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• Question about how to implement a c# host application with a plugin-like architecture

  - by devoured elysium

  I want to have an application that works as a Host to many other small applications. Each one of those applications should work as kind of plugin to this main application. I call them plugins not in the sense they add something to the main application, but because they can only work with this Host application as they depend on some of its services. My idea was to have each of those plugins run in a different app domain. The problem seems to be that my host application should have a set of services that my plugins will want to use and from what is my understanding making data flow in and out from different app domains is not that great of a thing. On one hand I'd like them to behave as stand-alone applications(although, as I said, they need to use lots of times the host application services), but on the other hand I'd like that if any of them crashes, my main application wouldn't suffer from it. What is the best (.NET) approach to this kind of situation? Make them all run on the same AppDomain but each one in a different Thread? Use different AppDomains? One for each "plugin"? How would I make them communicate with the Host Application? Any other way of doing this? Although speed is not an issue here, I wouldn't like for function calls to be that much slower than they are when we're working with just a regular .NET application. Thanks

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• Encapsulating user input of data for a class (C++)

  - by Dr. Monkey

  For an assignment I've made a simple C++ program that uses a superclass (Student) and two subclasses (CourseStudent and ResearchStudent) to store a list of students and print out their details, with different details shown for the two different types of students (using overriding of the display() method from Student). My question is about how the program collects input from the user of things like the student name, ID number, unit and fee information (for a course student) and research information (for research students): My implementation has the prompting for user input and the collecting of that input handled within the classes themselves. The reasoning behind this was that each class knows what kind of input it needs, so it makes sense to me to have it know how to ask for it (given an ostream through which to ask and an istream to collect the input from). My lecturer says that the prompting and input should all be handled in the main program, which seems to me somewhat messier, and would make it trickier to extend the program to handle different types of students. I am considering, as a compromise, to make a helper class that handles the prompting and collection of user input for each type of Student, which could then be called on by the main program. The advantage of this would be that the student classes don't have as much in them (so they're cleaner), but also they can be bundled with the helper classes if the input functionality is required. This also means more classes of Student could be added without having to make major changes to the main program, as long as helper classes are provided for these new classes. Also the helper class could be swapped for an alternative language version without having to make any changes to the class itself. What are the major advantages and disadvantages of the three different options for user input (fully encapsulated, helper class or in the main program)?

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• Servlet Security question about j_security_check, j_username and j_password

  - by Nitesh Panchal

  Hello, I used jdbcRealm in my web application and it's working fine. I defined all constraints also in my web.xml. Like all pages of url pattern /Admin/* should be accessed by only admin. I have a login form with uses standard j_security_check, j_username and j_password. Now, when i type Admin/home.jsf it rightly redirects me login.jsf and there when i type the password i am redirected to home.jsf. This works alright but problem comes i directly go to login.jsf and then type password and username. This time it again redirects me to login.jsf. Is there any way through which i can specify which page to go when successful login is there? I need to specify different different pages for different roles. For Admin, it is /Admin/home.jsf for general users it is /General/home.jsf because login form is shared between different type of users. Where do i specify all these things? Secondly, i want to have a remember me checkbox at the end of login form. How do i do this? By default, it is submitted to j_security_check servlet and i have no control over its execution. Please help. This doesn't seem so hard but looks like i am missing something.

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• How to maintain long-lived python projects w.r.t. dependencies and python versions ?

  - by Gyom

  short version: how can I get rid of the multiple-versions-of-python nightmare ? long version: over the years, I've used several versions of python, and what is worse, several extensions to python (e.g. pygame, pylab, wxPython...). Each time it was on a different setup, with different OSes, sometimes different architectures (like my old PowerPC mac). Nowadays I'm using a mac (OSX 10.6 on x86-64) and it's a dependency nightmare each time I want to revive script older than a few months. Python itself already comes in three different flavours in /usr/bin (2.5, 2.6, 3.1), but I had to install 2.4 from macports for pygame, something else (cannot remember what) forced me to install all three others from macports as well, so at the end of the day I'm the happy owner of seven (!) instances of python on my system. But that's not the problem, the problem is, none of them has the right (i.e. same set of) libraries installed, some of them are 32bits, some 64bits, and now I'm pretty much lost. For example right now I'm trying to run a three-year-old script (not written by me) which used to use matplotlib/numpy to draw a real-time plot within a rectangle of a wxwidgets window. But I'm failing miserably: py26-wxpython from macports won't install, stock python has wxwidgets included but also has some conflict between 32 bits and 64 bits, and it doesn't have numpy... what a mess ! Obviously, I'm doing things the wrong way. How do you usally cope with all that chaos ?

