to branch) everything you need to build, test and deploy your application to an environment. That environment may be development, test or even production, but I can’t stress the importance of having everything your need. Note: You usually will not be able to install custom software on your build server. Store any *.dll’s or *.exe’s that you need under the “Tools\Tool1” folder. Note: Consult the Branching Guidance for Team Foundation Server 2010 for more on branching Figure: Adding category may be a necessary evil Even if you have to have a couple of categories called “Default”, it is better than not knowing the difference between a folder, Product and Branch. Work Item Queries Queries are used to load lists of Work Items out of TFS so you can see what work you have. This means that you want to also separate queries out by Product / project to make it easier to Figure: Again you have the same first level structure Having Folders also in Work Item Tracking we do the same thing. We put all the queries under a folder named for the Product / Project and change each query to have “AreaPath=[TeamProject]\[ProductX]” in the query instead of the standard “Project=@Project”. Tip: Don’t have a folder with new queries for each iteration. Instead have a single “Current” folder that has queries that point to the current iteration. Just change the queries as you move from one iteration to another. Tip: You can ctrl+drag the “Product1” folder to create your “Product2” folder. Builds You may have many builds both for individual products but also for different quality's. This can be further complicated by having some builds that action “Gated Check-In” and others that are specifically for “Release”, “Test” or another purpose. Figure: There are no folders, yet, for the builds so you need a good naming convention Its a pity that there are no folders under builds, some way to categorise would be nice. In lue of that at the moment you can use a functional naming convention that at least allows you to find what you want. Conclusion It is really easy to both achieve and to stick to this format if you take the time to do it. Unless you have 1000+ builds or 100+ Products you are unlikely run into any issues. Even then there are things you can do to mitigate the issues and I have describes some of them above. Let me know if you can think of any other things to make this easier.

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  • Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

    - by Simon Cooper
    If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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  • await, WhenAll, WaitAll, oh my!!

    - by cibrax
    If you are dealing with asynchronous work in .NET, you might know that the Task class has become the main driver for wrapping asynchronous calls. Although this class was officially introduced in .NET 4.0, the programming model for consuming tasks was much more simplified in C# 5.0 in .NET 4.5 with the addition of the new async/await keywords. In a nutshell, you can use these keywords to make asynchronous calls as if they were sequential, and avoiding in that way any fork or callback in the code. The compiler takes care of the rest. I was yesterday writing some code for making multiple asynchronous calls to backend services in parallel. The code looked as follow, var allResults = new List<Result>(); foreach(var provider in providers) { var results = await provider.GetResults(); allResults.AddRange(results); } return allResults; You see, I was using the await keyword to make multiple calls in parallel. Something I did not consider was the overhead this code implied after being compiled. I started an interesting discussion with some smart folks in twitter. One of them, Tugberk Ugurlu, had the brilliant idea of actually write some code to make a performance comparison with another approach using Task.WhenAll. There are two additional methods you can use to wait for the results of multiple calls in parallel, WhenAll and WaitAll. WhenAll creates a new task and waits for results in that new task, so it does not block the calling thread. WaitAll, on the other hand, blocks the calling thread. This is the code Tugberk initially wrote, and I modified afterwards to also show the results of WaitAll. class Program { private static Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] funcs = new Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] { async (watch) => { watch.Start(); await Task.Delay(1000); Console.WriteLine("1000 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(1500); Console.WriteLine("1500 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(2000); Console.WriteLine("2000 one has been completed."); watch.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(watch.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms has been elapsed."); } }; static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Await in loop work starts..."); DoWorkAsync().ContinueWith(task => { Console.WriteLine("Parallel work starts..."); DoWorkInParallelAsync().ContinueWith(t => { Console.WriteLine("WaitAll work starts..."); WaitForAll(); }); }); Console.ReadLine(); } static async Task DoWorkAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); foreach (var func in funcs) { await func(watch); } } static async Task DoWorkInParallelAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); await Task.WhenAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } static void WaitForAll() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); Task.WaitAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } } After running this code, the results were very concluding. Await in loop work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 4532ms has been elapsed. Parallel work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2007ms has been elapsed. WaitAll work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2009ms has been elapsed. The await keyword in a loop does not really make the calls in parallel.

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  • Vendors: Partners or Salespeople?

    - by BuckWoody
    I got a great e-mail from a friend that asked about how he could foster a better relationship with his vendors. So many times when you work with a vendor it’s more of a used-car sales experience than a partnership – but you can actually make your vendor more of a partner, as long as you both set some ground-rules at the start. Sit down with your vendor, and have a heart-to-heart talk with them, explain that they won’t win every time, but that you’re willing to work with them in an honest way on both sides. Here’s the advice I sent him verbatim. I hope this post generates lots of comments from both customers and vendors. I don’t expect that you’ve had a great experience with your Microsoft reps, but I happen to work with some of the best sales teams in the business, and our clients tell us that all the time. “The key to this relationship is to keep the audience really small. Ideally there should be one person from your side that is responsible for the relationship, and one from the vendor’s side. Each responsible person should have the authority to make decisions, and to bring in other folks as needed for a given topic, project or decision.   For Microsoft, this is called an “Account Manager” – they aren’t technical, they aren’t sales. They “own” a relationship with a company. They learn what the company does, who does it, and how. They are responsible to understand what the challenges in your company are. While they don’t know the bits and bytes of everything we sell, they know what each thing does, and who to talk to about it. I get a call from an Account Manager every week that has pre-digested an issue at an organization and says to me: “I need you to set up an architectural meeting with their technical staff to get a better read on how we can help with problem X.” I do that and then report back to the Account Manager what we learned.  All through this process there’s the atmosphere of a “team”, not a “sales opportunity” per se. I’ve even recommended that the firm use a rival product, and I’ve never gotten push-back on that decision from my Account Managers.   But that brings up an interesting point. Someone pays an Account Manager and pays me. They expect something in return. At some point, you have to buy something. Not every time, not every situation – sometimes it’s just helping you with what you already bought from us. But the point is that you can’t expect lots of love and never spend any money. That’s the way business works.   Finally, don’t view the vendor as someone with their hand in your pocket – somebody that’s just trying to sell you something and doesn’t care if they ever see you again – unless they deserve it. There are plenty of “love them and leave them” companies out there, and you may have even had this experience with us, but that isn’t the case in the firms I work with. In fact, my customers get a questionnaire that asks them that exact question. “How many times have you seen your account team? Did you like your interaction with them? Can they do better?” My raises, performance reviews and general standing in my group are based on the answers the company gives.  Ask your vendor if they measure their sales and support teams this way – if not, seek another vendor to partner with.   Partnering with someone is a big deal. It involves time and effort on your part, and on the vendor’s part. If either of you isn’t pulling your weight, it just won’t work. You have every right to expect them to treat you as a partner, and they have the same right for your side.” Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Toon shader with Texture. Can this be optimized?

