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• Using VLOOKUP in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  VLOOKUP is one of Excel’s most useful functions, and it’s also one of the least understood.  In this article, we demystify VLOOKUP by way of a real-life example.  We’ll create a usable Invoice Template for a fictitious company. So what is VLOOKUP?  Well, of course it’s an Excel function.  This article will assume that the reader already has a passing understanding of Excel functions, and can use basic functions such as SUM, AVERAGE, and TODAY.  In its most common usage, VLOOKUP is a database function, meaning that it works with database tables – or more simply, lists of things in an Excel worksheet.  What sort of things?   Well, any sort of thing.  You may have a worksheet that contains a list of employees, or products, or customers, or CDs in your CD collection, or stars in the night sky.  It doesn’t really matter. Here’s an example of a list, or database.  In this case it’s a list of products that our fictitious company sells: Usually lists like this have some sort of unique identifier for each item in the list.  In this case, the unique identifier is in the “Item Code” column.  Note:  For the VLOOKUP function to work with a database/list, that list must have a column containing the unique identifier (or “key”, or “ID”), and that column must be the first column in the table.  Our sample database above satisfies this criterion. The hardest part of using VLOOKUP is understanding exactly what it’s for.  So let’s see if we can get that clear first: VLOOKUP retrieves information from a database/list based on a supplied instance of the unique identifier. Put another way, if you put the VLOOKUP function into a cell and pass it one of the unique identifiers from your database, it will return you one of the pieces of information associated with that unique identifier.  In the example above, you would pass VLOOKUP an item code, and it would return to you either the corresponding item’s description, its price, or its availability (its “In stock” quantity).  Which of these pieces of information will it pass you back?  Well, you get to decide this when you’re creating the formula. If all you need is one piece of information from the database, it would be a lot of trouble to go to to construct a formula with a VLOOKUP function in it.  Typically you would use this sort of functionality in a reusable spreadsheet, such as a template.  Each time someone enters a valid item code, the system would retrieve all the necessary information about the corresponding item. Let’s create an example of this:  An Invoice Template that we can reuse over and over in our fictitious company. First we start Excel… …and we create ourselves a blank invoice: This is how it’s going to work:  The person using the invoice template will fill in a series of item codes in column “A”, and the system will retrieve each item’s description and price, which will be used to calculate the line total for each item (assuming we enter a valid quantity). For the purposes of keeping this example simple, we will locate the product database on a separate sheet in the same workbook: In reality, it’s more likely that the product database would be located in a separate workbook.  It makes little difference to the VLOOKUP function, which doesn’t really care if the database is located on the same sheet, a different sheet, or a completely different workbook. In order to test the VLOOKUP formula we’re about to write, we first enter a valid item code into cell A11: Next, we move the active cell to the cell in which we want information retrieved from the database by VLOOKUP to be stored.  Interestingly, this is the step that most people get wrong.  To explain further:  We are about to create a VLOOKUP formula that will retrieve the description that corresponds to the item code in cell A11.  Where do we want this description put when we get it?  In cell B11, of course.  So that’s where we write the VLOOKUP formula – in cell B11. Select cell B11: We need to locate the list of all available functions that Excel has to offer, so that we can choose VLOOKUP and get some assistance in completing the formula.  This is found by first clicking the Formulas tab, and then clicking Insert Function:   A box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel.  To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function).  The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel.  VLOOKUP is the second one in the list.  Select it an click OK… The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function.  You can think of this box as the function is asking us the following questions: What unique identifier are you looking up in the database? Where is the database? Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you? The first three arguments are shown in bold, indicating that they are mandatory arguments (the VLOOKUP function is incomplete without them and will not return a valid value).  The fourth argument is not bold, meaning that it’s optional:   We will complete the arguments in order, top to bottom. The first argument we need to complete is the Lookup_value argument.  The function needs us to tell it where to find the unique identifier (the item code in this case) that it should be retuning the description of.  We must select the item code we entered earlier (in A11). Click on the selector icon to the right of the first argument: Then click once on the cell containing the item code (A11), and press Enter: The value of “A11” is inserted into the first argument. Now we need to enter a value for the Table_array argument.  In other words, we need to tell VLOOKUP where to find the database/list.  Click on the selector icon next to the second argument: Now locate the database/list and select the entire list – not including the header line.  The database is located on a separate worksheet, so we first click on that worksheet tab: Next we select the entire database, not including the header line: …and press Enter.  The range of cells that represents the database (in this case “’Product Database’!A2:D7”) is entered automatically for us into the second argument. Now we need to enter the third argument, Col_index_num.  We use this argument to specify to VLOOKUP which piece of information from the database, associate with our item code in A11, we wish to have returned to us.  In this particular example, we wish to have the item’s description returned to us.  If you look on the database worksheet, you’ll notice that the “Description” column is the second column in the database.  This means that we must enter a value of “2” into the Col_index_num box: It is important to note that that we are not entering a “2” here because the “Description” column is in the B column on that worksheet.  If the database happened to start in column K of the worksheet, we would still enter a “2” in this field. Finally, we need to decide whether to enter a value into the final VLOOKUP argument, Range_lookup.  This argument requires either a true or false value, or it should be left blank.  When using VLOOKUP with databases (as is true 90% of the time), then the way to decide what to put in this argument can be thought of as follows: If the first column of the database (the column that contains the unique identifiers) is sorted alphabetically/numerically in ascending order, then it’s possible to enter a value of true into this argument, or leave it blank. If the first column of the database is not sorted, or it’s sorted in descending order, then you must enter a value of false into this argument As the first column of our database is not sorted, we enter false into this argument: That’s it!  We’ve entered all the information required for VLOOKUP to return the value we need.  Click the OK button and notice that the description corresponding to item code “R99245” has been correctly entered into cell B11: The formula that was created for us looks like this: If we enter a different item code into cell A11, we will begin to see the power of the VLOOKUP function:  The description cell changes to match the new item code: We can perform a similar set of steps to get the item’s price returned into cell E11.  Note that the new formula must be created in cell E11.  The result will look like this: …and the formula will look like this: Note that the only difference between the two formulae is the third argument (Col_index_num) has changed from a “2” to a “3” (because we want data retrieved from the 3rd column in the database). If we decided to buy 2 of these items, we would enter a “2” into cell D11.  We would then enter a simple formula into cell F11 to get the line total: =D11*E11 …which looks like this… Completing the Invoice Template We’ve learned a lot about VLOOKUP so far.  In fact, we’ve learned all we’re going to learn in this article.  It’s important to note that VLOOKUP can be used in other circumstances besides databases.  This is less common, and may be covered in future How-To Geek articles. Our invoice template is not yet complete.  In order to complete it, we would do the following: We would remove the sample item code from cell A11 and the “2” from cell D11.  This will cause our newly created VLOOKUP formulae to display error messages: We can remedy this by judicious use of Excel’s IF() and ISBLANK() functions.  We change our formula from this…       =VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) We would copy the formulas in cells B11, E11 and F11 down to the remainder of the item rows of the invoice.  Note that if we do this, the resulting formulas will no longer correctly refer to the database table.  We could fix this by changing the cell references for the database to absolute cell references.  Alternatively – and even better – we could create a range name for the entire product database (such as “Products”), and use this range name instead of the cell references.  The formula would change from this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,Products,2,FALSE)) …and then copy the formulas down to the rest of the invoice item rows. We would probably “lock” the cells that contain our formulae (or rather unlock the other cells), and then protect the worksheet, in order to ensure that our carefully constructed formulae are not accidentally overwritten when someone comes to fill in the invoice. We would save the file as a template, so that it could be reused by everyone in our company If we were feeling really clever, we would create a database of all our customers in another worksheet, and then use the customer ID entered in cell F5 to automatically fill in the customer’s name and address in cells B6, B7 and B8. If you would like to practice with VLOOKUP, or simply see our resulting Invoice Template, it can be downloaded from here. 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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Joy of Anonymous Types