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• What is preferred strategies for cross browser and multiple styled table in CSS?

  - by jitendra

  What is preferred strategies for cross browser and multiple styled table in CSS? in default css what should i predefined for <table>, td, th , thead, tbody, tfoot I have to work in a project there are so many tables with different color schemes and different type of alignment like in some table , i will need to horizontally align data of cell to right, sometime left, sometime right. same thing for vertical alignment, top, bottom and middle. some table will have thin border on row , some will have thick (same with column border). Some time i want to give different background color to particular row or column or in multiple row or column. So my question is: What code should i keep in css default for all tables and how to handle table with different style using ID and classes in multiple pages. I want to do every presentational thing with css. How to make ID classes for everything using semantic naming ? Which tags related to table can be useful? How to control whole tables styling from one css class?

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• Multiple grids in one area

  - by anon

  I'm currently creating a WPF application, using C# and XAML in Visual Studios 2010. I have a master grid. In that master grid I have a group bar which you can select different items. Depending on what you select, the middle of the master grid can be totally different. What I was wondering is, what's the best way to program the middle part? Right now, I have it set up in such a way that everything in the middle is dynamically programed in C#, and everything on the outside is programmed in XAML. In C# I programmed: for each group bar item, there is a grid that goes with it (so that different content can be displayed on it). Each grid is a child of the master grid. Each grid is visible or hidden when necessary. Is this the best way to approach this? The best example of this is in Outlook 2007, where you have your group bar on the right hand side. When you select different items on the group bar (mail, calendar, tasks) the right of the group bar completely changes.

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• Using entity framework to connect to multiple similar tables in .net MVC.

  - by Dite

  A relative newcomer to .net MVC2 and the entity framework, I am working on a project which requires a single web application, (C# .net 4), to connect to multiple different databases depending on the route of access, (ie subdomain). No problem with this in principle and all the logic is written to transform the subdomain into an entity connection and pass this through to the Entity Model. The problem comes with the fact that the different database whilst being largely similar in structure contain 3 or 4 unique tables bespoke to that instance. To my mind there are two ways to solve this issue, neither of which i am sure will be possible. 1/ Use a separate entity model for each database. -Attempts down this route have through up conflicts where table/sp names are the same across differnt db's, or implicit conversion errors when I try and put the different models in different namespaces. or 2/ Overwrite the classes which refer to the changeable database objects based on the value of a base controller property. -I have found nothing to suggest i can even do this. My question is if either of theser routes can ever work in principle or if i should just give up on the EF and connect to the dtabases directlky using ADO. Perhaps there is another way to solve this problem i haven't thought of? Thanks for any help...

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• Access VBA question: Change the query being referenced by a function, depending on context

  - by Tara Amatista

  I have a custom function in Access2007 that hinges on grabbing data out of a specific query. It opens Outlook, creates a new email and populates the fields with specific addresses and data taken from the query ("DecisionEmail"). Now I want to make a different query ("RequestEmail") and have it populate the email with that data. So all I have to do is change this line: Set MailList = db.OpenRecordset("DecisionEmail") and that's where I get stumped. This is my desired result: If the user is on Form_Decision and clicks the button "Send email", "DecisionEmail" will get plugged into the function and that data will appear in the email. If the user on Form_SendRequest and clicks the button "Send email", "RequestEmail" will instead get plugged in. The reason that these are different queries is because they contain very different information that is smudged about in different ways. However, since it's just one little thing that needs to change in the function code, I don't think a brand new function is a good idea. My last resort would be to make a brand new function and use the Conditions field in the Macro interface to choose between them, but I have a feeling there's a more elegant solution possible. I have a vague notion of setting the query names as variables and using an If statement but I just don't have the mental vocabulary for thinking through this.

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• Multiple "ObjectChangeTracker" getting created, can it be avoided?