    - by Alex
    I am quite new to OpenGL, I have managed after long trial and error to integrate Nehe's Cel-Shading rendering with my Model loaders, and have them drawn using the Toon shade and outline AND their original texture at the same time. The result is actually a very nice Cel Shading effect of the model texture, but it is havling the speed of the program, it's quite very slow even with just 3 models on screen... Since the result was kind of hacked together, I am thinking that maybe I am performing some extra steps or extra rendering tasks that maybe are not needed, and are slowing down the game? Something unnecessary that maybe you guys could spot? Both MD2 and 3DS loader have an InitToon() function called upon creation to load the shader initToon(){ int i; // Looping Variable ( NEW ) char Line[255]; // Storage For 255 Characters ( NEW ) float shaderData[32][3]; // Storate For The 96 Shader Values ( NEW ) FILE *In = fopen ("Shader.txt", "r"); // Open The Shader File ( NEW ) if (In) // Check To See If The File Opened ( NEW ) { for (i = 0; i < 32; i++) // Loop Though The 32 Greyscale Values ( NEW ) { if (feof (In)) // Check For The End Of The File ( NEW ) break; fgets (Line, 255, In); // Get The Current Line ( NEW ) shaderData[i][0] = shaderData[i][1] = shaderData[i][2] = float(atof (Line)); // Copy Over The Value ( NEW ) } fclose (In); // Close The File ( NEW ) } else return false; // It Went Horribly Horribly Wrong ( NEW ) glGenTextures (1, &shaderTexture[0]); // Get A Free Texture ID ( NEW ) glBindTexture (GL_TEXTURE_1D, shaderTexture[0]); // Bind This Texture. From Now On It Will Be 1D ( NEW ) // For Crying Out Loud Don't Let OpenGL Use Bi/Trilinear Filtering! ( NEW ) glTexParameteri (GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri (GL_TEXTURE_1D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexImage1D (GL_TEXTURE_1D, 0, GL_RGB, 32, 0, GL_RGB , GL_FLOAT, shaderData); // Upload ( NEW ) } This is the drawing for the animated MD2 model: void MD2Model::drawToon() { float outlineWidth = 3.0f; // Width Of The Lines ( NEW ) float outlineColor[3] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f }; // Color Of The Lines ( NEW ) // ORIGINAL PART OF THE FUNCTION //Figure out the two frames between which we are interpolating int frameIndex1 = (int)(time * (endFrame - startFrame + 1)) + startFrame; if (frameIndex1 > endFrame) { frameIndex1 = startFrame; } int frameIndex2; if (frameIndex1 < endFrame) { frameIndex2 = frameIndex1 + 1; } else { frameIndex2 = startFrame; } MD2Frame* frame1 = frames + frameIndex1; MD2Frame* frame2 = frames + frameIndex2; //Figure out the fraction that we are between the two frames float frac = (time - (float)(frameIndex1 - startFrame) / (float)(endFrame - startFrame + 1)) * (endFrame - startFrame + 1); // I ADDED THESE FROM NEHE'S TUTORIAL FOR FIRST PASS (TOON SHADE) glHint (GL_LINE_SMOOTH_HINT, GL_NICEST); // Use The Good Calculations ( NEW ) glEnable (GL_LINE_SMOOTH); // Cel-Shading Code // glEnable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Enable 1D Texturing ( NEW ) glBindTexture (GL_TEXTURE_1D, shaderTexture[0]); // Bind Our Texture ( NEW ) glColor3f (1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Set The Color Of The Model ( NEW ) // ORIGINAL DRAWING CODE //Draw the model as an interpolation between the two frames glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); for(int i = 0; i < numTriangles; i++) { MD2Triangle* triangle = triangles + i; for(int j = 0; j < 3; j++) { MD2Vertex* v1 = frame1->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; MD2Vertex* v2 = frame2->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; Vec3f pos = v1->pos * (1 - frac) + v2->pos * frac; Vec3f normal = v1->normal * (1 - frac) + v2->normal * frac; if (normal[0] == 0 && normal[1] == 0 && normal[2] == 0) { normal = Vec3f(0, 0, 1); } glNormal3f(normal[0], normal[1], normal[2]); MD2TexCoord* texCoord = texCoords + triangle->texCoords[j]; glTexCoord2f(texCoord->texCoordX, texCoord->texCoordY); glVertex3f(pos[0], pos[1], pos[2]); } } glEnd(); // ADDED THESE FROM NEHE'S FOR SECOND PASS (OUTLINE) glDisable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Disable 1D Textures ( NEW ) glEnable (GL_BLEND); // Enable Blending ( NEW ) glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA,GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // Set The Blend Mode ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_LINE); // Draw Backfacing Polygons As Wireframes ( NEW ) glLineWidth (outlineWidth); // Set The Line Width ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_FRONT); // Don't Draw Any Front-Facing Polygons ( NEW ) glDepthFunc (GL_LEQUAL); // Change The Depth Mode ( NEW ) glColor3fv (&outlineColor[0]); // Set The Outline Color ( NEW ) // HERE I AM PARSING THE VERTICES AGAIN (NOT IN THE ORIGINAL FUNCTION) FOR THE OUTLINE AS PER NEHE'S TUT glBegin (GL_TRIANGLES); // Tell OpenGL What We Want To Draw for(int i = 0; i < numTriangles; i++) { MD2Triangle* triangle = triangles + i; for(int j = 0; j < 3; j++) { MD2Vertex* v1 = frame1->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; MD2Vertex* v2 = frame2->vertices + triangle->vertices[j]; Vec3f pos = v1->pos * (1 - frac) + v2->pos * frac; Vec3f normal = v1->normal * (1 - frac) + v2->normal * frac; if (normal[0] == 0 && normal[1] == 0 && normal[2] == 0) { normal = Vec3f(0, 0, 1); } glNormal3f(normal[0], normal[1], normal[2]); MD2TexCoord* texCoord = texCoords + triangle->texCoords[j]; glTexCoord2f(texCoord->texCoordX, texCoord->texCoordY); glVertex3f(pos[0], pos[1], pos[2]); } } glEnd (); // Tell OpenGL We've Finished glDepthFunc (GL_LESS); // Reset The Depth-Testing Mode ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_BACK); // Reset The Face To Be Culled ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_FILL); // Reset Back-Facing Polygon Drawing Mode ( NEW ) glDisable (GL_BLEND); } Whereas this is the drawToon function in the 3DS loader void Model_3DS::drawToon() { float outlineWidth = 3.0f; // Width Of The Lines ( NEW ) float outlineColor[3] = { 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f }; // Color Of The Lines ( NEW ) //ORIGINAL CODE if (visible) { glPushMatrix(); // Move the model glTranslatef(pos.x, pos.y, pos.z); // Rotate the model glRotatef(rot.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(rot.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(rot.z, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glScalef(scale, scale, scale); // Loop through the objects for (int i = 0; i < numObjects; i++) { // Enable texture coordiantes, normals, and vertices arrays if (Objects[i].textured) glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); if (lit) glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); // Point them to the objects arrays if (Objects[i].textured) glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, Objects[i].TexCoords); if (lit) glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, Objects[i].Normals); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, Objects[i].Vertexes); // Loop through the faces as sorted by material and draw them for (int j = 0; j < Objects[i].numMatFaces; j ++) { // Use the material's texture Materials[Objects[i].MatFaces[j].MatIndex].tex.Use(); // AFTER THE TEXTURE IS APPLIED I INSERT THE TOON FUNCTIONS HERE (FIRST PASS) glHint (GL_LINE_SMOOTH_HINT, GL_NICEST); // Use The Good Calculations ( NEW ) glEnable (GL_LINE_SMOOTH); // Cel-Shading Code // glEnable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Enable 1D Texturing ( NEW ) glBindTexture (GL_TEXTURE_1D, shaderTexture[0]); // Bind Our Texture ( NEW ) glColor3f (1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Set The Color Of The Model ( NEW ) glPushMatrix(); // Move the model glTranslatef(Objects[i].pos.x, Objects[i].pos.y, Objects[i].pos.z); // Rotate the model glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.z, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Draw the faces using an index to the vertex array glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].numSubFaces, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].subFaces); glPopMatrix(); } glDisable (GL_TEXTURE_1D); // Disable 1D Textures ( NEW ) // THIS IS AN ADDED SECOND PASS AT THE VERTICES FOR THE OUTLINE glEnable (GL_BLEND); // Enable Blending ( NEW ) glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA,GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // Set The Blend Mode ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_LINE); // Draw Backfacing Polygons As Wireframes ( NEW ) glLineWidth (outlineWidth); // Set The Line Width ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_FRONT); // Don't Draw Any Front-Facing Polygons ( NEW ) glDepthFunc (GL_LEQUAL); // Change The Depth Mode ( NEW ) glColor3fv (&outlineColor[0]); // Set The Outline Color ( NEW ) for (int j = 0; j < Objects[i].numMatFaces; j ++) { glPushMatrix(); // Move the model glTranslatef(Objects[i].pos.x, Objects[i].pos.y, Objects[i].pos.z); // Rotate the model glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.z, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.y, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glRotatef(Objects[i].rot.x, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // Draw the faces using an index to the vertex array glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].numSubFaces, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, Objects[i].MatFaces[j].subFaces); glPopMatrix(); } glDepthFunc (GL_LESS); // Reset The Depth-Testing Mode ( NEW ) glCullFace (GL_BACK); // Reset The Face To Be Culled ( NEW ) glPolygonMode (GL_BACK, GL_FILL); // Reset Back-Facing Polygon Drawing Mode ( NEW ) glDisable (GL_BLEND); glPopMatrix(); } Finally this is the tex.Use() function that loads a BMP texture and somehow gets blended perfectly with the Toon shading void GLTexture::Use() { glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); // Enable texture mapping glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // Bind the texture as the current one }