  - by James Michael Hare

  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. In the .NET 3 Framework, Microsoft introduced the concept of anonymous types, which provide a way to create a quick, compiler-generated types at the point of instantiation.  These may seem trivial, but are very handy for concisely creating lightweight, strongly-typed objects containing only read-only properties that can be used within a given scope. Creating an Anonymous Type In short, an anonymous type is a reference type that derives directly from object and is defined by its set of properties base on their names, number, types, and order given at initialization.  In addition to just holding these properties, it is also given appropriate overridden implementations for Equals() and GetHashCode() that take into account all of the properties to correctly perform property comparisons and hashing.  Also overridden is an implementation of ToString() which makes it easy to display the contents of an anonymous type instance in a fairly concise manner. To construct an anonymous type instance, you use basically the same initialization syntax as with a regular type.  So, for example, if we wanted to create an anonymous type to represent a particular point, we could do this: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 7 }; Note the similarity between anonymous type initialization and regular initialization.  The main difference is that the compiler generates the type name and the properties (as readonly) based on the names and order provided, and inferring their types from the expressions they are assigned to. It is key to remember that all of those factors (number, names, types, order of properties) determine the anonymous type.  This is important, because while these two instances share the same anonymous type: 1: // same names, types, and order 2: var point1 = new { X = 13, Y = 7 }; 3: var point2 = new { X = 5, Y = 0 }; These similar ones do not: 1: var point3 = new { Y = 3, X = 5 }; // different order 2: var point4 = new { X = 3, Y = 5.0 }; // different type for Y 3: var point5 = new {MyX = 3, MyY = 5 }; // different names 4: var point6 = new { X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3 }; // different count Limitations on Property Initialization Expressions The expression for a property in an anonymous type initialization cannot be null (though it can evaluate to null) or an anonymous function.  For example, the following are illegal: 1: // Null can't be used directly. Null reference of what type? 2: var cantUseNull = new { Value = null }; 3:  4: // Anonymous methods cannot be used. 5: var cantUseAnonymousFxn = new { Value = () => Console.WriteLine(“Can’t.”) }; Note that the restriction on null is just that you can’t use it directly as the expression, because otherwise how would it be able to determine the type?  You can, however, use it indirectly assigning a null expression such as a typed variable with the value null, or by casting null to a specific type: 1: string str = null; 2: var fineIndirectly = new { Value = str }; 3: var fineCast = new { Value = (string)null }; All of the examples above name the properties explicitly, but you can also implicitly name properties if they are being set from a property, field, or variable.  In these cases, when a field, property, or variable is used alone, and you don’t specify a property name assigned to it, the new property will have the same name.  For example: 1: int variable = 42; 2:  3: // creates two properties named varriable and Now 4: var implicitProperties = new { variable, DateTime.Now }; Is the same type as: 1: var explicitProperties = new { variable = variable, Now = DateTime.Now }; But this only works if you are using an existing field, variable, or property directly as the expression.  If you use a more complex expression then the name cannot be inferred: 1: // can't infer the name variable from variable * 2, must name explicitly 2: var wontWork = new { variable * 2, DateTime.Now }; In the example above, since we typed variable * 2, it is no longer just a variable and thus we would have to assign the property a name explicitly. ToString() on Anonymous Types One of the more trivial overrides that an anonymous type provides you is a ToString() method that prints the value of the anonymous type instance in much the same format as it was initialized (except actual values instead of expressions as appropriate of course). For example, if you had: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 42 }; And then print it out: 1: Console.WriteLine(point.ToString()); You will get: 1: { X = 13, Y = 42 } While this isn’t necessarily the most stunning feature of anonymous types, it can be handy for debugging or logging values in a fairly easy to read format. Comparing Anonymous Type Instances Because anonymous types automatically create appropriate overrides of Equals() and GetHashCode() based on the underlying properties, we can reliably compare two instances or get hash codes.  For example, if we had the following 3 points: 1: var point1 = new { X = 1, Y = 2 }; 2: var point2 = new { X = 1, Y = 2 }; 3: var point3 = new { Y = 2, X = 1 }; If we compare point1 and point2 we’ll see that Equals() returns true because they overridden version of Equals() sees that the types are the same (same number, names, types, and order of properties) and that the values are the same.   In addition, because all equal objects should have the same hash code, we’ll see that the hash codes evaluate to the same as well: 1: // true, same type, same values 2: Console.WriteLine(point1.Equals(point2)); 3:  4: // true, equal anonymous type instances always have same hash code 5: Console.WriteLine(point1.GetHashCode() == point2.GetHashCode()); However, if we compare point2 and point3 we get false.  Even though the names, types, and values of the properties are the same, the order is not, thus they are two different types and cannot be compared (and thus return false).  And, since they are not equal objects (even though they have the same value) there is a good chance their hash codes are different as well (though not guaranteed): 1: // false, different types 2: Console.WriteLine(point2.Equals(point3)); 3:  4: // quite possibly false (was false on my machine) 5: Console.WriteLine(point2.GetHashCode() == point3.GetHashCode()); Using Anonymous Types Now that we’ve created instances of anonymous types, let’s actually use them.  The property names (whether implicit or explicit) are used to access the individual properties of the anonymous type.  The main thing, once again, to keep in mind is that the properties are readonly, so you cannot assign the properties a new value (note: this does not mean that instances referred to by a property are immutable – for more information check out C#/.NET Fundamentals: Returning Data Immutably in a Mutable World). Thus, if we have the following anonymous type instance: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 42 }; We can get the properties as you’d expect: 1: Console.WriteLine(“The point is: ({0},{1})”, point.X, point.Y); But we cannot alter the property values: 1: // compiler error, properties are readonly 2: point.X = 99; Further, since the anonymous type name is only known by the compiler, there is no easy way to pass anonymous type instances outside of a given scope.  The only real choices are to pass them as object or dynamic.  But really that is not the intention of using anonymous types.  If you find yourself needing to pass an anonymous type outside of a given scope, you should really consider making a POCO (Plain Old CLR Type – i.e. a class that contains just properties to hold data with little/no business logic) instead. Given that, why use them at all?  Couldn’t you always just create a POCO to represent every anonymous type you needed?  Sure you could, but then you might litter your solution with many small POCO classes that have very localized uses. It turns out this is the key to when to use anonymous types to your advantage: when you just need a lightweight type in a local context to store intermediate results, consider an anonymous type – but when that result is more long-lived and used outside of the current scope, consider a POCO instead. So what do we mean by intermediate results in a local context?  Well, a classic example would be filtering down results from a LINQ expression.  For example, let’s say we had a List<Transaction>, where Transaction is defined something like: 1: public class Transaction 2: { 3: public string UserId { get; set; } 4: public DateTime At { get; set; } 5: public decimal Amount { get; set; } 6: // … 7: } And let’s say we had this data in our List<Transaction>: 1: var transactions = new List<Transaction> 2: { 3: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = 2200.00m }, 4: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -1100.00m }, 5: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1), Amount = 900.00m }, 6: new Transaction { UserId = "John", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2), Amount = 300.00m }, 7: new Transaction { UserId = "John", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -10.00m }, 8: new Transaction { UserId = "Jane", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = 200.00m }, 9: new Transaction { UserId = "Jane", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -50.00m }, 10: new Transaction { UserId = "Jaime", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-3), Amount = -100.00m }, 11: new Transaction { UserId = "Jaime", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-3), Amount = 300.00m }, 12: }; So let’s say we wanted to get the transactions for each day for each user.  That is, for each day we’d want to see the transactions each user performed.  We could do this very simply with a nice LINQ expression, without the need of creating any POCOs: 1: // group the transactions based on an anonymous type with properties UserId and Date: 2: byUserAndDay = transactions 3: .GroupBy(tx => new { tx.UserId, tx.At.Date }) 4: .OrderBy(grp => grp.Key.Date) 5: .ThenBy(grp => grp.Key.UserId); Now, those of you who have attempted to use custom classes as a grouping type before (such as GroupBy(), Distinct(), etc.) may have discovered the hard way that LINQ gets a lot of its speed by utilizing not on Equals(), but also GetHashCode() on the type you are grouping by.  Thus, when you use custom types for these purposes, you generally end up having to write custom Equals() and GetHashCode() implementations or you won’t get the results you were expecting (the default implementations of Equals() and GetHashCode() are reference equality and reference identity based respectively). As we said before, it turns out that anonymous types already do these critical overrides for you.  This makes them even more convenient to use!  Instead of creating a small POCO to handle this grouping, and then having to implement a custom Equals() and GetHashCode() every time, we can just take advantage of the fact that anonymous types automatically override these methods with appropriate implementations that take into account the values of all of the properties. Now, we can look at our results: 1: foreach (var group in byUserAndDay) 2: { 3: // the group’s Key is an instance of our anonymous type 4: Console.WriteLine("{0} on {1:MM/dd/yyyy} did:", group.Key.UserId, group.Key.Date); 5:  6: // each grouping contains a sequence of the items. 7: foreach (var tx in group) 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("\t{0}", tx.Amount); 10: } 11: } And see: 1: Jaime on 06/18/2012 did: 2: -100.00 3: 300.00 4:  5: John on 06/19/2012 did: 6: 300.00 7:  8: Jim on 06/20/2012 did: 9: 900.00 10:  11: Jane on 06/21/2012 did: 12: 200.00 13: -50.00 14:  15: Jim on 06/21/2012 did: 16: 2200.00 17: -1100.00 18:  19: John on 06/21/2012 did: 20: -10.00 Again, sure we could have just built a POCO to do this, given it an appropriate Equals() and GetHashCode() method, but that would have bloated our code with so many extra lines and been more difficult to maintain if the properties change.  Summary Anonymous types are one of those Little Wonders of the .NET language that are perfect at exactly that time when you need a temporary type to hold a set of properties together for an intermediate result.  While they are not very useful beyond the scope in which they are defined, they are excellent in LINQ expressions as a way to create and us intermediary values for further expressions and analysis. Anonymous types are defined by the compiler based on the number, type, names, and order of properties created, and they automatically implement appropriate Equals() and GetHashCode() overrides (as well as ToString()) which makes them ideal for LINQ expressions where you need to create a set of properties to group, evaluate, etc. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Anonymous Types,LINQ

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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

  In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Down Tools Week Cometh: Kissing Goodbye to CVs/Resumes and Cover Letters