  - by user555937

  Hi, We are working on a POC where we have following architecture (MVVM), WPF(Client) + WCF + Model(DataAccess)+ ADO.Net Entity Framework 4.0 (with SQL Server 2008 R2 as DB) All are different projects. In the DataAccess layer we have created different Entity Models(edmx) based on the functionality. The tables under perticular flow are grouped and created different entity models. We are using self tracking entities to and fro to communicate with the WPF client through wcf service. For Single model everything works fine. But when we created a Multiple models then few issues started coming. Mutliple models have few duplicate tables/entities. Two probels are, 1) When we try to access entities from different models mutiple objects "ObjectChangeTracker" are getting created. E.g. CompanyModel(edmx) - Company(Entity) - ObjectChangeTracker, ObjectState ProductModel(edmx) - Customer(Entity) - ObjectChangeTracker1, ObjectState1 OrderModel(edmx) - Oder(Entity) - ObjectChangeTracker2, ObjectState2 Is there any way to avoid this? 2) There are few tables which shared across the Models, E.g. Company(Entity) is used in All above mdoels. During compile time it does not thow any error. But run time It gives error saying "Schema specified is not valid. Errors: The mapping of CLR type to EDM type is ambiguous because multiple CLR types match the EDM type "Company"".. To resolve this, we renamed the entities with some prefix to make them Unique. Is there any other way we can resolve this without changing the name of the entity in the same assembly? Thanks in advance and appreciate if anyone has approach for these issues. Thanks, Kiran

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• How to Develop Dynamic Plug-In Based Functionality in C#

  - by Matthew

  Hello: I've been looking around for different methods of providing plug-in support for my application. Ideally, I will be creating a core functionality and based on different customers developing different plug-ins/addons such as importing, exporting data etc... What are the some methods available for making a C# application extensible via a plug-in architecture? Lets make up an example. If we have a program that consists of a main menu ( File, Edit, View, et al. ) along with a TreeView that displays different brands of cars grouped by manufacturer ( Ford, GM, for now). Right clicking on a car displays a context menu with the only option being 'delete car'. How could you develop the application so that plug-ins could be deployed so that you could allow one customer to see a new brand in the TreeView, let's say Honda, and also extent the car context menu so that they may now 'paint a car'? In Eclipse/RCP development this is easily handled by extension points and plug-ins. How does C# handle it? I've been looking into developing my own plug-in architecture and reading up on MEF.

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• Link failure with either abnormal memory consumption or LNK1106 in Visual Studio 2005.

  - by Corvin

  Hello, I am trying to build a solution for windows XP in Visual Studio 2005. This solution contains 81 projects (static libs, exe's, dlls) and is being successfully used by our partners. I copied the solution bundle from their repository and tried setting it up on 3 similar machines of people in our group. I was successful on two machines and the solution failed to build on my machine. The build on my machine encountered two problems: During a simple build creation of the biggest static library (about 522Mb in debug mode) would fail with the message "13libd\ui1d.lib : fatal error LNK1106: invalid file or disk full: cannot seek to 0x20101879" Full solution rebuild creates this library, however when it comes to linking the library to main .exe file, devenv.exe spawns link.exe which consumes about 80Mb of physical memory and 250MB of virtual and spawns another link.exe, which does the same. This goes on until the system runs out of memory. On PCs of my colleagues where successful build could be performed, there is only one link.exe process which uses all the memory required for linking (about 500Mb physical). There is a plenty of hard drive space on my machine and the file system is NTFS. All three of our systems are similar - Core2Quad processors, 4Gb of RAM, Windows XP SP3. We are using Visual studio installed from the same source. I tried using a different RAM and CPU, using dedicated graphics adapter to eliminate possibility of video memory sharing influencing the build, putting solution files to different location, using different versions of VS 2005 (Professional, Standard and Team Suite), changing the amount of available virtual memory, running memtest86 and building the project from scratch (i.e. a clean bundle). I have read what MSDN says about LNK1106, none of the cases apply to me except for maybe "out of heap space", however I am not sure how I should fight this. The only idea that I have left is reinstalling the OS, however I am not sure that it would help and I am not sure that my situation wouldn't repeat itself on a different machine. Would anyone have any sort of advice for me? Thanks

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• How to use JSF h:messages better?

  - by gurupriyan.e

  My Objective is to use h:messages to convey user - error and confirmation messages.The CSS styles to show these two different messages are different, In fact I would like to use an image beside the confirmation message. for Eg: <tr> <td><img/></td><td><h:msg></td> </td>. So I tried to add messages to the Faces Context based on 2 different client ids <tr> <td height="5"> <h:messages style="color:darkred" id="error_message" /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="89%" class="InfoMsg" align="center"> <h:messages id="confirm_message" /> </td> </tr> and in the java layer FacesMessage facesMessage = new FacesMessage(Constants.saveMessageConfirm); FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addMessage(Constants.STATIC_CONFIRM_MSG_CLIENT_ID, facesMessage); But, even if i add messages to client Id confirm_message - and only to confirm_message - and not to error_message - The message is shown twice in 2 different styles (refer the HTML above) 2 Questions : 1) What is the problem here? 2) If I want to show the image inside a td in the second tr and conditionaly show that second tr when confirm messages are present - what is the best way? Thanks,