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  • Using Stored Procedures in SSIS

    - by dataintegration
    The SSIS Data Flow components: the source task and the destination task are the easiest way to transfer data in SSIS. Some data transactions do not fit this model, they are procedural tasks modeled as stored procedures. In this article we show how you can call stored procedures available in RSSBus ADO.NET Providers from SSIS. In this article we will use the CreateJob and the CreateBatch stored procedures available in RSSBus ADO.NET Provider for Salesforce, but the same steps can be used to call a stored procedure in any of our data providers. Step 1: Open Visual Studio and create a new Integration Services Project. Step 2: Add a new Data Flow Task to the Control Flow window. Step 3: Open the Data Flow Task and add a Script Component to the data flow pane. A dialog box will pop-up allowing you to select the Script Component Type: pick the source type as we will be outputting columns from our stored procedure. Step 4: Double click the Script Component to open the editor. Step 5: In the "Inputs and Outputs" settings, enter all the columns you want to output to the data flow. Ensure the correct data type has been set for each output. You can check the data type by selecting the output and then changing the "DataType" property from the property editor. In our example, we'll add the column JobID of type String. Step 6: Select the "Script" option in the left-hand pane and click the "Edit Script" button. This will open a new Visual Studio window with some boiler plate code in it. Step 7: In the CreateOutputRows() function you can add code that executes the stored procedures included with the Salesforce Component. In this example we will be using the CreateJob and CreateBatch stored procedures. You can find a list of the available stored procedures along with their inputs and outputs in the product help. //Configure the connection string to your credentials String connectionString = "Offline=False;user=myusername;password=mypassword;access token=mytoken;"; using (SalesforceConnection conn = new SalesforceConnection(connectionString)) { //Create the command to call the stored procedure CreateJob SalesforceCommand cmd = new SalesforceCommand("CreateJob", conn); cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; cmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("ObjectName", "Contact")); cmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("Action", "insert")); //Execute CreateJob //CreateBatch requires JobID as input so we store this value for later SalesforceDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader(); String JobID = ""; while (rdr.Read()) { JobID = (String)rdr["JobID"]; } //Create the command for CreateBatch, for this example we are adding two new rows SalesforceCommand batCmd = new SalesforceCommand("CreateBatch", conn); batCmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure; batCmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("JobID", JobID)); batCmd.Parameters.Add(new SalesforceParameter("Aggregate", "<Contact><Row><FirstName>Bill</FirstName>" + "<LastName>White</LastName></Row><Row><FirstName>Bob</FirstName><LastName>Black</LastName></Row></Contact>")); //Execute CreateBatch SalesforceDataReader batRdr = batCmd.ExecuteReader(); } Step 7b: If you had specified output columns earlier, you can now add data into them using the UserComponent Output0Buffer. For example, we had set an output column called JobID of type String so now we can set a value for it. We will modify the DataReader that contains the output of CreateJob like so:. while (rdr.Read()) { Output0Buffer.AddRow(); JobID = (String)rdr["JobID"]; Output0Buffer.JobID = JobID; } Step 8: Note: You will need to modify the connection string to include your credentials. Also ensure that the System.Data.RSSBus.Salesforce assembly is referenced and include the following using statements to the top of the class: using System.Data; using System.Data.RSSBus.Salesforce; Step 9: Once you are done editing your script, save it, and close the window. Click OK in the Script Transformation window to go back to the main pane. Step 10: If had any outputs from the Script Component you can use them in your data flow. For example we will use a Flat File Destination. Configure the Flat File Destination to output the results to a file, and you should see the JobId in the file. Step 11: Your project should be ready to run.

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  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: Getting Caller Information