  - by Bart Read

  I haven't blogged about what I'm doing in my (not so new) temporary role as Red Gate's technical recruiter, mostly because it's been routine, business as usual stuff, and because I've been trying to understand the role by doing it. I think now though the time has come to get a little more radical, so I'm going to tell you why I want to largely eliminate CVs/resumes and cover letters from the application process for some of our technical roles, and why I think that might be a good thing for candidates (and for us). I have a terrible confession to make, or at least it's a terrible confession for a recruiter: I don't really like CV sifting, or reading cover letters, and, unless I've misread the mood around here, neither does anybody else. It's dull, it's time-consuming, and it's somewhat soul destroying because, when all is said and done, you're being paid to be incredibly judgemental about people based on relatively little information. I feel like I've dirtied myself by saying that - I mean, after all, it's a core part of my job - but it sucks, it really does. (And, of course, the truth is I'm still a software engineer at heart, and I'm always looking for ways to do things better.) On the flip side, I've never met anyone who likes writing their CV. It takes hours and hours of faffing around and massaging it into shape, and the whole process is beset by a gnawing anxiety, frustration, and insecurity. All you really want is a chance to demonstrate your skills - not just talk about them - and how do you do that in a CV or cover letter? Often the best candidates will include samples of their work (a portfolio, screenshots, links to websites, product downloads, etc.), but sometimes this isn't possible, or may not be appropriate, or you just don't think you're allowed because of what your school/university careers service has told you (more commonly an issue with grads, obviously). And what are we actually trying to find out about people with all of this? I think the common criteria are actually pretty basic: Smart Gets things done (thanks for these two Joel) Not an a55hole* (sorry, have to get around Simple Talk's swear filter - and thanks to Professor Robert I. Sutton for this one) *Of course, everyone has off days, and I don't honestly think we're too worried about somebody being a bit grumpy every now and again. We can do a bit better than this in the context of the roles I'm talking about: we can be more specific about what "gets things done" means, at least in part. For software engineers and interns, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Excellent coder For test engineers, the non-exhaustive meaning of "gets things done" is: Good at finding problems in software Competent coder Team player, etc., to me, are covered by "not an a55hole". I don't expect people to be the life and soul of the party, or a wild extrovert - that's not what team player means, and it's not what "not an a55hole" means. Some of our best technical staff are quiet, introverted types, but they're still pleasant to work with. My problem is that I don't think the initial sift really helps us find out whether people are smart and get things done with any great efficacy. It's better than nothing, for sure, but it's not as good as it could be. It's also contentious, and potentially unfair/inequitable - if you want to get an idea of what I mean by this, check out the background information section at the bottom. Before I go any further, let's look at the Red Gate recruitment process for technical staff* as it stands now: (LOTS of) People apply for jobs. All these applications go through a brutal process of manual sifting, which eliminates between 75 and 90% of them, depending upon the role, and the time of year**. Depending upon the role, those who pass the sift will be sent an assessment or telescreened. For the purposes of this blog post I'm only interested in those that are sent some sort of programming assessment, or bug hunt. This means software engineers, test engineers, and software interns, which are the roles for which I receive the most applications. The telescreen tends to be reserved for project or product managers. Those that pass the assessment are invited in for first interview. This interview is mostly about assessing their technical skills***, although we're obviously on the look out for cultural fit red flags as well. If the first interview goes well we'll invite candidates back for a second interview. This is where team/cultural fit is really scoped out. We also use this interview to dive more deeply into certain areas of their skillset, and explore any concerns that may have come out of the first interview (these obviously won't have been serious or obvious enough to cause a rejection at that point, but are things we do need to look into before we'd consider making an offer). We might subsequently invite them in for lunch before we make them an offer. This tends to happen when we're recruiting somebody for a specific team and we'd like them to meet all the people they'll be working with directly. It's not an interview per se, but can prove pivotal if they don't gel with the team. Anyone who's made it this far will receive an offer from us. *We have a slightly quirky definition of "technical staff" as it relates to the technical recruiter role here. It includes software engineers, test engineers, software interns, user experience specialists, technical authors, project managers, product managers, and development managers, but does not include product support or information systems roles. **For example, the quality of graduate applicants overall noticeably drops as the academic year wears on, which is not to say that by now there aren't still stars in there, just that they're fewer and further between. ***Some organisations prefer to assess for team fit first, but I think assessing technical skills is a more effective initial filter - if they're the nicest person in the world, but can't cut a line of code they're not going to work out. Now, as I suggested in the title, Red Gate's Down Tools Week is upon us once again - next week in fact - and I had proposed as a project that we refactor and automate the first stage of marking our programming assessments. Marking assessments, and in fact organising the marking of them, is a somewhat time-consuming process, and we receive many assessment solutions that just don't make the cut, for whatever reason. Whilst I don't think it's possible to fully automate marking, I do think it ought to be possible to run a suite of automated tests over each candidate's solution to see whether or not it behaves correctly and, if it does, move on to a manual stage where we examine the code for structure, decomposition, style, readability, maintainability, etc. Obviously it's possible to use tools to generate potentially helpful metrics for some of these indices as well. This would obviously reduce the marking workload, and would provide candidates with quicker feedback about whether they've been successful - though I do wonder if waiting a tactful interval before sending a (nicely written) rejection might be wise. I duly scrawled out a picture of my ideal process, which looked like this: The problem is, as soon as I'd roughed it out, I realised that fundamentally it wasn't an ideal process at all, which explained the gnawing feeling of cognitive dissonance I'd been wrestling with all week, whilst I'd been trying to find time to do this. Here's what I mean. Automated assessment marking, and the associated infrastructure around that, makes it much easier for us to deal with large numbers of assessments. This means we can be much more permissive about who we send assessments out to or, in other words, we can give more candidates the opportunity to really demonstrate their skills to us. And this leads to a question: why not give everyone the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, to show that they're smart and can get things done? (Two or three of us even discussed this in the down tools week hustings earlier this week.) And isn't this a lot simpler than the alternative we'd been considering? (FYI, this was automated CV/cover letter sifting by some form of textual analysis to ideally eliminate the worst 50% or so of applications based on an analysis of the 20,000 or so historical applications we've received since 2007 - definitely not the basic keyword analysis beloved of recruitment agencies, since this would eliminate hardly anyone who was awful, but definitely would eliminate stellar Oxbridge candidates - #fail - or some nightmarishly complex Google-like system where we profile all our currently employees, only to realise that we're never going to get representative results because we don't have a statistically significant sample size in any given role - also #fail.) No, I think the new way is better. We let people self-select. We make them the masters (or mistresses) of their own destiny. We give applicants the power - we put their fate in their hands - by giving them the chance to demonstrate their skills, which is what they really want anyway, instead of requiring that they spend hours and hours creating a CV and cover letter that I'm going to evaluate for suitability, and make a value judgement about, in approximately 1 minute (give or take). It doesn't matter what university you attended, it doesn't matter if you had a bad year when you took your A-levels - here's your chance to shine, so take it and run with it. (As a side benefit, we cut the number of applications we have to sift by something like two thirds.) WIN! OK, yeah, sounds good, but will it actually work? That's an excellent question. My gut feeling is yes, and I'll justify why below (and hopefully have gone some way towards doing that above as well), but what I'm proposing here is really that we run an experiment for a period of time - probably a couple of months or so - and measure the outcomes we see: How many people apply? (Wouldn't be surprised or alarmed to see this cut by a factor of ten.) How many of them submit a good assessment? (More/less than at present?) How much overhead is there for us in dealing with these assessments compared to now? What are the success and failure rates at each interview stage compared to now? How many people are we hiring at the end of it compared to now? I think it'll work because I hypothesize that, amongst other things: It self-selects for people who really want to work at Red Gate which, at the moment, is something I have to try and assess based on their CV and cover letter - but if you're not that bothered about working here, why would you complete the assessment? Candidates who would submit a shoddy application probably won't feel motivated to do the assessment. Candidates who would demonstrate good attention to detail in their CV/cover letter will demonstrate good attention to detail in the assessment. In general, only the better candidates will complete and submit the assessment. Marking assessments is much less work so we'll be able to deal with any increase that we see (hopefully we will see). There are obviously other questions as well: Is plagiarism going to be a problem? Is there any way we can detect/discourage potential plagiarism? How do we assess candidates' education and experience? What about their ability to communicate in writing? Do we still want them to submit a CV afterwards if they pass assessment? Do we want to offer them the opportunity to tell us a bit about why they'd like the job when they submit their assessment? How does this affect our relationship with recruitment agencies we might use to hire for these roles? So, what's the objective for next week's Down Tools Week? Pretty simple really - we want to implement this process for the Graduate Software Engineer and Software Engineer positions that you can find on our website. I will be joined by a crack team of our best developers (Kevin Boyle, and new Red-Gater, Sam Blackburn), and recruiting hostess with the mostest Laura McQuillen, and hopefully a couple of others as well - if I can successfully twist more arms before Monday.* Hopefully by next Friday our experiment will be up and running, and we may have changed the way Red Gate recruits software engineers for good! Stay tuned and we'll let you know how it goes! *I'm going to play dirty by offering them beer and chocolate during meetings. Some background information: how agonising over the initial CV/cover letter sift helped lead us to bin it off entirely The other day I was agonising about the new university/good degree grade versus poor A-level results issue, and decided to canvas for other opinions to see if there was something I could do that was fairer than my current approach, which is almost always to reject. This generated quite an involved discussion on our Yammer site: I'm sure you can glean a pretty good impression of my own educational prejudices from that discussion as well, although I'm very open to changing my opinion - hopefully you've already figured that out from reading the rest of this post. Hopefully you can also trace a logical path from agonising about sifting to, "Uh, hang on, why on earth are we doing this anyway?!?" Technorati Tags: recruitment,hr,developers,testers,red gate,cv,resume,cover letter,assessment,sea change

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• Render To Texture Using OpenGL is not working but normal rendering works just fine