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• Reverse-projection 2D points into 3D

  - by ehsan baghaki

  Suppose we have a 3d Space with a plane on it with an arbitary equation : ax+by+cz+d=0 now suppose that we pick 3 random points on that plane: (x0,y0,z0) (x1,y1,z1) (x1,y1,z1) now i have a different point of view(camera) for this plane. i mean i have a different camera that will look at this plane from a different point of view. From that camera point of view these points have different locations. for example (x0,y0,z0) will be (x0',y0') and (x1,y1,z1) will be (x1',y1') and (x2,y2,z2) will be (x2',y2') from the new camera point of view. So here is my a little hard question! I want to pick a point for example (X,Y) from the new camera point of view and tell where it will be on that plane. All i know is that 3 points and their locations on 3d space and their projection locations on the new camera view. Do you know the coefficients of the plane-equation and the camera positions (along with the projection), or do you only have the six points? - Nils i know the location of first 3 points. therefore we can calculate the coefficients of the plane. so we know exactly where the plane is from (0,0,0) point of view. and then we have the camera that can only see the points! So the only thing that camera sees is 3 points and also it knows their locations in 3d space (and for sure their locations on 2d camera view plane). and after all i want to look at camera view, pick a point (for example (x1,y1)) and tell where is that point on that plane. (for sure this (X,Y,Z) point should fit on the plane equation). Also i know nothing about the camera location.

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• Javascript (using jQuery) in a large Project... organization, passing data, private method, etc.

  - by gaoshan88

  I'm working on a large project that is organized like so: Multiple javascript files are included as needed and most code is wrapped in anonymous functions... // wutang.js //Included Files Go Here // Public stuff var MethodMan; // Private stuff (function() { var someVar1; MethodMan = function(){...}; var APrivateMethod = function(){...}; $(function(){ //jquery page load stuff here $('#meh').click(APrivateMethod); }); })(); I'm wondering about a few things here. Assuming that there are a number of these files included on a page, what has access to what and what is the best way to pass data between the files? For example, I assume that MethodMan() can be accessed by anything on any included page. It is public, yes? var someVar1 is only accessible to the methods inside that particular anonymous function and nowhere else, yes? Also true of var APrivateMethod(), yes? What if I want APrivateMethod() to make something available to some other method in a different anonymous wrapped method in a different included page. What's the best way to pass data between these private, anonymous functions on different included pages? Do I simply have to make whatever I want to use between them public? How about if I want to minimize global variables? What about the following: var PootyTang = function(){ someVar1 = $('#someid').text(); //some stuff }; and in another included file used by that same page I have: var TangyPoot = function(){ someVar1 = $('#someid').text(); //some completely different stuff }; What's the best way to share the value of someVar1 across these anonymous (they are wrapped as the first example) functions?

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• Deterministic floating point and .NET

  - by code2code

  How can I guarantee that floating point calculations in a .NET application (say in C#) always produce the same bit-exact result? Especially when using different versions of .NET and running on different platforms (x86 vs x86_64). Inaccuracies of floating point operations do not matter. In Java I'd use strictfp. In C/C++ and other low level languages this problem is essentially solved by accessing the FPU / SSE control registers but that's probably not possible in .NET. Even with control of the FPU control register the JIT of .NET will generate different code on different platforms. Something like HotSpot would be even worse in this case... Why do I need it? I'm thinking about writing a real-time strategy (RTS) game which heavily depends on fast floating point math together with a lock stepped simulation. Essentially I will only transmit user input across the network. This also applies to other games which implement replays by storing the user input. Not an option are: decimals (too slow) fixed point values (too slow and cumbersome when using sqrt, sin, cos, tan, atan...) update state across the network like an FPS: Sending position information for hundreds or a few thousand units is not an option Any ideas?

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• General web service ideas

  - by user2014175

  I have a question regarding different types of web services. I'll preface this by saying that I have built a number of apps (for both ios and android) for personal use that interact with the web via php and sql. I have taught myself these languages, and as such don't have the broader background knowledge that many of you do. My question is, in what other ways can you perform an interaction between a web service and a mobile device other than mobile - php - sql - etc. For example, If I built a very simple tracking app for my car, my current method would be to push GPS coordinates from my iphone to my database at a set interval, then I would write a simple bit of javascript that pulled those coordinates out of the database and superimposed them on a google map. Is there a different way to do this? Such as the server acting as a live middle man who simple pushed the coordinates directly to a target browser? Without the database in the middle? If so, are there advantages and disadvantages to these different methods to achieve different goals? I know its a broad question but I'm really intrigued and I'm finding it difficult to word a google search for it. Any info / reading material suggesting would be excellent. Thanks