    - by James Michael Hare
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2013/07/25/c.net-little-wonders-getting-caller-information.aspx Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. There are times when it is desirable to know who called the method or property you are currently executing.  Some applications of this could include logging libraries, or possibly even something more advanced that may server up different objects depending on who called the method. In the past, we mostly relied on the System.Diagnostics namespace and its classes such as StackTrace and StackFrame to see who our caller was, but now in C# 5, we can also get much of this data at compile-time. Determining the caller using the stack One of the ways of doing this is to examine the call stack.  The classes that allow you to examine the call stack have been around for a long time and can give you a very deep view of the calling chain all the way back to the beginning for the thread that has called you. You can get caller information by either instantiating the StackTrace class (which will give you the complete stack trace, much like you see when an exception is generated), or by using StackFrame which gets a single frame of the stack trace.  Both involve examining the call stack, which is a non-trivial task, so care should be done not to do this in a performance-intensive situation. For our simple example let's say we are going to recreate the wheel and construct our own logging framework.  Perhaps we wish to create a simple method Log which will log the string-ified form of an object and some information about the caller.  We could easily do this as follows: 1: static void Log(object message) 2: { 3: // frame 1, true for source info 4: StackFrame frame = new StackFrame(1, true); 5: var method = frame.GetMethod(); 6: var fileName = frame.GetFileName(); 7: var lineNumber = frame.GetFileLineNumber(); 8: 9: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 10: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 11: fileName, lineNumber, method.Name, message); 12: } So, what we are doing here is grabbing the 2nd stack frame (the 1st is our current method) using a 2nd argument of true to specify we want source information (if available) and then taking the information from the frame.  This works fine, and if we tested it out by calling from a file such as this: 1: // File c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs 2:  3: public class CallerInfo 4: { 5: Log("Hello Logger!"); 6: } We'd see this: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! This works well, and in fact CallStack and StackFrame are still the best ways to examine deeper into the call stack.  But if you only want to get information on the caller of your method, there is another option… Determining the caller at compile-time In C# 5 (.NET 4.5) they added some attributes that can be supplied to optional parameters on a method to receive caller information.  These attributes can only be applied to methods with optional parameters with explicit defaults.  Then, as the compiler determines who is calling your method with these attributes, it will fill in the values at compile-time. These are the currently supported attributes available in the  System.Runtime.CompilerServices namespace": CallerFilePathAttribute – The path and name of the file that is calling your method. CallerLineNumberAttribute – The line number in the file where your method is being called. CallerMemberName – The member that is calling your method. So let’s take a look at how our Log method would look using these attributes instead: 1: static int Log(object message, 2: [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "", 3: [CallerFilePath] string fileName = "", 4: [CallerLineNumber] int lineNumber = 0) 5: { 6: // we'll just use a simple Console write for now 7: Console.WriteLine("{0}({1}):{2} - {3}", 8: fileName, lineNumber, memberName, message); 9: } Again, calling this from our sample Main would give us the same result: 1: c:\projects\test\CallerInfo\CallerInfo.cs(5):Main - Hello Logger! However, though this seems the same, there are a few key differences. First of all, there are only 3 supported attributes (at this time) that give you the file path, line number, and calling member.  Thus, it does not give you as rich of detail as a StackFrame (which can give you the calling type as well and deeper frames, for example).  Also, these are supported through optional parameters, which means we could call our new Log method like this: 1: // They're defaults, why not fill 'em in 2: Log("My message.", "Some member", "Some file", -13); In addition, since these attributes require optional parameters, they cannot be used in properties, only in methods. These caveats aside, they do let you get similar information inside of methods at a much greater speed!  How much greater?  Well lets crank through 1,000,000 iterations of each.  instead of logging to console, I’ll return the formatted string length of each.  Doing this, we get: 1: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with StackTrace: 5096 ms 2: Time for 1,000,000 iterations with Attributes: 196 ms So you see, using the attributes is much, much faster!  Nearly 25x faster in fact.  Summary There are a few ways to get caller information for a method.  The StackFrame allows you to get a comprehensive set of information spanning the whole call stack, but at a heavier cost.  On the other hand, the attributes allow you to quickly get at caller information baked in at compile-time, but to do so you need to create optional parameters in your methods to support it. Technorati Tags: Little Wonders,CSharp,C#,.NET,StackFrame,CallStack,CallerFilePathAttribute,CallerLineNumberAttribute,CallerMemberName

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  • The Enterprise is a Curmudgeon

    - by John K. Hines
    Working in an enterprise environment is a unique challenge.  There's a lot more to software development than developing software.  A project lead or Scrum Master has to manage personalities and intra-team politics, has to manage accomplishing the task at hand while creating the opportunities and a reputation for handling desirable future work, has to create a competent, happy team that actually delivers while being careful not to burn bridges or hurt feelings outside the team.  Which makes me feel surprised to read advice like: " The enterprise should figure out what is likely to work best for itself and try to use it." - Ken Schwaber, The Enterprise and Scrum. The enterprises I have experience with are fundamentally unable to be self-reflective.  It's like asking a Roman gladiator if he'd like to carve out a little space in the arena for some silent meditation.  I'm currently wondering how compatible Scrum is with the top-down hierarchy of life in a large organization.  Specifically, manufacturing-mindset, fixed-release, harmony-valuing large organizations.  Now I understand why Agile can be a better fit for companies without much organizational inertia. Recently I've talked with nearly two dozen software professionals and their managers about Scrum and Agile.  I've become convinced that a developer, team, organization, or enterprise can be Agile without using Scrum.  But I'm not sure about what process would be the best fit, in general, for an enterprise that wants to become Agile.  It's possible I should read more than just the introduction to Ken's book. I do feel prepared to answer some of the questions I had asked in a previous post: How can Agile practices (including but not limited to Scrum) be adopted in situations where the highest-placed managers in a company demand software within extremely aggressive deadlines? Answer: In a very limited capacity at the individual level.  The situation here is that the senior management of this company values any software release more than it values developer well-being, end-user experience, or software quality.  Only if the developing organization is given an immediate refactoring opportunity does this sort of development make sense to a person who values sustainable software.   How can Agile practices be adopted by teams that do not perform a continuous cycle of new development, such as those whose sole purpose is to reproduce and debug customer issues? Answer: It depends.  For Scrum in particular, I don't believe Scrum is meant to manage unpredictable work.  While you can easily adopt XP practices for bug fixing, the project-management aspects of Scrum require some predictability.  My question here was meant toward those who want to apply Scrum to non-development teams.  In some cases it works, in others it does not. How can a team measure if its development efforts are both Agile and employ sound engineering practices? Answer: I'm currently leaning toward measuring these independently.  The Agile Principles are a terrific way to measure if a software team is agile.  Sound engineering practices are those practices which help developers meet the principles.  I think Scrum is being mistakenly applied as an engineering practice when it is essentially a project management practice.  In my opinion, XP and Lean are examples of good engineering practices. How can Agile be explained in an accurate way that describes its benefits to sceptical developers and/or revenue-focused non-developers? Answer: Agile techniques will result in higher-quality, lower-cost software development.  This comes primarily from finding defects earlier in the development cycle.  If there are individual developers who do not want to collaborate, write unit tests, or refactor, then these are simply developers who are either working in an area where adding these techniques will not add value (i.e. they are an expert) or they are a developer who is satisfied with the status quo.  In the first case they should be left alone.  In the second case, the results of Agile should be demonstrated by other developers who are willing to receive recognition for their efforts.  It all comes down to individuals, doesn't it?  If you're working in an organization whose Agile adoption consists exclusively of Scrum, consider ways to form individual Agile teams to demonstrate its benefits.  These can even be virtual teams that span people across org-chart boundaries.  Once you can measure real value, whether it's Scrum, Lean, or something else, people will follow.  Even the curmudgeons.

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  • On Reflector Pricing

    - by Nick Harrison
    I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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  • CABasicAnimation not scrolling with rest of View

    - by morgman
    All, I'm working on reproducing the pulsing Blue circle effect that the map uses to show your own location... I layered a UIView over a MKMapView. The UIView contains the pulsing animation. I ended up using the following code gleaned from numerous answers here on stackoverflow: CABasicAnimation* pulseAnimation = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"opacity"]; pulseAnimation.toValue = [NSNumber numberWithFloat: 0.0]; pulseAnimation.duration = 1.0; pulseAnimation.repeatCount = HUGE_VALF; pulseAnimation.autoreverses = YES; pulseAnimation.timingFunction = [CAMediaTimingFunction functionWithName:kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut]; [self.layer addAnimation:pulseAnimation forKey:@"pulseAnimation"]; CABasicAnimation* resizeAnimation = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"bounds.size"]; resizeAnimation.toValue = [NSValue valueWithCGSize:CGSizeMake(0.0f, 0.0f)]; resizeAnimation.fillMode = kCAFillModeBoth; resizeAnimation.duration = 1.0; resizeAnimation.repeatCount = HUGE_VALF; resizeAnimation.autoreverses = YES; resizeAnimation.timingFunction = [CAMediaTimingFunction functionWithName:kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut]; [self.layer addAnimation:resizeAnimation forKey:@"resizeAnimation"]; This does an acceptable job of pulsing/fading a circle I drew in the UIView using: CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext(); CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(context, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.4); // And draw with a blue fill color CGContextSetRGBFillColor(context, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.1); // Draw them with a 2.0 stroke width so they are a bit more visible. CGContextSetLineWidth(context, 2.0); CGContextAddEllipseInRect(context, CGRectMake(x-30, y-30, 60.0, 60.0)); CGContextDrawPath(context, kCGPathFillStroke); But I soon found that while this appears to work, as soon as I drag the underlying map to another position the animation screws up... While the position I want highlighted is centered on the screen the animation works ok, once I've dragged the position so it's no longer centered the animation now pulses starting at the center of the screen scaling up to center on the position dragged off center, and back again... A humorous and cool effect, but not what I was looking for. I realize I may have been lucky on several fronts. I'm not sure what I misunderstood. I think the animation is scaling the entire layer which just happens to have my circle drawn in the middle of it. So it works when centered but not when off center. I tried the following gleaned from one of the questions suggested by stackoverflow when I started this question: CABasicAnimation* translateAnimation = [CABasicAnimation animationWithKeyPath:@"position"]; translateAnimation.fromValue = [NSValue valueWithCGPoint:CGPointMake(oldx, oldy )]; translateAnimation.toValue = [NSValue valueWithCGPoint:CGPointMake(x, y )]; // translateAnimation.fillMode = kCAFillModeBoth; translateAnimation.duration = 1.0; translateAnimation.timingFunction = [CAMediaTimingFunction functionWithName:kCAMediaTimingFunctionEaseInEaseOut]; [self.layer addAnimation:translateAnimation forKey:@"translateAnimation"]; But it doesn't help much, when I play with it sometimes it looks like once time it animates in the correct spot after I've moved it offcenter, but then it switches back to the animating from the center point to the new location. Sooo, any suggestions or do I need to provide additional information.