  - by Franky Rivera

  things I initialize at the beginning of the program I realize not all of these pertain to my issue I just copy and pasted what I had //overall initialized //things openGL related I initialize earlier on in the project glClearColor( 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f ); glClearDepth( 1.0f ); glEnable(GL_ALPHA_TEST); glEnable( GL_STENCIL_TEST ); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc( GL_LEQUAL ); glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE); glFrontFace( GL_CCW ); glEnable(GL_COLOR_MATERIAL); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glHint( GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL_NICEST ); //we also initialize our shader programs //(i added some shader program functions for definitions) //this enum list is else where in code //i figured it would help show you guys more about my //shader compile creation function right under this enum list VVVVVV /*enum eSHADER_ATTRIB_LOCATION { VERTEX_ATTRIB = 0, NORMAL_ATTRIB = 2, COLOR_ATTRIB, COLOR2_ATTRIB, FOG_COORD, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB0 = 8, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB1, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB2, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB3, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB4, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB5, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB6, TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB7 }; */ //if we fail making our shader leave if( !testShader.CreateShader( "SimpleShader.vp", "SimpleShader.fp", 3, VERTEX_ATTRIB, "vVertexPos", NORMAL_ATTRIB, "vNormal", TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB0, "vTexCoord" ) ) return false; if( !testScreenShader.CreateShader( "ScreenShader.vp", "ScreenShader.fp", 3, VERTEX_ATTRIB, "vVertexPos", NORMAL_ATTRIB, "vNormal", TEXTURE_COORD_ATTRIB0, "vTexCoord" ) ) return false; SHADER PROGRAM FUNCTIONS bool CShaderProgram::CreateShader( const char* szVertexShaderName, const char* szFragmentShaderName, ... ) { //here are our handles for the openGL shaders int iGLVertexShaderHandle = -1, iGLFragmentShaderHandle = -1; //get our shader data char *vData = 0, *fData = 0; int vLength = 0, fLength = 0; LoadShaderFile( szVertexShaderName, &vData, &vLength ); LoadShaderFile( szFragmentShaderName, &fData, &fLength ); //data if( !vData ) return false; //data if( !fData ) { delete[] vData; return false; } //create both our shader objects iGLVertexShaderHandle = glCreateShader( GL_VERTEX_SHADER ); iGLFragmentShaderHandle = glCreateShader( GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER ); //well we got this far so we have dynamic data to clean up //load vertex shader glShaderSource( iGLVertexShaderHandle, 1, (const char**)(&vData), &vLength ); //load fragment shader glShaderSource( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, 1, (const char**)(&fData), &fLength ); //we are done with our data delete it delete[] vData; delete[] fData; //compile them both glCompileShader( iGLVertexShaderHandle ); //get shader status int iShaderOk; glGetShaderiv( iGLVertexShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iShaderOk ); if( iShaderOk == GL_FALSE ) { char* buffer; //get what happend with our shader glGetShaderiv( iGLVertexShaderHandle, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &iShaderOk ); buffer = new char[iShaderOk]; glGetShaderInfoLog( iGLVertexShaderHandle, iShaderOk, NULL, buffer ); //sprintf_s( buffer, "Failure Our Object For %s was not created", szFileName ); MessageBoxA( NULL, buffer, szVertexShaderName, MB_OK ); //delete our dynamic data free( buffer ); glDeleteShader(iGLVertexShaderHandle); return false; } glCompileShader( iGLFragmentShaderHandle ); //get shader status glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iShaderOk ); if( iShaderOk == GL_FALSE ) { char* buffer; //get what happend with our shader glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &iShaderOk ); buffer = new char[iShaderOk]; glGetShaderInfoLog( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, iShaderOk, NULL, buffer ); //sprintf_s( buffer, "Failure Our Object For %s was not created", szFileName ); MessageBoxA( NULL, buffer, szFragmentShaderName, MB_OK ); //delete our dynamic data free( buffer ); glDeleteShader(iGLFragmentShaderHandle); return false; } //lets check to see if the fragment shader compiled int iCompiled = 0; glGetShaderiv( iGLVertexShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iCompiled ); if( !iCompiled ) { //this shader did not compile leave return false; } //lets check to see if the fragment shader compiled glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_COMPILE_STATUS, &iCompiled ); if( !iCompiled ) { char* buffer; //get what happend with our shader glGetShaderiv( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, GL_INFO_LOG_LENGTH, &iShaderOk ); buffer = new char[iShaderOk]; glGetShaderInfoLog( iGLFragmentShaderHandle, iShaderOk, NULL, buffer ); //sprintf_s( buffer, "Failure Our Object For %s was not created", szFileName ); MessageBoxA( NULL, buffer, szFragmentShaderName, MB_OK ); //delete our dynamic data free( buffer ); glDeleteShader(iGLFragmentShaderHandle); return false; } //make our new shader program m_iShaderProgramHandle = glCreateProgram(); glAttachShader( m_iShaderProgramHandle, iGLVertexShaderHandle ); glAttachShader( m_iShaderProgramHandle, iGLFragmentShaderHandle ); glLinkProgram( m_iShaderProgramHandle ); int iLinked = 0; glGetProgramiv( m_iShaderProgramHandle, GL_LINK_STATUS, &iLinked ); if( !iLinked ) { //we didn't link return false; } //NOW LETS CREATE ALL OUR HANDLES TO OUR PROPER LIKING //start from this parameter va_list parseList; va_start( parseList, szFragmentShaderName ); //read in number of variables if any unsigned uiNum = 0; uiNum = va_arg( parseList, unsigned ); //for loop through our attribute pairs int enumType = 0; for( unsigned x = 0; x < uiNum; ++x ) { //specify our attribute locations enumType = va_arg( parseList, int ); char* name = va_arg( parseList, char* ); glBindAttribLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, enumType, name ); } //end our list parsing va_end( parseList ); //relink specify //we have custom specified our attribute locations glLinkProgram( m_iShaderProgramHandle ); //fill our handles InitializeHandles( ); //everything went great return true; } void CShaderProgram::InitializeHandles( void ) { m_uihMVP = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mMVP" ); m_uihWorld = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mWorld" ); m_uihView = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mView" ); m_uihProjection = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "mProjection" ); ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //texture handles m_uihDiffuseMap = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "diffuseMap" ); if( m_uihDiffuseMap != -1 ) { //store what texture index this handle will be in the shader glUniform1i( m_uihDiffuseMap, RM_DIFFUSE+GL_TEXTURE0 ); (0)+ } m_uihNormalMap = glGetUniformLocation( m_iShaderProgramHandle, "normalMap" ); if( m_uihNormalMap != -1 ) { //store what texture index this handle will be in the shader glUniform1i( m_uihNormalMap, RM_NORMAL+GL_TEXTURE0 ); (1)+ } } void CShaderProgram::SetDiffuseMap( const unsigned& uihDiffuseMap ) { (0)+ glActiveTexture( RM_DIFFUSE+GL_TEXTURE0 ); glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, uihDiffuseMap ); } void CShaderProgram::SetNormalMap( const unsigned& uihNormalMap ) { (1)+ glActiveTexture( RM_NORMAL+GL_TEXTURE0 ); glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, uihNormalMap ); } //MY 2 TEST SHADERS also my math order is correct it pertains to my matrix ordering in my math library once again i've tested the basic rendering. rendering to the screen works fine ----------------------------------------SIMPLE SHADER------------------------------------- //vertex shader looks like this #version 330 in vec3 vVertexPos; in vec3 vNormal; in vec2 vTexCoord; uniform mat4 mWorld; // Model Matrix uniform mat4 mView; // Camera View Matrix uniform mat4 mProjection;// Camera Projection Matrix out vec2 vTexCoordVary; // Texture coord to the fragment program out vec3 vNormalColor; void main( void ) { //pass the texture coordinate vTexCoordVary = vTexCoord; vNormalColor = vNormal; //calculate our model view projection matrix mat4 mMVP = (( mWorld * mView ) * mProjection ); //result our position gl_Position = vec4( vVertexPos, 1 ) * mMVP; } //fragment shader looks like this #version 330 in vec2 vTexCoordVary; in vec3 vNormalColor; uniform sampler2D diffuseMap; uniform sampler2D normalMap; out vec4 fragColor[2]; void main( void ) { //CORRECT fragColor[0] = texture( normalMap, vTexCoordVary ); fragColor[1] = vec4( vNormalColor, 1.0 ); }; ----------------------------------------SCREEN SHADER------------------------------------- //vertext shader looks like this #version 330 in vec3 vVertexPos; // This is the position of the vertex coming in in vec2 vTexCoord; // This is the texture coordinate.... out vec2 vTexCoordVary; // Texture coord to the fragment program void main( void ) { vTexCoordVary = vTexCoord; //set our position gl_Position = vec4( vVertexPos.xyz, 1.0f ); } //fragment shader looks like this #version 330 in vec2 vTexCoordVary; // Incoming "varying" texture coordinate uniform sampler2D diffuseMap;//the tile detail texture uniform sampler2D normalMap; //the normal map from earlier out vec4 vTheColorOfThePixel; void main( void ) { //CORRECT vTheColorOfThePixel = texture( normalMap, vTexCoordVary ); }; .Class RenderTarget Main Functions //here is my render targets create function bool CRenderTarget::Create( const unsigned uiNumTextures, unsigned uiWidth, unsigned uiHeight, int iInternalFormat, bool bDepthWanted ) { if( uiNumTextures <= 0 ) return false; //generate our variables glGenFramebuffers(1, &m_uifboHandle); // Initialize FBO glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, m_uifboHandle); m_uiNumTextures = uiNumTextures; if( bDepthWanted ) m_uiNumTextures += 1; m_uiTextureHandle = new unsigned int[uiNumTextures]; glGenTextures( uiNumTextures, m_uiTextureHandle ); for( unsigned x = 0; x < uiNumTextures-1; ++x ) { glBindTexture( GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[x]); // Reserve space for our 2D render target glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, iInternalFormat, uiWidth, uiHeight, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, NULL); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0 + x, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[x], 0); } //if we need one for depth testing if( bDepthWanted ) { glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1], 0); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1], 0);*/ // Must attach texture to framebuffer. Has Stencil and depth glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1]); glRenderbufferStorage(GL_RENDERBUFFER, /*GL_DEPTH_STENCIL*/GL_DEPTH24_STENCIL8, TEXTURE_WIDTH, TEXTURE_HEIGHT ); glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_RENDERBUFFER, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1]); glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, GL_RENDERBUFFER, m_uiTextureHandle[uiNumTextures-1]); } glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); //everything went fine return true; } void CRenderTarget::Bind( const int& iTargetAttachmentLoc, const unsigned& uiWhichTexture, const bool bBindFrameBuffer ) { if( bBindFrameBuffer ) glBindFramebuffer( GL_FRAMEBUFFER, m_uifboHandle ); if( uiWhichTexture < m_uiNumTextures ) glFramebufferTexture(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0 + iTargetAttachmentLoc, m_uiTextureHandle[uiWhichTexture], 0); } void CRenderTarget::UnBind( void ) { //default our binding glBindFramebuffer( GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0 ); } //this is all in a test project so here's my straight forward rendering function for testing this render function does basic rendering steps keep in mind i have already tested my textures i have already tested my box thats being rendered all basic rendering works fine its just when i try to render to a texture then display it in a render surface that it does not work. Also I have tested my render surface it is bound exactly to the screen coordinate space void TestRenderSteps( void ) { //Clear the color and the depth glClearColor( 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f ); glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT ); //bind the shader program glUseProgram( testShader.m_iShaderProgramHandle ); //1) grab the vertex buffer related to our rendering glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionNormalTexBuffer().GetBufferHandle() ); //2) how our stream will be split here ( 4 bytes position, ..ext ) CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionNormalTexBuffer().MapVertexStride(); //3) set the index buffer if needed glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, CIndexBuffer::GetInstance()->GetBufferHandle() ); //send the needed information into the shader testShader.SetWorldMatrix( boxPosition ); testShader.SetViewMatrix( Static_Camera.GetView( ) ); testShader.SetProjectionMatrix( Static_Camera.GetProjection( ) ); testShader.SetDiffuseMap( iTextureID ); testShader.SetNormalMap( iTextureID2 ); GLenum buffers[] = { GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1 }; glDrawBuffers(2, buffers); //bind to our render target //RM_DIFFUSE, RM_NORMAL are enums (0 && 1) renderTarget.Bind( RM_DIFFUSE, 1, true ); renderTarget.Bind( RM_NORMAL, 1, false); //false because buffer is already bound //i clear here just to clear the texture to make it a default value of white //by doing this i can see if what im rendering to my screen is just drawing to the screen //or if its my render target defaulted glClearColor( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f ); glClear( GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT ); //i have this box object which i draw testBox.Draw(); //the draw call looks like this //my normal rendering works just fine so i know this draw is fine // glDrawElementsBaseVertex( m_sides[x].GetPrimitiveType(), // m_sides[x].GetPrimitiveCount() * 3, // GL_UNSIGNED_INT, // BUFFER_OFFSET(sizeof(unsigned int) * m_sides[x].GetStartIndex()), // m_sides[x].GetStartVertex( ) ); //we unbind the target back to default renderTarget.UnBind(); //i stop mapping my vertex format CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionNormalTexBuffer().UnMapVertexStride(); //i go back to default in using no shader program glUseProgram( 0 ); //now that everything is drawn to the textures //lets draw our screen surface and pass it our 2 filled out textures //NOW RENDER THE TEXTURES WE COLLECTED TO THE SCREEN QUAD //bind the shader program glUseProgram( testScreenShader.m_iShaderProgramHandle ); //1) grab the vertex buffer related to our rendering glBindBuffer( GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionTexBuffer().GetBufferHandle() ); //2) how our stream will be split here CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionTexBuffer().MapVertexStride(); //3) set the index buffer if needed glBindBuffer( GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, CIndexBuffer::GetInstance()->GetBufferHandle() ); //pass our 2 filled out textures (in the shader im just using the diffuse //i wanted to see if i was rendering anything before i started getting into other techniques testScreenShader.SetDiffuseMap( renderTarget.GetTextureHandle(0) ); //SetDiffuseMap definitions in shader program class testScreenShader.SetNormalMap( renderTarget.GetTextureHandle(1) ); //SetNormalMap definitions in shader program class //DO the draw call drawing our screen rectangle glDrawElementsBaseVertex( m_ScreenRect.GetPrimitiveType(), m_ScreenRect.GetPrimitiveCount() * 3, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, BUFFER_OFFSET(sizeof(unsigned int) * m_ScreenRect.GetStartIndex()), m_ScreenRect.GetStartVertex( ) );*/ //unbind our vertex mapping CVertexBufferManager::GetInstance()->GetPositionTexBuffer().UnMapVertexStride(); //default to no shader program glUseProgram( 0 ); } Last words: 1) I can render my box just fine 2) i can render my screen rect just fine 3) I cannot render my box into a texture then display it into my screen rect 4) This entire project is just a test project I made to test different rendering practices. So excuse any "ugly-ish" unclean code. This was made just on a fly run through when I was trying new test cases.