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• Qt: QStackedWidget solution

  - by Martin

  I'm building a Qt application that have about 30 different views (QWidgets). My idea is to use a QStackedWidget to make it easy to switch between the different views in the application. I have two different solutions of how to implement this and use as little memory as possible when the user navigates through the application. Solution 1: Everytime I need to show a view I check if it is already in the stack. (The user might open the same view many times, maybe a view showing an item from a database). If the view is in the stack already it doesn't need to be created again and I can just show the view. The good thing with this solution is that I reuse the views (widgets) so they only need to be created once. This is good as the UI and other stuff should look the same everytime the user show a view, so why not reuse it? The problem with this solution is that every view has childrens. Maybe an object, a QList with objects or other things. A good thing with Qt is that you can use the parent-children mechanism so that the children will be deleted when the parent is deleted. As I never delete the parent (view) I need to handle this myself as the children might need to be deleted from different times when the view is shown. (Maybe the view show a list with objects and the list should be updated from a database each time the view is shown.) Solution 2: Everytime I need to show a QWidget I create a new one and show it. When it is not shown anymore, I delete it from memory. This is a quite easy solution. And as I delete the views when they are not shown both the view and it's children should be deleted from memory so it shouldn't increase memory, am I right? Which one of the solutions do you recommend?

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• Search and highlight in html with multiple keywords as a single string

  - by Qiusheng

  In JavaScript, by given a html string with tags like: This string has different fonts. <b>This</b> <i>string</i> <span style="background-color: rgb(212, 239, 181);">has</span> <b>different</b> <i>fonts</i>. When user searches for a search term with multiple words like "different fonts". How can I add highlighting to make the html string look like: <b>This</b> <i>string</i> <span style="background-color: rgb(212, 239, 181);">has</span> <span class="highlight"> <b>different</b> <i>fonts</i> </span>. Please note that the search term is treated as a single string as if the words are in a quote, so I cannot search and highlight each word individually.

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• C# property exactly the same, defined in two places

  - by Sarah Vessels

  I have the following classes: Defect - represents a type of data that can be found in a database FilterQuery - provides a way of querying the database by setting simple Boolean filters Both Defect and FilterQuery implement the same interface: IDefectProperties. This interface specifies particular fields that are in the database. Different classes have methods that return lists of Defect instances. With FilterQuery, you specify some filters for the particular properties implemented as part of IDefectProperties, and then you run the query and get back a list of Defect instances. My problem is that I end up implementing some properties exactly the same in FilterQuery and Defect. The two are inherently different classes, they just share some of the same properties. For example: public DateTime SubmitDateAsDate { get { return DateTime.Parse(SubmitDate); } set { SubmitDate = value.ToString(); } } This is a property required by IDefectProperties that depends on a different property, SubmitDate, which returns a string instead of a DateTime. Now SubmitDate is implemented differently in Defect and FilterQuery, but SubmitDateAsDate is exactly the same. Is there a way that I can define SubmitDateAsDate in only place, but both Defect and FilterQuery provide it as a property? FilterQuery and Defect already inherit from two different classes, and it wouldn't make sense for them to share an ancestor anyway, I think. I am open to suggestions as to my design here as well.

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• Structuring iPhone/iPad application views

  - by Mark

  I have an idea about an application that I want to build and Im new to iPhone/iPad development (but not new to development in other languages/frameworks such as .NET and Java). I want to layout some views on the screen so that they animate (slide in) from different directions into their places. The question is about the strucuture of the application, if I have say 4 rectanglular areas on the screen that contain business data, such as contacts (name, photo, etc...) and they all take up different widths of the screen (say the first contact takes up one row of the screen, but the next 2 take up half the width of the next row each, and so on). Should I create a custom view for the different sized contact views, (i.e. LargeCustomView and SmallCustomView, and any other special type that I make) or should it all be one type, say, CustomerDetailsView which could be stretched to fit at design time? Also, if there were, say, 3 different instances of the same custom view on the one screen, are there 3 instances of the view controller also? Im a little confused about powering the data behind a view, can someone shed some light on this for me? Do I just set the properties (say an instance variable ContactForView) on the view controller for each instance? Thanks for any help you can give Cheers, Mark

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• Using a single texture image unit with multiple sampler uniforms