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  • JavaDay Taipei 2014 Trip Report

    - by reza_rahman
    JavaDay Taipei 2014 was held at the Taipei International Convention Center on August 1st. Organized by Oracle University, it is one of the largest Java developer events in Taiwan. This was another successful year for JavaDay Taipei with a fully sold out venue packed with youthful, energetic developers (this was my second time at the event and I have already been invited to speak again next year!). In addition to Oracle speakers like me, Steve Chin and Naveen Asrani, the event also featured a bevy of local speakers including Taipei Java community leaders. Topics included Java SE, Java EE, JavaFX, cloud and Big Data. It was my pleasure and privilege to present one of the opening keynotes for the event. I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". I covered the changes in Java EE 7 as well as what's coming in Java EE 8. I demoed the Cargo Tracker Java EE BluePrints. I also briefly talked about Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 8. The slides for the keynote are below (click here to download and view the actual PDF): It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file. In the afternoon I did my JavaScript + Java EE 7 talk titled "Using JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients with Java EE 7". This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The talk was completely packed. The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end. I finished off Java Day Taipei with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE" (this was the last session of the conference). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here: Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running. After the event the Oracle University folks hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended by organizers, speakers and local Java community leaders. I am extremely saddened by the fact that this otherwise excellent trip was scarred by terrible tragedy. After the conference I joined a few folks for a hike on the Maokong Mountain on Saturday. The group included friends in the Taiwanese Java community including Ian and Robbie Cheng. Without warning, fatal tragedy struck on a remote part of the trail. Despite best efforts by us, the excellent Taiwanese Emergency Rescue Team and World class Taiwanese physicians we were unable to save our friend Robbie Cheng's life. Robbie was just thirty-four years old and is survived by his younger brother, mother and father. Being the father of a young child myself, I can only imagine the deep sorrow that this senseless loss unleashes. Robbie was a key member of the Taiwanese Java community and a Java Evangelist at Sun at one point. Ironically the only picture I was able to take of the trail was mere moments before tragedy. I thought I should place him in that picture in profoundly respectful memoriam: Perhaps there is some solace in the fact that there is something inherently honorable in living a bright life, dying young and meeting one's end on a beautiful remote mountain trail few venture to behold let alone attempt to ascend in a long and tired lifetime. Perhaps I'd even say it's a fate I would not entirely regret facing if it were my own. With that thought in mind it seems appropriate to me to quote some lyrics from the song "Runes to My Memory" by legendary Swedish heavy metal band Amon Amarth idealizing a fallen Viking warrior cut down in his prime: "Here I lie on wet sand I will not make it home I clench my sword in my hand Say farewell to those I love When I am dead Lay me in a mound Place my weapons by my side For the journey to Hall up high When I am dead Lay me in a mound Raise a stone for all to see Runes carved to my memory" I submit my deepest condolences to Robbie's family and hope my next trip to Taiwan ends in a less somber note.

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  • Namespaces are obsolete

    - by Bertrand Le Roy
    To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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  • What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

    - by Louis Davidson
    If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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  • A Patent for Workload Management Based on Service Level Objectives

    - by jsavit
    I'm very pleased to announce that after a tiny :-) wait of about 5 years, my patent application for a workload manager was finally approved. Background Many operating systems have a resource manager which lets you control machine resources. For example, Solaris provides controls for CPU with several options: shares for proportional CPU allocation. If you have twice as many shares as me, and we are competing for CPU, you'll get about twice as many CPU cycles), dedicated CPU allocation in which a number of CPUs are exclusively dedicated to an application's use. You can say that a zone or project "owns" 8 CPUs on a 32 CPU machine, for example. And, capped CPU in which you specify the upper bound, or cap, of how much CPU an application gets. For example, you can throttle an application to 0.125 of a CPU. (This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of Solaris RM controls.) Workload management Useful as that is (and tragic that some other operating systems have little resource management and isolation, and frighten people into running only 1 app per OS instance - and wastefully size every server for the peak workload it might experience) that's not really workload management. With resource management one controls the resources, and hope that's enough to meet application service objectives. In fact, we hold resource distribution constant, see if that was good enough, and adjust resource distribution if that didn't meet service level objectives. Here's an example of what happens today: Let's try 30% dedicated CPU. Not enough? Let's try 80% Oh, that's too much, and we're achieving much better response time than the objective, but other workloads are starving. Let's back that off and try again. It's not the process I object to - it's that we to often do this manually. Worse, we sometimes identify and adjust the wrong resource and fiddle with that to no useful result. Back in my days as a customer managing large systems, one of my users would call me up to beg for a "CPU boost": Me: "it won't make any difference - there's plenty of spare CPU to be had, and your application is completely I/O bound." User: "Please do it anyway." Me: "oh, all right, but it won't do you any good." (I did, because he was a friend, but it didn't help.) Prior art There are some operating environments that take a stab about workload management (rather than resource management) but I find them lacking. I know of one that uses synthetic "service units" composed of the sum of CPU, I/O and memory allocations multiplied by weighting factors. A workload is set to make a target rate of service units consumed per second. But this seems to be missing a key point: what is the relationship between artificial 'service units' and actually meeting a throughput or response time objective? What if I get plenty of one of the components (so am getting enough service units), but not enough of the resource whose needed to remove the bottleneck? Actual workload management That's not really the answer either. What is needed is to specify a workload's service levels in terms of externally visible metrics that are meaningful to a business, such as response times or transactions per second, and have the workload manager figure out which resources are not being adequately provided, and then adjust it as needed. If an application is not meeting its service level objectives and the reason is that it's not getting enough CPU cycles, adjust its CPU resource accordingly. If the reason is that the application isn't getting enough RAM to keep its working set in memory, then adjust its RAM assignment appropriately so it stops swapping. Simple idea, but that's a task we keep dumping on system administrators. In other words - don't hold the number of CPU shares constant and watch the achievement of service level vary. Instead, hold the service level constant, and dynamically adjust the number of CPU shares (or amount of other resources like RAM or I/O bandwidth) in order to meet the objective. Instrumenting non-instrumented applications There's one little problem here: how do I measure application performance in a way relating to a service level. I don't want to do it based on internal resources like number of CPU seconds it received per minute - We need to make resource decisions based on externally visible and meaningful measures of performance, not synthetic items or internal resource counters. If I have a way of marking the beginning and end of a transaction, I can then measure whether or not the application is meeting an objective based on it. If I can observe the delay factors for an application, I can see which resource shortages are slowing an application enough to keep it from meeting its objectives. I can then adjust resource allocations to relieve those shortages. Fortunately, Solaris provides facilities for both marking application progress and determining what factors cause application latency. The Solaris DTrace facility let's me introspect on application behavior: in particular I can see events like "receive a web hit" and "respond to that web hit" so I can get transaction rate and response time. DTrace (and tools like prstat) let me see where latency is being added to an application, so I know which resource to adjust. Summary After a delay of a mere few years, I am the proud creator of a patent (advice to anyone interested in going through the process: don't hold your breath!). The fundamental idea is fairly simple: instead of holding resource constant and suffering variable levels of success meeting service level objectives, properly characterise the service level objective in meaningful terms, instrument the application to see if it's meeting the objective, and then have a workload manager change resource allocations to remove delays preventing service level attainment. I've done it by hand for a long time - I think that's what a computer should do for me.