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• 3D Graphics with XNA Game Studio 4.0 bug in light map?

  - by Eibis

  i'm following the tutorials on 3D Graphics with XNA Game Studio 4.0 and I came up with an horrible effect when I tried to implement the Light Map http://i.stack.imgur.com/BUWvU.jpg this effect shows up when I look towards the center of the house (and it moves with me). it has this shape because I'm using a sphere to represent light; using other light shapes gives different results. I'm using a class PreLightingRenderer: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Dhpoware; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; namespace XNAFirstPersonCamera { public class PrelightingRenderer { // Normal, depth, and light map render targets RenderTarget2D depthTarg; RenderTarget2D normalTarg; RenderTarget2D lightTarg; // Depth/normal effect and light mapping effect Effect depthNormalEffect; Effect lightingEffect; // Point light (sphere) mesh Model lightMesh; // List of models, lights, and the camera public List<CModel> Models { get; set; } public List<PPPointLight> Lights { get; set; } public FirstPersonCamera Camera { get; set; } GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice; int viewWidth = 0, viewHeight = 0; public PrelightingRenderer(GraphicsDevice GraphicsDevice, ContentManager Content) { viewWidth = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width; viewHeight = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height; // Create the three render targets depthTarg = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, viewWidth, viewHeight, false, SurfaceFormat.Single, DepthFormat.Depth24); normalTarg = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, viewWidth, viewHeight, false, SurfaceFormat.Color, DepthFormat.Depth24); lightTarg = new RenderTarget2D(GraphicsDevice, viewWidth, viewHeight, false, SurfaceFormat.Color, DepthFormat.Depth24); // Load effects depthNormalEffect = Content.Load<Effect>(@"Effects\PPDepthNormal"); lightingEffect = Content.Load<Effect>(@"Effects\PPLight"); // Set effect parameters to light mapping effect lightingEffect.Parameters["viewportWidth"].SetValue(viewWidth); lightingEffect.Parameters["viewportHeight"].SetValue(viewHeight); // Load point light mesh and set light mapping effect to it lightMesh = Content.Load<Model>(@"Models\PPLightMesh"); lightMesh.Meshes[0].MeshParts[0].Effect = lightingEffect; this.graphicsDevice = GraphicsDevice; } public void Draw() { drawDepthNormalMap(); drawLightMap(); prepareMainPass(); } void drawDepthNormalMap() { // Set the render targets to 'slots' 1 and 2 graphicsDevice.SetRenderTargets(normalTarg, depthTarg); // Clear the render target to 1 (infinite depth) graphicsDevice.Clear(Color.White); // Draw each model with the PPDepthNormal effect foreach (CModel model in Models) { model.CacheEffects(); model.SetModelEffect(depthNormalEffect, false); model.Draw(Camera.ViewMatrix, Camera.ProjectionMatrix, Camera.Position); model.RestoreEffects(); } // Un-set the render targets graphicsDevice.SetRenderTargets(null); } void drawLightMap() { // Set the depth and normal map info to the effect lightingEffect.Parameters["DepthTexture"].SetValue(depthTarg); lightingEffect.Parameters["NormalTexture"].SetValue(normalTarg); // Calculate the view * projection matrix Matrix viewProjection = Camera.ViewMatrix * Camera.ProjectionMatrix; // Set the inverse of the view * projection matrix to the effect Matrix invViewProjection = Matrix.Invert(viewProjection); lightingEffect.Parameters["InvViewProjection"].SetValue(invViewProjection); // Set the render target to the graphics device graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(lightTarg); // Clear the render target to black (no light) graphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); // Set render states to additive (lights will add their influences) graphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Additive; graphicsDevice.DepthStencilState = DepthStencilState.None; foreach (PPPointLight light in Lights) { // Set the light's parameters to the effect light.SetEffectParameters(lightingEffect); // Calculate the world * view * projection matrix and set it to // the effect Matrix wvp = (Matrix.CreateScale(light.Attenuation) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(light.Position)) * viewProjection; lightingEffect.Parameters["WorldViewProjection"].SetValue(wvp); // Determine the distance between the light and camera float dist = Vector3.Distance(Camera.Position, light.Position); // If the camera is inside the light-sphere, invert the cull mode // to draw the inside of the sphere instead of the outside if (dist < light.Attenuation) graphicsDevice.RasterizerState = RasterizerState.CullClockwise; // Draw the point-light-sphere lightMesh.Meshes[0].Draw(); // Revert the cull mode graphicsDevice.RasterizerState = RasterizerState.CullCounterClockwise; } // Revert the blending and depth render states graphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque; graphicsDevice.DepthStencilState = DepthStencilState.Default; // Un-set the render target graphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); } void prepareMainPass() { foreach (CModel model in Models) foreach (ModelMesh mesh in model.Model.Meshes) foreach (ModelMeshPart part in mesh.MeshParts) { // Set the light map and viewport parameters to each model's effect if (part.Effect.Parameters["LightTexture"] != null) part.Effect.Parameters["LightTexture"].SetValue(lightTarg); if (part.Effect.Parameters["viewportWidth"] != null) part.Effect.Parameters["viewportWidth"].SetValue(viewWidth); if (part.Effect.Parameters["viewportHeight"] != null) part.Effect.Parameters["viewportHeight"].SetValue(viewHeight); } } } } that uses three effect: PPDepthNormal.fx float4x4 World; float4x4 View; float4x4 Projection; struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float3 Normal : NORMAL0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 Depth : TEXCOORD0; float3 Normal : TEXCOORD1; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; float4x4 viewProjection = mul(View, Projection); float4x4 worldViewProjection = mul(World, viewProjection); output.Position = mul(input.Position, worldViewProjection); output.Normal = mul(input.Normal, World); // Position's z and w components correspond to the distance // from camera and distance of the far plane respectively output.Depth.xy = output.Position.zw; return output; } // We render to two targets simultaneously, so we can't // simply return a float4 from the pixel shader struct PixelShaderOutput { float4 Normal : COLOR0; float4 Depth : COLOR1; }; PixelShaderOutput PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) { PixelShaderOutput output; // Depth is stored as distance from camera / far plane distance // to get value between 0 and 1 output.Depth = input.Depth.x / input.Depth.y; // Normal map simply stores X, Y and Z components of normal // shifted from (-1 to 1) range to (0 to 1) range output.Normal.xyz = (normalize(input.Normal).xyz / 2) + .5; // Other components must be initialized to compile output.Depth.a = 1; output.Normal.a = 1; return output; } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } PPLight.fx float4x4 WorldViewProjection; float4x4 InvViewProjection; texture2D DepthTexture; texture2D NormalTexture; sampler2D depthSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; sampler2D normalSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; float3 LightColor; float3 LightPosition; float LightAttenuation; // Include shared functions #include "PPShared.vsi" struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float4 LightPosition : TEXCOORD0; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; output.Position = mul(input.Position, WorldViewProjection); output.LightPosition = output.Position; return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { // Find the pixel coordinates of the input position in the depth // and normal textures float2 texCoord = postProjToScreen(input.LightPosition) + halfPixel(); // Extract the depth for this pixel from the depth map float4 depth = tex2D(depthSampler, texCoord); // Recreate the position with the UV coordinates and depth value float4 position; position.x = texCoord.x * 2 - 1; position.y = (1 - texCoord.y) * 2 - 1; position.z = depth.r; position.w = 1.0f; // Transform position from screen space to world space position = mul(position, InvViewProjection); position.xyz /= position.w; // Extract the normal from the normal map and move from // 0 to 1 range to -1 to 1 range float4 normal = (tex2D(normalSampler, texCoord) - .5) * 2; // Perform the lighting calculations for a point light float3 lightDirection = normalize(LightPosition - position); float lighting = clamp(dot(normal, lightDirection), 0, 1); // Attenuate the light to simulate a point light float d = distance(LightPosition, position); float att = 1 - pow(d / LightAttenuation, 6); return float4(LightColor * lighting * att, 1); } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } PPShared.vsi has some common functions: float viewportWidth; float viewportHeight; // Calculate the 2D screen position of a 3D position float2 postProjToScreen(float4 position) { float2 screenPos = position.xy / position.w; return 0.5f * (float2(screenPos.x, -screenPos.y) + 1); } // Calculate the size of one half of a pixel, to convert // between texels and pixels float2 halfPixel() { return 0.5f / float2(viewportWidth, viewportHeight); } and finally from the Game class I set up in LoadContent with: effect = Content.Load(@"Effects\PPModel"); models[0] = new CModel(Content.Load(@"Models\teapot"), new Vector3(-50, 80, 0), new Vector3(0, 0, 0), 1f, Content.Load(@"Textures\prova_texture_autocad"), GraphicsDevice); house = new CModel(Content.Load(@"Models\house"), new Vector3(0, 0, 0), new Vector3((float)-Math.PI / 2, 0, 0), 35.0f, Content.Load(@"Textures\prova_texture_autocad"), GraphicsDevice); models[0].SetModelEffect(effect, true); house.SetModelEffect(effect, true); renderer = new PrelightingRenderer(GraphicsDevice, Content); renderer.Models = new List(); renderer.Models.Add(house); renderer.Models.Add(models[0]); renderer.Lights = new List() { new PPPointLight(new Vector3(0, 120, 0), Color.White * .85f, 2000) }; where PPModel.fx is: float4x4 World; float4x4 View; float4x4 Projection; texture2D BasicTexture; sampler2D basicTextureSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; addressU = wrap; addressV = wrap; minfilter = anisotropic; magfilter = anisotropic; mipfilter = linear; }; bool TextureEnabled = true; texture2D LightTexture; sampler2D lightSampler = sampler_state { texture = ; minfilter = point; magfilter = point; mipfilter = point; }; float3 AmbientColor = float3(0.15, 0.15, 0.15); float3 DiffuseColor; #include "PPShared.vsi" struct VertexShaderInput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 UV : TEXCOORD0; }; struct VertexShaderOutput { float4 Position : POSITION0; float2 UV : TEXCOORD0; float4 PositionCopy : TEXCOORD1; }; VertexShaderOutput VertexShaderFunction(VertexShaderInput input) { VertexShaderOutput output; float4x4 worldViewProjection = mul(World, mul(View, Projection)); output.Position = mul(input.Position, worldViewProjection); output.PositionCopy = output.Position; output.UV = input.UV; return output; } float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0 { // Sample model's texture float3 basicTexture = tex2D(basicTextureSampler, input.UV); if (!TextureEnabled) basicTexture = float4(1, 1, 1, 1); // Extract lighting value from light map float2 texCoord = postProjToScreen(input.PositionCopy) + halfPixel(); float3 light = tex2D(lightSampler, texCoord); light += AmbientColor; return float4(basicTexture * DiffuseColor * light, 1); } technique Technique1 { pass Pass1 { VertexShader = compile vs_1_1 VertexShaderFunction(); PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PixelShaderFunction(); } } I don't have any idea on what's wrong... googling the web I found that this tutorial may have some bug but I don't know if it's the LightModel fault (the sphere) or in a shader or in the class PrelightingRenderer. Any help is very appreciated, thank you for reading!

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• Android - Emulator internet access

  - by teepusink

  Hi, I've been using this method to gain access to internet from my Android emulator emulator -http-proxy < -avd < It works but is that the best way to do it? It just doesn't feel right that I need to open the emulator from command line and can't just do it from Eclipse or something. Can't seem to find an internet option on the "AVD Manager" either. Thanks, Tee

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• Invalid or expired security context token in WCF web service

  - by Damian

  All, I have a WCF web service (let's called service "B") hosted under IIS using a service account (VM, Windows 2003 SP2). The service exposes an endpoint that use WSHttpBinding with the default values except for maxReceivedMessageSize, maxBufferPoolSize, maxBufferSize and some of the time outs that have been increased. The web service has been load tested using Visual Studio Load Test framework with around 800 concurrent users and successfully passed all tests with no exceptions being thrown. The proxy in the unit test has been created from configuration. There is a sharepoint application that use the Office Sharepoint Server Search service to call web services "A" and "B". The application will get data from service "A" to create a request that will be sent to service "B". The response coming from service "B" is indexed for search. The proxy is created programmatically using the ChannelFactory. When service "A" takes less than 10 minutes, the calls to service "B" are successfull. But when service "A" takes more time (~20 minutes) the calls to service "B" throw the following exception: Exception Message: An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party. See the inner FaultException for the fault code and detail Inner Exception Message: The message could not be processed. This is most likely because the action 'namespace/OperationName' is incorrect or because the message contains an invalid or expired security context token or because there is a mismatch between bindings. The security context token would be invalid if the service aborted the channel due to inactivity. To prevent the service from aborting idle sessions prematurely increase the Receive timeout on the service endpoint's binding. The binding settings are the same, the time in both client server and web service server are synchronize with the Windows Time service, same time zone. When i look at the server where web service "B" is hosted i can see the following security errors being logged: Source: Security Category: Logon/Logoff Event ID: 537 User NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Logon Failure: Reason: An error occurred during logon Logon Type: 3 Logon Process: Kerberos Authentication Package: Kerberos Status code: 0xC000006D Substatus code: 0xC0000133 After reading some of the blogs online, the Status code means STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE and the substatus code means STATUS_TIME_DIFFERENCE_AT_DC. but i already checked both server and client clocks and they are syncronized. I also noticed that the security token seems to be cached somewhere in the client server because they have another process that calls the web service "B" using the same service account and successfully gets data the first time is called. Then they start the proccess to update the office sharepoint server search service indexes and it fails. Then if they called the first proccess again it will fail too. Has anyone experienced this type of problems or have any ideas? Regards, --Damian

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• How and where to implement basic authentication in Kibana 3