  - by bcrist

  I am writing a batching system which tracks currently bound textures in order to avoid unnecessary glBindTexture() calls. I'm not sure if I need to keep track of which textures have already been used by a particular batch so that if a texture is used twice, it will be bound to a different TIU for the second sampler which requires it. Is it acceptable for an OpenGL application to use the same texture image unit for multiple samplers within the same shader stage? What about samplers in different shader stages? For example: Fragment shader: ... uniform sampler2D samp1; uniform sampler2D samp2; void main() { ... } Main program: ... glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, tex_id); glUniform1i(samp1_location, 0); glUniform1i(samp2_location, 0); ... I don't see any reason why this shouldn't work, but what about if the shader program also included a vertex shader like this: Vertex shader: ... uniform sampler2D samp1; void main() { ... } In this case, OpenGL is supposed to treat both instances of samp1 as the same variable, and exposes a single location for them. Therefore, the same texture unit is being used in the vertex and fragment shaders. I have read that using the same texture in two different shader stages counts doubly against GL_MAX_COMBINED_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS but this would seem to contradict that. In a quick test on my hardware (HD 6870), all of the following scenarios worked as expected: 1 TIU used for 2 sampler uniforms in same shader stage 1 TIU used for 1 sampler uniform which is used in 2 shader stages 1 TIU used for 2 sampler uniforms, each occurring in a different stage. However, I don't know if this is behavior that I should expect on all hardware/drivers, or if there are performance implications.

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• Programmatically Change Colors in C#

  - by Jason

  I am current working on a project where, as different users add text to a document, I would like the color of the text to change. Originally, I was using C#'s predefined color values and just putting the ones I wanted to use into an enum in my application and cycling through the colors as different users added annotations. This works fine, and I am okay with this solution. However, I also could have chosen to change the RGB values and derived colors that way. I'm curious about what type of algorithm would be good to change those values to get different sets of colors. This is more just an exercise of something I had thought about. To clarify a little bit, I don't want to just increment one of the color values (R, G, or B) because that wouldn't give me enough variety in my colors. But, I don't think it would also work to increment all three of equal amounts. I also have to watch out for repeating colors (up to a point). The requirements for my project anticipates, at most, 10 different reviewers.

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• Ajax Control Toolkit and Superexpert