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  • Taking the Plunge - or Dipping Your Toe - into the Fluffy IAM Cloud by Paul Dhanjal (Simeio Solutions)

    - by Greg Jensen
    In our last three posts, we’ve examined the revolution that’s occurring today in identity and access management (IAM). We looked at the business drivers behind the growth of cloud-based IAM, the shortcomings of the old, last-century IAM models, and the new opportunities that federation, identity hubs and other new cloud capabilities can provide by changing the way you interact with everyone who does business with you. In this, our final post in the series, we’ll cover the key things you, the enterprise architect, should keep in mind when considering moving IAM to the cloud. Invariably, what starts the consideration process is a burning business need: a compliance requirement, security vulnerability or belt-tightening edict. Many on the business side view IAM as the “silver bullet” – and for good reason. You can almost always devise a solution using some aspect of IAM. The most critical question to ask first when using IAM to address the business need is, simply: is my solution complete? Typically, “business” is not focused on the big picture. Understandably, they’re focused instead on the need at hand: Can we be HIPAA compliant in 6 months? Can we tighten our new hire, employee transfer and termination processes? What can we do to prevent another password breach? Can we reduce our service center costs by the end of next quarter? The business may not be focused on the complete set of services offered by IAM but rather a single aspect or two. But it is the job – indeed the duty – of the enterprise architect to ensure that all aspects are being met. It’s like remodeling a house but failing to consider the impact on the foundation, the furnace or the zoning or setback requirements. While the homeowners may not be thinking of such things, the architect, of course, must. At Simeio Solutions, the way we ensure that all aspects are being taken into account – to expose any gaps or weaknesses – is to assess our client’s IAM capabilities against a five-step maturity model ranging from “ad hoc” to “optimized.” The model we use is similar to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s based upon some simple criteria, which can provide a visual representation of how well our clients fair when evaluated against four core categories: ·         Program Governance ·         Access Management (e.g., Single Sign-On) ·         Identity and Access Governance (e.g., Identity Intelligence) ·         Enterprise Security (e.g., DLP and SIEM) Often our clients believe they have a solution with all the bases covered, but the model exposes the gaps or weaknesses. The gaps are ideal opportunities for the cloud to enter into the conversation. The complete process is straightforward: 1.    Look at the big picture, not just the immediate need – what is our roadmap and how does this solution fit? 2.    Determine where you stand with respect to the four core areas – what are the gaps? 3.    Decide how to cover the gaps – what role can the cloud play? Returning to our home remodeling analogy, at some point, if gaps or weaknesses are discovered when evaluating the complete impact of the proposed remodel – if the existing foundation wouldn’t support the new addition, for example – the owners need to decide if it’s time to move to a new house instead of trying to remodel the old one. However, with IAM it’s not an either-or proposition – i.e., either move to the cloud or fix the existing infrastructure. It’s possible to use new cloud technologies just to cover the gaps. Many of our clients start their migration to the cloud this way, dipping in their toe instead of taking the plunge all at once. Because our cloud services offering is based on the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite, we can offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in this regard. The Oracle platform is not a collection of point solutions, but rather a complete, integrated, best-of-breed suite. Yet it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can choose just the features and capabilities you need using a pay-as-you-go model, incrementally turning on and off services as needed. Better still, all the other capabilities are there, at the ready, whenever you need them. Spooling up these cloud-only services takes just a fraction of the time it would take a typical organization to deploy internally. SLAs in the cloud may be higher than on premise, too. And by using a suite of software that’s complete and integrated, you can dramatically lower cost and complexity. If your in-house solution cannot be migrated to the cloud, you might consider using hardware appliances such as Simeio’s Cloud Interceptor to extend your enterprise out into the network. You might also consider using Expert Managed Services. Cost is usually the key factor – not just development costs but also operational sustainment costs. Talent or resourcing issues often come into play when thinking about sustaining a program. Expert Managed Services such as those we offer at Simeio can address those concerns head on. In a cloud offering, identity and access services lend to the new paradigms described in my previous posts. Most importantly, it allows us all to focus on what we're meant to do – provide value, lower costs and increase security to our respective organizations. It’s that magic “silver bullet” that business knew you had all along. If you’d like to talk more, you can find us at simeiosolutions.com.

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  • Understanding the 'High Performance' meaning in Extreme Transaction Processing