  - by Jabb

  I have put my elasticsearch server behind a Apache reverse proxy that provides basic authentication. Authenticating to Apache directly from the browser works fine. However, when I use Kibana 3 to access the server, I receive authentication errors. Obviously because no auth headers are sent along with Kibana's Ajax calls. I added the below to elastic-angular-client.js in the Kibana vendor directory to implement authentication quick and dirty. But for some reason it does not work. $http.defaults.headers.common.Authorization = 'Basic ' + Base64Encode('user:Password'); What is the best approach and place to implement basic authentication in Kibana? /*! elastic.js - v1.1.1 - 2013-05-24 * https://github.com/fullscale/elastic.js * Copyright (c) 2013 FullScale Labs, LLC; Licensed MIT */ /*jshint browser:true */ /*global angular:true */ 'use strict'; /* Angular.js service wrapping the elastic.js API. This module can simply be injected into your angular controllers. */ angular.module('elasticjs.service', []) .factory('ejsResource', ['$http', function ($http) { return function (config) { var // use existing ejs object if it exists ejs = window.ejs || {}, /* results are returned as a promise */ promiseThen = function (httpPromise, successcb, errorcb) { return httpPromise.then(function (response) { (successcb || angular.noop)(response.data); return response.data; }, function (response) { (errorcb || angular.noop)(response.data); return response.data; }); }; // check if we have a config object // if not, we have the server url so // we convert it to a config object if (config !== Object(config)) { config = {server: config}; } // set url to empty string if it was not specified if (config.server == null) { config.server = ''; } /* implement the elastic.js client interface for angular */ ejs.client = { server: function (s) { if (s == null) { return config.server; } config.server = s; return this; }, post: function (path, data, successcb, errorcb) { $http.defaults.headers.common.Authorization = 'Basic ' + Base64Encode('user:Password'); console.log($http.defaults.headers); path = config.server + path; var reqConfig = {url: path, data: data, method: 'POST'}; return promiseThen($http(angular.extend(reqConfig, config)), successcb, errorcb); }, get: function (path, data, successcb, errorcb) { $http.defaults.headers.common.Authorization = 'Basic ' + Base64Encode('user:Password'); path = config.server + path; // no body on get request, data will be request params var reqConfig = {url: path, params: data, method: 'GET'}; return promiseThen($http(angular.extend(reqConfig, config)), successcb, errorcb); }, put: function (path, data, successcb, errorcb) { $http.defaults.headers.common.Authorization = 'Basic ' + Base64Encode('user:Password'); path = config.server + path; var reqConfig = {url: path, data: data, method: 'PUT'}; return promiseThen($http(angular.extend(reqConfig, config)), successcb, errorcb); }, del: function (path, data, successcb, errorcb) { $http.defaults.headers.common.Authorization = 'Basic ' + Base64Encode('user:Password'); path = config.server + path; var reqConfig = {url: path, data: data, method: 'DELETE'}; return promiseThen($http(angular.extend(reqConfig, config)), successcb, errorcb); }, head: function (path, data, successcb, errorcb) { $http.defaults.headers.common.Authorization = 'Basic ' + Base64Encode('user:Password'); path = config.server + path; // no body on HEAD request, data will be request params var reqConfig = {url: path, params: data, method: 'HEAD'}; return $http(angular.extend(reqConfig, config)) .then(function (response) { (successcb || angular.noop)(response.headers()); return response.headers(); }, function (response) { (errorcb || angular.noop)(undefined); return undefined; }); } }; return ejs; }; }]); UPDATE 1: I implemented Matts suggestion. However, the server returns a weird response. It seems that the authorization header is not working. Could it have to do with the fact, that I am running Kibana on port 81 and elasticsearch on 8181? OPTIONS /solar_vendor/_search HTTP/1.1 Host: 46.252.46.173:8181 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Origin: http://46.252.46.173:81 Access-Control-Request-Method: POST Access-Control-Request-Headers: authorization,content-type Connection: keep-alive Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache This is the response HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 23:47:02 GMT WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Username/Password" Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 346 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 UPDATE 2: Updated all instances with the modified headers in these Kibana files root@localhost:/var/www/kibana# grep -r 'ejsResource(' . ./src/app/controllers/dash.js: $scope.ejs = ejsResource({server: config.elasticsearch, headers: {'Access-Control-Request-Headers': 'Accept, Origin, Authorization', 'Authorization': 'Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=='}}); ./src/app/services/querySrv.js: var ejs = ejsResource({server: config.elasticsearch, headers: {'Access-Control-Request-Headers': 'Accept, Origin, Authorization', 'Authorization': 'Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=='}}); ./src/app/services/filterSrv.js: var ejs = ejsResource({server: config.elasticsearch, headers: {'Access-Control-Request-Headers': 'Accept, Origin, Authorization', 'Authorization': 'Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=='}}); ./src/app/services/dashboard.js: var ejs = ejsResource({server: config.elasticsearch, headers: {'Access-Control-Request-Headers': 'Accept, Origin, Authorization', 'Authorization': 'Basic XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX=='}}); And modified my vhost conf for the reverse proxy like this <VirtualHost *:8181> ProxyRequests Off ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:9200/ ProxyPassReverse / https://127.0.0.1:9200/ <Location /> Order deny,allow Allow from all AuthType Basic AuthName “Username/Password” AuthUserFile /var/www/cake2.2.4/.htpasswd Require valid-user Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, PUT" Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Content-Type, X-Requested-With, X-HTTP-Method-Override, Origin, Accept, Authorization" Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true" Header always set Cache-Control "max-age=0" Header always set Access-Control-Allow-Origin * </Location> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log </VirtualHost> Apache sends back the new response headers but the request header still seems to be wrong somewhere. Authentication just doesn't work. Request Headers OPTIONS /solar_vendor/_search HTTP/1.1 Host: 46.252.26.173:8181 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: de-de,de;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Origin: http://46.252.26.173:81 Access-Control-Request-Method: POST Access-Control-Request-Headers: authorization,content-type Connection: keep-alive Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache Response Headers HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 08:48:48 GMT Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, DELETE, OPTIONS, PUT Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type, X-Requested-With, X-HTTP-Method-Override, Origin, Accept, Authorization Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true Cache-Control: max-age=0 Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Username/Password" Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 346 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 SOLUTION: After doing some more research, I found out that this is definitely a configuration issue with regard to CORS. There are quite a few posts available regarding that topic but it appears that in order to solve my problem, it would be necessary to to make some very granular configurations on apache and also make sure that the right stuff is sent from the browser. So I reconsidered the strategy and found a much simpler solution. Just modify the vhost reverse proxy config to move the elastisearch server AND kibana on the same http port. This also adds even better security to Kibana. This is what I did: <VirtualHost *:8181> ProxyRequests Off ProxyPass /bigdatadesk/ http://127.0.0.1:81/bigdatadesk/src/ ProxyPassReverse /bigdatadesk/ http://127.0.0.1:81/bigdatadesk/src/ ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:9200/ ProxyPassReverse / https://127.0.0.1:9200/ <Location /> Order deny,allow Allow from all AuthType Basic AuthName “Username/Password” AuthUserFile /var/www/.htpasswd Require valid-user </Location> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log </VirtualHost>

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• Invoking a WCF service using claims based authentication

  - by ashwnacharya

  I have a WCF service deployed in a server machine. We are using claims based authentication to authenticate the WCF service caller. The WCF service is restricted by using IIS Authorization rules. How do I programmatically invoke the WCF service using .NET? The client app uses a proxy generated using SVCUtil. calling the service reads the credentials from a configuration file (not the app.config file, in fact the client application does not have a *.config file).

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• Conceptually how does load-balancing on the EJB tier work in Glassfish/any ejb container

  - by Benju

  I am wondering conceptually how load-balancing works on the EJB-level (not web session replication) with Java EE containers like Glassfish. From what I have gleaned your remote interface is a proxy that delegates your call to one of many servers you may have in an environment. If things fail are they supposed to be able to "finish" on another server? I want to understand the basic theory behind this load balancing, why is it better than a bunch of servers all running a plain web application with session affinity on a load-balancer?

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• How to enable HTTPS monitoring in FiddlerCore WITHOUT decrypting SSL

  - by Alex Skorohod

  Hi, I need to be able to monitor all requests (HTTP & HTTPS) going out of IE. I am only interested in the headers and the cookies, so that I don't need to decrypt the SSL encrypted body. But I don't see a way of setting FiddlerCore as a proxy for HTTPS without enabling decryptSSL. Thanks, Alex

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• .Net Intermittent System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHeaderException

  - by ScottE

  We have a .net 3.5 web app that consumes third party web services. The proxy was created by adding a web reference to their wsdl. This proxy is not compiled. Our error logging is picking up frequent but intermittent exceptions: An exception of type 'System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHeaderException' occurred and was caught If I follow the url to the page that generated the exception, I can't recreate it. Edit: Here is most of the exception - where it bubbled up from Message : Internal Error Type : System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHeaderException, System.Web.Services, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Source : System.Web.Services Help link : Actor : Code : http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/:Client Detail : Lang : Node : Role : SubCode : Data : System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal TargetSite : System.Object[] ReadResponse(System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapClientMessage, System.Net.WebResponse, System.IO.Stream, Boolean) Stack Trace : at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall) at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters) at Vendor.getSearch(getSearchRequest getSearchRequest) in c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\be43c34e\b09edc7e\App_WebReferences.pww-cf-q.0.cs:line 73 Edit 2: Inner exceptions: I sometimes get the following inner exceptions logged: Message : Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. Type : System.IO.IOException, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Source : System Help link : Data : System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal TargetSite : Int32 Read(Byte[], Int32, Int32) Stack Trace : at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size) at System.Net.FixedSizeReader.ReadPacket(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count) at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartReceiveBlob(Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest) at System.Net.Security.SslState.CheckCompletionBeforeNextReceive(ProtocolToken message, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest) at System.Net.Security.SslState.StartSendBlob(Byte[] incoming, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest) at System.Net.Security.SslState.ForceAuthentication(Boolean receiveFirst, Byte[] buffer, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest) at System.Net.Security.SslState.ProcessAuthentication(LazyAsyncResult lazyResult) at System.Net.TlsStream.CallProcessAuthentication(Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.runTryCode(Object userData) at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RuntimeHelpers.ExecuteCodeWithGuaranteedCleanup(TryCode code, CleanupCode backoutCode, Object userData) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Net.TlsStream.ProcessAuthentication(LazyAsyncResult result) at System.Net.TlsStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size) at System.Net.PooledStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size) at System.Net.ConnectStream.WriteHeaders(Boolean async) And/Or: Message : An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host Type : System.Net.Sockets.SocketException, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Source : System Help link : ErrorCode : 10054 SocketErrorCode : ConnectionReset NativeErrorCode : 10054 Data : System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal TargetSite : Int32 Receive(Byte[], Int32, Int32, System.Net.Sockets.SocketFlags) Stack Trace : at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Receive(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size, SocketFlags socketFlags) at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Read(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size) Update We're still working on it. Originally there was a route issue, which was resolved. We're still getting the inner exception with socket errors. We had MS support involved today, and they looked at some traces and network captures. The web service host does round-robin DNS, and they may be responding on a different IP address for the syn syn/ack from one ip, and the next from a different ip. This is not good. This is likely quite specific to our situation, but perhaps it applies to others as well. Microsoft Network Monitor and an application trace got us the information we needed.

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• DefaultNetworkCredentials or DefaultCredentials

  - by dr. evil

  Which one am I supposed to use when I need to supply a credential to a proxy (local or in Network)? What's the exact difference between these two?

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• WCF client and non-wcf client

  - by Lijo

  Hi, Could you please tell what is the difference between a WCF client and a non-WCF client? When I generate proxy of a WCF service using svcutil and put that in client, what is created - wcf client or non-wcf client? When should I use WCF client and non-WCF Client? Thanks Lijo

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• How to add manytomany field to flatpage admin

  - by valya

  Hello! I have a site with Flatpages, and now I need to be able to add galleries (Gallery model) to the page. This is going to be ManyToManyField, so there is no need to change the flatpages table. But I still can't define ManyToManyField in proxy class. I can define ManyToManyField in Gallery model, but it isn't comfortable for the client. How can I change FlatPage Admin to add a ManyToManyField from Galleries model?

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• Question on the "ListenBackLog" parameter in WCF netTcpBinding.

  - by yossi1981

  According to msdn this parameter means: controls the maximum number of queued connection requests that can be pending for a Web service. Does this parameter have any influence when used in a autogenerated WCF client proxy. (the one that created with svcutil....)

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• Extend linq-to-sql partial class to avoid writing a property?

  - by Curtis White

  I have a linq-to-sql class. I have a property "Password" for which I want to call the underlying ASP.NET Membership provider. Thus, I do not want this property written out directly but via my own code. I basically want to create a facade/proxy for this property such that I may use the underlying membership provider or a custom stored procedure. I want to accomplish without modifying the LINQ-TO-SQL designer generated code, if at all possible.

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• gdata and Silverlight (crossdomain.xml)

  - by Larsi

  Hi! I'd like to access the the google calendar api from a Silverlight client. Problem is that there's no crossdomain or clientaccesspolicy that allows calls from my client at www.google.com/crossdomain.xml Question is: Will a call from a SL running out of browser, and in full trust still be classified as a crossdomain call? Are there any other ways to access the gdata from my SL client? (other than using the server as a proxy) Regards Larsi

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• ipv4.fiddler, how does it work?

  - by Daniel

  I'm curious as to how fiddler is able to capture traffic when you use the URL ipv4.fiddler. Is ipv4 a special domain that resolves local and fiddler just registers with http.sys to proxy the call? Any insight would be great.

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• WebClient security error when accessing the world of warcraft armoury

  - by user348446

  Hello World, I am trying to piece together a solution to a problem. Basically I am using Silverlight 4 with C# 4.0 to access the world of warcraft armoury. If anyone has done this - please oh please provide the working .net 4.0 code. The code I am attempting to run is (e.Error contains a securtiy error): private void button10_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { string url = @"http://eu.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Eonar&n=Gifted and Talented"; WebClient wc = new WebClient(); // HOW DO I ADD A USER AGENT STRING (RESPONSE MAY VARY (I.E. HTML VS XML) IF PAGE THINKS CALL IS NOT CAPABABLE OF SUPPORTING XML TRANSFORMATIONS) //wc.ResponseHeaders["User-Agent"] = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)"; wc.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(wc_DownloadStringCompleted); wc.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(url)); } void wc_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e) { if (e.Error == null) { string result = e.Result; XDocument ArmouryXML = XDocument.Parse(result); ShowGuildies(ArmouryXML); } else { MessageBox.Show("Something is complaining about security but not sure what!"); } } Notes: C# 4.0 The armoury is an XML file - but i believe it reverts to html should the request not be from a browser that supports XML transformation. But i don't think I am getting this far. The armoury has a cross domain policy file on it - this may be the cause of the error (not sure! I have uploaded to a production server I am testing it locally using IIS website I am going insane! Websites have made the suggestion that this problem can be overcome by creating a WebProxy - but I haven't the first clue how to do this. It would be great if someone could take on this challenge and show us all that it is possible. I'd prefer a non-proxy solution first, then try a proxy. The error details: e.Error = {System.Security.SecurityException --- System.Security.SecurityException: Security error. at System.Net.Browser.BrowserHttpWebRequest.InternalEndGetResponse(IAsyncResult asyncResult) at System.Net.Browser.BrowserHttpWebRequest.<c__DisplayClass5. Any intelligent master coders out there who can solve this in their sleep? Thanks if you can! Pass this on to someone who can if you can't. If you know someone who can't, don't pass it to them, but if you know someone can't then presumedly you know how to solve it and would encourage you to give it a go! Cheers! Dan.

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• Richtextbox wpf binding

  - by Alex Maker

  To do DataBinding of the Document in a WPF RichtextBox, I saw 2 Solutions so far, which are to derive from the RichtextBox and add a DependencyProperty, and also the solution with a "proxy". Neither the first or the second are satisfactory. Does somebody know another solution, or instead, a commercial RTF control which is capable of DataBinding? The normal Textbox ist not an alternative, since we need text formating. Any idea?

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• Automation : Selenium iphone(Mobile) Driver To Capture Network using Xcode iPhone Simulator

  - by Sandeep

  I am using Xcode iPhone(Mobile) simulator to run Selenium iPhone WebDriver Automation scripts for mobile Websites. Is there anyway to capture Network-Traffic on iPhone simulator similar to Selenium RC Network capture or BrowserMob Proxy for Web Driver. Please let me know if you know way to capture Network traffic on iPhone simulator programmatically. I do see some tools like Wireshark or HTTPScoop to capture network traffic but I need in a pro grammatical way to automate. I need this scenario for pixel tracking. Thanks Sandeep

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• WCF Timeout issue - should there even be a socket connection?

  - by stiank81

  I have a .Net application which is split into a client and server side. The communication between them is handled using WCF. I'm not using the automagic service references, but instead I've built the connection manually like described in the Screencast by Miguel Castro. Summarized this means that I create a console application on the server side that holds ServiceHost objects for the different services: var myServiceHost = new System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost(typeof(MyService), new Uri("net.tcp://localhost:8002")); myServiceHost.Open(); And on the client side I have service proxies creating channels using the ChannelFactory: IMyService proxy = new ChannelFactory<IMyService>("MyServiceEndpoint").CreateChannel(); The client and server side share the service contract defined in the interface IMyService. And another advantage is that I get minimal App.config files - without all the autogenerated stuff created through the Service References. Example from client side: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <client> <endpoint address="net.tcp://localhost:8002/MyEndpoint" binding="netTcpBinding" contract="IMyService" name="MyServiceEndpoint"/> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> So - to my problem. I create the proxy once, and it holds a channel all the way through the application. However, if I leave the application without use for a few minutes the channel has timed out, and I get the following exception: The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a receive timeout being exceeded by the remote host, or an underlying network resource issue. Local socket timeout was '00:00:59.9979998'. How do I prevent this? I'm assuming I need to specify a higher timeout in my configuration? But I don't want it to ever time out. But on the other hand - I don't want a socket connection! Do I need one? Thought I could go connection less with WCF... What's the permanent solution and best practice on solving this? Set timeout to "never".. Create a new channel for each request? I'm assuming there is some overhead creating the channel?.. Increase the timeout to e.g. 5minutes and create new channel if the connection did timeout? Make it connection less somehow? (Without the overhead of creating channels..) Something else...

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• Packing jQuery plugin - jFeed

  - by David Neale

  I have a modified version of the jFeed plugin and now want to pack the four source files. There is a Makefile and some perl scripts in the download but I don't know how to use them. This is the file structure: \Makefile \proxy.php \src\jatom.js \src\jfeed.js \src\jfeeditem.js \src\jrss.js \build\packer\jsPacker.pl \build\packer\Pack.pm \build\packer\ParseMaster.pm

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