  - by Stephen Walther

  Microsoft has asked my company, Superexpert Consulting, to take ownership of the development and maintenance of the Ajax Control Toolkit moving forward. In this blog entry, I discuss our strategy for improving the Ajax Control Toolkit. Why the Ajax Control Toolkit? The Ajax Control Toolkit is one of the most popular projects on CodePlex. In fact, some have argued that it is among the most successful open-source projects of all time. It consistently receives over 3,500 downloads a day (not weekends -- workdays). A mind-boggling number of developers use the Ajax Control Toolkit in their ASP.NET Web Forms applications. Why does the Ajax Control Toolkit continue to be such a popular project? The Ajax Control Toolkit fills a strong need in the ASP.NET Web Forms world. The Toolkit enables Web Forms developers to build richly interactive JavaScript applications without writing any JavaScript. For example, by taking advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit, a Web Forms developer can add modal dialogs, popup calendars, and client tabs to a web application simply by dragging web controls onto a page. The Ajax Control Toolkit is not for everyone. If you are comfortable writing JavaScript then I recommend that you investigate using jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit. However, if you are a Web Forms developer and you don’t want to get your hands dirty writing JavaScript, then the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great solution. The Ajax Control Toolkit is Vast The Ajax Control Toolkit consists of 40 controls. That’s a lot of controls (For the sake of comparison, jQuery UI consists of only 8 controls – those slackers J). Furthermore, developers expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on browsers both old and new. For example, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 9 and every version of Internet Explorer in between. People also expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. And, people expect the Ajax Control Toolkit to work with different operating systems. Yikes, that is a lot of combinations. The biggest challenge which my company faces in supporting the Ajax Control Toolkit is ensuring that the Ajax Control Toolkit works across all of these different browsers and operating systems. Testing, Testing, Testing Because we wanted to ensure that we could easily test the Ajax Control Toolkit with different browsers, the very first thing that we did was to set up a dedicated testing server. The dedicated server -- named Schizo -- hosts 4 virtual machines so that we can run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Internet Explorer 9 at the same time (We also use the virtual machines to host the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari). The five developers on our team (plus me) can each publish to a separate FTP website on the testing server. That way, we can quickly test how changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit affect different browsers. QUnit Tests for the Ajax Control Toolkit Introducing regressions – introducing new bugs when trying to fix existing bugs – is the concern which prevents me from sleeping well at night. There are so many people using the Ajax Control Toolkit in so many unique scenarios, that it is difficult to make improvements to the Ajax Control Toolkit without introducing regressions. In order to avoid regressions, we decided early on that it was extremely important to build good test coverage for the 40 controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We’ve been focusing a lot of energy on building automated JavaScript unit tests which we can use to help us discover regressions. We decided to write the unit tests with the QUnit test framework. We picked QUnit because it is quickly becoming the standard unit testing framework in the JavaScript world. For example, it is the unit testing framework used by the jQuery team, the jQuery UI team, and many jQuery UI plugin developers. We had to make several enhancements to the QUnit framework in order to test the Ajax Control Toolkit. For example, QUnit does not support tests which include postbacks. We modified the QUnit framework so that it works with IFrames so we could perform postbacks in our automated tests. At this point, we have written hundreds of QUnit tests. For example, we have written 135 QUnit tests for the Accordion control. The QUnit tests are included with the Ajax Control Toolkit source code in a project named AjaxControlToolkit.Tests. You can run all of the QUnit tests contained in the project by opening the Default.aspx page. Automating the QUnit Tests across Multiple Browsers Automated tests are useless if no one ever runs them. In order for the QUnit tests to be useful, we needed an easy way to run the tests automatically against a matrix of browsers. We wanted to run the unit tests against Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari automatically. Expecting a developer to run QUnit tests against every browser after every check-in is just too much to expect. It takes 20 seconds to run the Accordion QUnit tests. We are testing against 8 browsers. That would require the developer to open 8 browsers and wait for the results after each change in code. Too much work. Therefore, we built a JavaScript Test Server. Our JavaScript Test Server project was inspired by John Resig’s TestSwarm project. The JavaScript Test Server runs our QUnit tests in a swarm of browsers (running on different operating systems) automatically. Here’s how the JavaScript Test Server works: 1. We created an ASP.NET page named RunTest.aspx that constantly polls the JavaScript Test Server for a new set of QUnit tests to run. After the RunTest.aspx page runs the QUnit tests, the RunTest.aspx records the test results back to the JavaScript Test Server. 2. We opened the RunTest.aspx page on instances of Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Google, and Safari. Now that we have the JavaScript Test Server setup, we can run all of our QUnit tests against all of the browsers which we need to support with a single click of a button. A New Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit Each Month The Ajax Control Toolkit Issue Tracker contains over one thousand five hundred open issues and feature requests. So we have plenty of work on our plates J At CodePlex, anyone can vote for an issue to be fixed. Originally, we planned to fix issues in order of their votes. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was inefficient. Constantly switching back and forth between different controls was too time-consuming. It takes time to re-familiarize yourself with a control. Instead, we decided to focus on two or three controls each month and really focus on fixing the issues with those controls. This way, we can fix sets of related issues and avoid the randomization caused by context switching. Our team works in monthly sprints. We plan to do another release of the Ajax Control Toolkit each and every month. So far, we have competed one release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which was released on April 1, 2011. We plan to release a new version in early May. Conclusion Fortunately, I work with a team of smart developers. We currently have 5 developers working on the Ajax Control Toolkit (not full-time, they are also building two very cool ASP.NET MVC applications). All the developers who work on our team are required to have strong JavaScript, jQuery, and ASP.NET MVC skills. In the interest of being as transparent as possible about our work on the Ajax Control Toolkit, I plan to blog frequently about our team’s ongoing work. In my next blog entry, I plan to write about the two Ajax Control Toolkit controls which are the focus of our work for next release.

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• HttpContext.Items and Server.Transfer/Execute