    - by kyap
    Despite my previous blogs entries on SOA/BPM and Identity Management, the domain where I'm the most passionated is definitely the Extreme Transaction Processing, commonly called XTP.I came across XTP back to 2007 while I was still FMW Product Manager in EMEA. At that time Oracle acquired a company called Tangosol, which owned an unique product called Coherence that we renamed to Oracle Coherence. Beside this innovative renaming of the product, to be honest, I didn't know much about it, except being a "distributed in-memory cache for Extreme Transaction Processing"... not very helpful still.In general when people doesn't fully understand a technology or a concept, they tend to find some shortcuts, either correct or not, to justify their lack-of understanding... and of course I was part of this category of individuals. And the shortcut was "Oracle Coherence Cache helps to improve Performance". Excellent marketing slogan... but not very meaningful still. By chance I was able to get away quickly from that group in July 2007* at Thames Valley Park (UK), after I attended one of the most interesting workshops, in my 10 years career in Oracle, delivered by Brian Oliver. The biggest mistake I made was to assume that performance improvement with Coherence was related to the response time. Which can be considered as legitimus at that time, because after-all caches help to reduce latency on cached data access, hence reduce the response-time. But like all caches, you need to define caching and expiration policies, thinking about the cache-missed strategy, and most of the time you have to re-write partially your application in order to work with the cache. At a result, the expected benefit vanishes... so, not very useful then?The key mistake I made was my perception or obsession on how performance improvement should be driven, but I strongly believe this is still a common problem to most of the developers. In fact we all know the that the performance of a system is generally presented by the Capacity (or Throughput), with the 2 important dimensions Speed (response-time) and Volume (load) :Capacity (TPS) = Volume (T) / Speed (S)To increase the Capacity, we can either reduce the Speed(in terms of response-time), or to increase the Volume. However we tend to only focus on reducing the Speed dimension, perhaps it is more concrete and tangible to measure, and nicer to present to our management because there's a direct impact onto the end-users experience. On the other hand, we assume the Volume can be addressed by the underlying hardware or software stack, so if we need more capacity (scale out), we just add more hardware or software. Unfortunately, the reality proves that IT is never as ideal as we assume...The challenge with Speed improvement approach is that it is generally difficult and costly to make things already fast... faster. And by adding Coherence will not necessarily help either. Even though we manage to do so, the Capacity can not increase forever because... the Speed can be influenced by the Volume. For all system, we always have a performance illustration as follow: In all traditional system, the increase of Volume (Transaction) will also increase the Speed (Response-Time) as some point. The reason is simple: most of the time the Application logics were not designed to scale. As an example, if you have a while-loop in your application, it is natural to conceive that parsing 200 entries will require double execution-time compared to 100 entries. If you need to "Speed-up" the execution, you can only upgrade your hardware (scale-up) with faster CPU and/or network to reduce network latency. It is technically limited and economically inefficient. And this is exactly where XTP and Coherence kick in. The primary objective of XTP is about designing applications which can scale-out for increasing the Volume, by applying coding techniques to keep the execution-time as constant as possible, independently of the number of runtime data being manipulated. It is actually not just about having an application running as fast as possible, but about having a much more predictable system, with constant response-time and linearly scale, so we can easily increase throughput by adding more hardwares in parallel. It is in general combined with the Low Latency Programming model, where we tried to optimize the network usage as much as possible, either from the programmatic angle (less network-hoops to complete a task), and/or from a hardware angle (faster network equipments). In this picture, Oracle Coherence can be considered as software-level XTP enabler, via the Distributed-Cache because it can guarantee: - Constant Data Objects access time, independently from the number of Objects and the Coherence Cluster size - Data Objects Distribution by Affinity for in-memory data grouping - In-place Data Processing for parallel executionTo summarize, Oracle Coherence is indeed useful to improve your application performance, just not in the way we commonly think. It's not about the Speed itself, but about the overall Capacity with Extreme Load while keeping consistant Speed. In the future I will keep adding new blog entries around this topic, with some sample codes experiences sharing that I capture in the last few years. In the meanwhile if you want to know more how Oracle Coherence, I strongly suggest you to start with checking how our worldwide customers are using Oracle Coherence first, then you can start playing with the product through our tutorial.Have Fun !

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  • Documentation Changes in Solaris 11.1

    - by alanc
    One of the first places you can see Solaris 11.1 changes are in the docs, which have now been posted in the Solaris 11.1 Library on docs.oracle.com. I spent a good deal of time reviewing documentation for this release, and thought some would be interesting to blog about, but didn't review all the changes (not by a long shot), and am not going to cover all the changes here, so there's plenty left for you to discover on your own. Just comparing the Solaris 11.1 Library list of docs against the Solaris 11 list will show a lot of reorganization and refactoring of the doc set, especially in the system administration guides. Hopefully the new break down will make it easier to get straight to the sections you need when a task is at hand. Packaging System Unfortunately, the excellent in-depth guide for how to build packages for the new Image Packaging System (IPS) in Solaris 11 wasn't done in time to make the initial Solaris 11 doc set. An interim version was published shortly after release, in PDF form on the OTN IPS page. For Solaris 11.1 it was included in the doc set, as Packaging and Delivering Software With the Image Packaging System in Oracle Solaris 11.1, so should be easier to find, and easier to share links to specific pages the HTML version. Beyond just how to build a package, it includes details on how Solaris is packaged, and how package updates work, which may be useful to all system administrators who deal with Solaris 11 upgrades & installations. The Adding and Updating Oracle Solaris 11.1 Software Packages was also extended, including new sections on Relaxing Version Constraints Specified by Incorporations and Locking Packages to a Specified Version that may be of interest to those who want to keep the Solaris 11 versions of certain packages when they upgrade, such as the couple of packages that had functionality removed by an (unusual for an update release) End of Feature process in the 11.1 release. Also added in this release is a document containing the lists of all the packages in each of the major package groups in Solaris 11.1 (solaris-desktop, solaris-large-server, and solaris-small-server). While you can simply get the contents of those groups from the package repository, either via the web interface or the pkg command line, the documentation puts them in handy tables for easier side-by-side comparison, or viewing the lists before you've installed the system to pick which one you want to initially install. X Window System We've not had good X11 coverage in the online Solaris docs in a while, mostly relying on the man pages, and upstream X.Org docs. In this release, we've integrated some X coverage into the Solaris 11.1 Desktop Adminstrator's Guide, including sections on installing fonts for fontconfig or legacy X11 clients, X server configuration, and setting up remote access via X11 or VNC. Of course we continue to work on improving the docs, including a lot of contributions to the upstream docs all OS'es share (more about that another time). Security One of the things Oracle likes to do for its products is to publish security guides for administrators & developers to know how to build systems that meet their security needs. For Solaris, we started this with Solaris 11, providing a guide for sysadmins to find where the security relevant configuration options were documented. The Solaris 11.1 Security Guidelines extend this to cover new security features, such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Read-Only Zones, as well as adding additional guidelines for existing features, such as how to limit the size of tmpfs filesystems, to avoid users driving the system into swap thrashing situations. For developers, the corresponding document is the Developer's Guide to Oracle Solaris 11 Security, which has been the source for years for documentation of security-relevant Solaris API's such as PAM, GSS-API, and the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. For Solaris 11.1, a new appendix was added to start providing Secure Coding Guidelines for Developers, leveraging the CERT Secure Coding Standards and OWASP guidelines to provide the base recommendations for common programming languages and their standard API's. Solaris specific secure programming guidance was added via links to other documentation in the product doc set. In parallel, we updated the Solaris C Libary Functions security considerations list with details of Solaris 11 enhancements such as FD_CLOEXEC flags, additional *at() functions, and new stdio functions such as asprintf() and getline(). A number of code examples throughout the Solaris 11.1 doc set were updated to follow these recommendations, changing unbounded strcpy() calls to strlcpy(), sprintf() to snprintf(), etc. so that developers following our examples start out with safer code. The Writing Device Drivers guide even had the appendix updated to list which of these utility functions, like snprintf() and strlcpy(), are now available via the Kernel DDI. Little Things Of course all the big new features got documented, and some major efforts were put into refactoring and renovation, but there were also a lot of smaller things that got fixed as well in the nearly a year between the Solaris 11 and 11.1 doc releases - again too many to list here, but a random sampling of the ones I know about & found interesting or useful: The Privileges section of the DTrace Guide now gives users a pointer to find out how to set up DTrace privileges for non-global zones and what limitations are in place there. A new section on Recommended iSCSI Configuration Practices was added to the iSCSI configuration section when it moved into the SAN Configuration and Multipathing administration guide. The Managing System Power Services section contains an expanded explanation of the various tunables for power management in Solaris 11.1. The sample dcmd sources in /usr/demo/mdb were updated to include ::help output, so that developers like myself who follow the examples don't forget to include it (until a helpful code reviewer pointed it out while reviewing the mdb module changes for Xorg 1.12). The README file in that directory was updated to show the correct paths for installing both kernel & userspace modules, including the 64-bit variants.

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  • Rules for Naming

    - by PointsToShare
    © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved Naming Documents (or is it “Document, Naming”?) Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name And for that name which is no part of thee Take all myself.  Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet Act II, Scene 2 We normally only use the bold portion of the famous Shakespearean quote above, but it is really out of context. As the play unfolds, we learn that a name is all too powerful. Indeed it is because of their names that the doomed lovers die. There might be life and death in a name (BTW, when I wrote this monogram, I was in Hatfield, PA. Remember the Hatfields and the McCoys?) This is a bit extreme, but in the field of Knowledge Management (KM) names are of the utmost importance as well. When I write an article about managing SharePoint sites, how should I name it? “Managing a site” or “Site, managing”? Nine times out of ten I’d opt for the latter. Almost everything we do is “Managing” so to make life easier for a person looking for meaningful content, we title our articles starting with the differentiator rather than the common factor. As a rule of thumb, we start the name with the noun rather than the verb. It is not what we do that is the primary key; it is what we do it to. So, answer this – is it a “rule of thumb” or a “thumb rule?” This is tough. A lot of what we do when naming is a judgment call. Both thumb and rule are nouns, albeit concrete and abstract (more about this later), but to most people “thumb rule” is meaningless while “rule of thumb” is an idiom. The difference between knowledge and information is that knowledge is meaningful information placed in context. Thus I elect the “rule of thumb”. It is the more meaningful title. Abstract and Concrete are relative terms. Many nouns (and verbs) that are abstract to a commoner, are concrete to a practitioner of one profession or another and may even have different concrete meanings in different professional jargons. Think about “running”. To an executive it means running a business, to a marathoner its meaning is much more literal. Generally speaking, we store and disseminate knowledge within a practice more than we do it in general. Even dictionaries encyclopedias define terms as they apply to different audiences. The rule of thumb is to put the more concrete first, but within the audience’s jargon. Even the title of this monogram is a question. Do I name it “Naming Documents” or “Documents, Naming”? Well, my own rule of thumb (“Here he goes again!?”) states that the latter is better because it starts with a noun, but this is a document about naming more than it about documents. The rules of naming also apply to graphs and charts, excel spreadsheets, and so on. Thus, I vote for the former.  A better title could have been “Naming Objects” only the word “Object” is a bit too abstract. How about just “Naming” or “Naming, rules of”? You get the drift. One of the ways to resolve all of this is to store the documents in Knowledge-Bases, which may become the subjects of a future punditry. Knowledge bases use keywords to describe their content.  Use a Metadata store for the keywords to at least attempt some common grounds. Here is another general rule (rule of thumb?!!) – put at least the one keyword in the title. Use subtitles. Here is an example: Migrating documents – Screening, cleaning, and organizing our knowledge. The main keyword is “documents”, next is “migrating”, other keywords also appear in the subtitle. They are “screening”, “cleaning”, and “organizing”. Any questions? Send me an amply named document by email: [email protected]

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  • jQuery tablesorter sorting not working

    - by jknox
    I'm using jQuery tablesorter plugin to generate dynamically a table from a csv file, and that part is working fine. However whenever i try to sort the table by clicking on the table headers, firebug reports this problem in the console: parsers is undefined return parsers[i].type;\n Initially i though this problem was being caused by the table not being ready after the document loads, so i fixed that by manually calling tablesorter() after my table was rendered from the csv file. this didn't fix the issue though. Also, at the very end of the table, the table is drawn garbled with some gray areas at the end. I suppose this is related to the error above. The code in question is this: <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="blue/style.css" type="text/css" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.tablesorter.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.csv.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" id="js"> function sortThis() { $("#myTable").tablesorter({ // sortList:[[0,0],[2,1]] }); }; </script> <title>huh!?</title> </head> <body> <table id="myTable" class="tablesorter" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0" border="0"> <thead> <tr> <th>name</th> <th>type</th> <th>Date</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <script type="text/javascript"> $.get('myfile.csv', function(data) { myfile = jQuery.csv()(data) for (var x = 0; x < myfile.length; x++) { str = "<tr>"; for (var y = 0; y < myfile[x].length; y++) { str += "<td>" + myfile[x][y] + "</td>"; } str += "</tr>"; $('#myTable').append(str); } }); sortThis(); </script> </tbody> </table> </body> </html> Thanks in advance for your help.

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  • Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 4): Script Configuration

    - by Simon Cooper
    If you've had a chance to play around with the Schema Compare for Oracle beta, you may have come across this screen in the synchronization wizard: This screen is one of the few screens that, along with the project configuration form, doesn't come from SQL Compare. This screen was designed to solve a couple of issues that, although aren't specific to Oracle, are much more of a problem than on SQL Server: Datatype conversions and NOT NULL columns. 1. Datatype conversions SQL Server is generally quite forgiving when it comes to datatype conversions using ALTER TABLE. For example, you can convert from a VARCHAR to INT using ALTER TABLE as long as all the character values are parsable as integers. Oracle, on the other hand, only allows ALTER TABLE conversions that don't change the internal data format. Essentially, every change that requires an actual datatype conversion has to be done using a rebuild with a conversion function. That's OK, as we can simply hard-code the various conversion functions for the valid datatype conversions and insert those into the rebuild SELECT list. However, as there always is with Oracle, there's a catch. Have a look at the NUMTODSINTERVAL function. As well as specifying the value (or column) to convert, you have to specify an interval_unit, which tells oracle how to interpret the input number. We can't hardcode a default for this parameter, as it is entirely dependent on the user's data context! So, in order to convert NUMBER to INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND/INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH, we need to have feedback from the user as to what to put in this parameter while we're generating the sync script - this requires a new step in the engine action/script generation to insert these values into the script, as well as new UI to allow the user to specify these values in a sensible fashion. In implementing the engine and UI infrastructure to allow this it made much more sense to implement it for any rebuild datatype conversion, not just NUMBER to INTERVALs. For conversions which we can do, we pre-fill the 'value' box with the appropriate function from the documentation. The user can also type in arbitary SQL expressions, which allows the user to specify optional format parameters for the relevant conversion functions, or indeed call their own functions to convert between values that don't have a built-in conversion defined. As the value gets inserted as-is into the rebuild SELECT list, any expression that is valid in that context can be specified as the conversion value. 2. NOT NULL columns Another problem that is solved by the new step in the sync wizard is adding a NOT NULL column to a table. If the table contains data (as most database tables do), you can't just add a NOT NULL column, as Oracle doesn't know what value to put in the new column for existing rows - the DDL statement will fail. There are actually 3 separate scenarios for this problem that have separate solutions within the engine: Adding a NOT NULL column to a table without a rebuild Here, the workaround is to add a column default with an appropriate value to the column you're adding: ALTER TABLE tbl1 ADD newcol NUMBER DEFAULT <value> NOT NULL; Note, however, there is something to bear in mind about this solution; once specified on a column, a default cannot be removed. To 'remove' a default from a column you change it to have a default of NULL, hence there's code in the engine to treat a NULL default the same as no default at all. Adding a NOT NULL column to a table, where a separate change forced a table rebuild Fortunately, in this case, a column default is not required - we can simply insert the default value into the rebuild SELECT clause. Changing an existing NULL to a NOT NULL column To implement this, we run an UPDATE command before the ALTER TABLE to change all the NULLs in the column to the required default value. For all three, we need some way of allowing the user to specify a default value to use instead of NULL; as this is essentially the same problem as datatype conversion (inserting values into the sync script), we can re-use the UI and engine implementation of datatype conversion values. We also provide the option to alter the new column to allow NULLs, or to ignore the problem completely. Note that there is the same (long-running) problem in SQL Compare, but it is much more of an issue in Oracle as you cannot easily roll back executed DDL statements if the script fails at some point during execution. Furthermore, the engine of SQL Compare is far less conducive to inserting user-supplied values into the generated script. As we're writing the Schema Compare engine from scratch, we used what we learnt from the SQL Compare engine and designed it to be far more modular, which makes inserting procedures like this much easier.

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