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago my buddy Ben Jones pointed out that he ran into a bug in the ScriptContainer control in the West Wind Web and Ajax Toolkit. The problem was basically that when a Server.Transfer call was applied the script container (and also various ClientScriptProxy script embedding routines) would potentially fail to load up the specified scripts. It turns out the problem is due to the fact that the various components in the toolkit use request specific singletons via a Current property. I use a static Current property tied to a Context.Items[] entry to handle this type of operation which looks something like this: /// <summary> /// Current instance of this class which should always be used to /// access this object. There are no public constructors to /// ensure the reference is used as a Singleton to further /// ensure that all scripts are written to the same clientscript /// manager. /// </summary> public static ClientScriptProxy Current { get { if (HttpContext.Current == null) return new ClientScriptProxy(); ClientScriptProxy proxy = null; if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains(STR_CONTEXTID)) proxy = HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] as ClientScriptProxy; else { proxy = new ClientScriptProxy(); HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] = proxy; } return proxy; } } The proxy is attached to a Context.Items[] item which makes the instance Request specific. This works perfectly fine in most situations EXCEPT when you’re dealing with Server.Transfer/Execute requests. Server.Transfer doesn’t cause Context.Items to be cleared so both the current transferred request and the original request’s Context.Items collection apply. For the ClientScriptProxy this causes a problem because script references are tracked on a per request basis in Context.Items to check for script duplication. Once a script is rendered an ID is written into the Context collection and so considered ‘rendered’: // No dupes - ref script include only once if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains( STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER + fileId ) ) return; HttpContext.Current.Items.Add(STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER + fileId, string.Empty); where the fileId is the script name or unique identifier. The problem is on the Transferred page the item will already exist in Context and so fail to render because it thinks the script has already rendered based on the Context item. Bummer. The workaround for this is simple once you know what’s going on, but in this case it was a bitch to track down because the context items are used in many places throughout this class. The trick is to determine when a request is transferred and then removing the specific keys. The first issue is to determine if a script is in a Trransfer or Execute call: if (HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler != HttpContext.Current.Handler) Context.Handler is the original handler and CurrentHandler is the actual currently executing handler that is running when a Transfer/Execute is active. You can also use Context.PreviousHandler to get the last handler and chain through the whole list of handlers applied if Transfer calls are nested (dog help us all for the person debugging that). For the ClientScriptProxy the full logic to check for a transfer and remove the code looks like this: /// <summary> /// Clears all the request specific context items which are script references /// and the script placement index. /// </summary> public void ClearContextItemsOnTransfer() { if (HttpContext.Current != null) { // Check for Server.Transfer/Execute calls - we need to clear out Context.Items if (HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler != HttpContext.Current.Handler) { List<string> Keys = HttpContext.Current.Items.Keys.Cast<string>().Where(s => s.StartsWith(STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER) || s == STR_ScriptResourceIndex).ToList(); foreach (string key in Keys) { HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(key); } } } } along with a small update to the Current property getter that sets a global flag to indicate whether the request was transferred: if (!proxy.IsTransferred && HttpContext.Current.Handler != HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler) { proxy.ClearContextItemsOnTransfer(); proxy.IsTransferred = true; } return proxy; I know this is pretty ugly, but it works and it’s actually minimal fuss without affecting the behavior of the rest of the class. Ben had a different solution that involved explicitly clearing out the Context items and replacing the collection with a manually maintained list of items which also works, but required changes through the code to make this work. In hindsight, it would have been better to use a single object that encapsulates all the ‘persisted’ values and store that object in Context instead of all these individual small morsels. Hindsight is always 20/20 though :-}. If possible use Page.Items ClientScriptProxy is a generic component that can be used from anywhere in ASP.NET, so there are various methods that are not Page specific on this component which is why I used Context.Items, rather than the Page.Items collection.Page.Items would be a better choice since it will sidestep the above Server.Transfer nightmares as the Page is reloaded completely and so any new Page gets a new Items collection. No fuss there. So for the ScriptContainer control, which has to live on the page the behavior is a little different. It is attached to Page.Items (since it’s a control): /// <summary> /// Returns a current instance of this control if an instance /// is already loaded on the page. Otherwise a new instance is /// created, added to the Form and returned. /// /// It's important this function is not called too early in the /// page cycle - it should not be called before Page.OnInit(). /// /// This property is the preferred way to get a reference to a /// ScriptContainer control that is either already on a page /// or needs to be created. Controls in particular should always /// use this property. /// </summary> public static ScriptContainer Current { get { // We need a context for this to work! if (HttpContext.Current == null) return null; Page page = HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler as Page; if (page == null) throw new InvalidOperationException(Resources.ERROR_ScriptContainer_OnlyWorks_With_PageBasedHandlers); ScriptContainer ctl = null; // Retrieve the current instance ctl = page.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] as ScriptContainer; if (ctl != null) return ctl; ctl = new ScriptContainer(); page.Form.Controls.Add(ctl); return ctl; } } The biggest issue with this approach is that you have to explicitly retrieve the page in the static Current property. Notice again the use of CurrentHandler (rather than Handler which was my original implementation) to ensure you get the latest page including the one that Server.Transfer fired. Server.Transfer and Server.Execute are Evil All that said – this fix is probably for the 2 people who are crazy enough to rely on Server.Transfer/Execute. :-} There are so many weird behavior problems with these commands that I avoid them at all costs. I don’t think I have a single application that uses either of these commands… Related Resources Full source of ClientScriptProxy.cs (repository) Part of the West Wind Web Toolkit Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls Post © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• The Incremental Architect&acute;s Napkin - #1 - It&acute;s about the money, stupid

  - by Ralf Westphal

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

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