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• Platform Builder: Cloning – the Linker is your Friend

  - by Bruce Eitman

  I was tasked this week with making a minor change to NetMsgBox() behavior. NetMsgBox() is a little function in NETUI that handles MessageBox() for the Network User Interface.  The obvious solution is to clone the entire NETUI directory from Public\Common\Oak\Drivers (see Platform Builder: Clone Public Code for more on cloning). If you haven’t already, take a minute to look in that folder. There are a lot of files in the folder, but I only needed to modify one function in one of those files. There must be a better way. Enter the linker. Instead of cloning the entire folder, here is what I did: Create a new folder in my Platform named NETUI (but the name isn’t important) Copy the C file that I needed to modify to the new folder, in this case netui.c Copy a makefile from one of the other folder (really they are all the same) Run Sysgen_capture Open a build window (see Platform Builder: Build Tools, Opening a Build Window) Change directories to the new folder Run “Sysgen_capture netui” Rename sources.netui to sources Add the C file to sources as SOURCES=netui.c Modify the code Build the code Done That is it, the functions from my new folder now replace the functions from the Public code and link with the rest to create NETUI.dll. There is a catches. If you remove any of the functions from the C file, linking will fail because the remaining functions will be found twice.   Copyright © 2010 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

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• Letter to Ballmer: Making Better Consumer Devices

  - by andrewbrust

  Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back.  The email contained a scan of a column I wrote praising Microsoft’s BI strategy.  His reply contained three simple words: “Super nice  thanks.” Well, now I’d like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher.  But I’m still super earnest. The past two days have been eventful ones for Microsoft: The company announced the departure of company veterans Robbie Bach and J Allard and the market announced Apple is now besting Microsoft in market capitalization. Plus, announcements were made that make it plain that Ballmer will, in effect, be running Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division himself. With that in mind, I’d like to offer my list of a dozen things I think Microsoft’s CEO should do to improve that division’s offerings and, hopefully, its bottom line. So here goes:   1. On Windows Phone 7, Stay the Course The press is teeming with headlines and reader comments proclaiming the death-before-arrival of Windows Phone 7.  That’s plain silly.  You’ve got the makings of a great and unique SmartPhone platform, and you’re the only company (even considering RIM) that can offer full fidelity Exchange integration, not to mention implementing Office on the device.  Let the existing team finish this puppy and ship it. And then have them pump out a few updates, over-the-air, quickly.  Show them that Google Android’s not the only product that can do good, rapid dot releases. And another thing: make sure your OEMs’ devices have flawless touch screens.  If they don’t, then you shouldn’t certify them for delivery to customers.  Period. Oh, and kill the Kin, quietly.  It was DOA, and you know it.   2. Move Media Center to the Xbox Platform Media Center is, at its core, a good product.  But delivering a media distribution and DVR platform on a sophisticated PC operating system like Windows 7 just creates too many moving parts.  Xbox already functions as the best Media Center extender device – it should actually be the hub as well. Media Center is mostly based on .NET code – and XNA is a .NET environment for Xbox – find a way to bridge that small gap and make Media Center a joy to work with instead of a frustration.  Beating Apple TV out of this sub-market is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree (goofy pun, but it’s true).   3. Integrate Media Center with Mediaroom, or Kill the Latter You have two media products with almost identical names.  One is for standalone DVRs and the other is for IPTV cable set tops with DVR capabilities.  Can we merge these please?  My previous request of putting Media Center on Xbox would seem to tie into this nicely, since you’ve announced plans to do that with Mediaroom already.   4. Fix the Red Ring of Death People love the Xbox, but they really don’t love sending their consoles back every 18-24 months, when they get a bunch of red lights flashing on power up.  You’ve handled this defect about as gracefully as possible, but it’s been around for a long time now and it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.  You can do better.  In fact, you must do better, or you insult your customers.   5. Add Blu Ray to Xbox I know, streaming movies are the future; physical media is legacy technology.  So if that’s true, why did you back HD DVD so hard?  You know why: for now, the film studios won’t allow a large selection of new release, HD, surround sound content be distributed on any medium other than Blu Ray or cable pay per view/on-demand.  Don’t you want home theater buffs to see the Xbox as a fantastic device for their rigs?  Don’t you want to put PlayStation 3 out of its misery?  And if you follow my suggestions above (move Media Center to the Xbox and fix the Red Ring problem), you’d have it all sewn up.  Do I think Blu Ray functionality will move a lot of units?  No.  Do I think that it would move more units with desperately needed influential home theater consumers?  You bet.  And you might sell more ZunePass subscriptions in the process. But while you’re at it, make the fan quieter, please.   6. Make More of Windows Home Server Home Server is a fantastic product.  And for reasons unknown to me, it seems like you’re letting it languish.  Development of the add-in ecosystem seems underfunded.  WHS’ unparalleled ease of use and reliability for home PC backup (and emergency restores) goes unsung.  Product cycles are slow.  Support for your OEMs, who are doing great work, especially in the green space with Atom CPUs, seems lacking.  You’ve married a trophy girl and you keep her cloistered at home!  That’s cruel, unusual and, um, incredibly ill-advised.  Make use of this ace card, and while you’re at it, give it real integration with Media Center.  The integration thus far proof-of-concept quality.  You should go way past that – both products will benefit immeasurably.   7. Set Up a Partner Platform for Custom Installers There’s a whole sub-industry of companies that install, integrate and configure home theater, security and connected home products.  They have an industry group. They are influential in the high-end of the consumer electronics industry, and so are their customers.  They love Media Center and they love Windows Home Server.  But I have talked to several of them at the Consumer Electronics Show and they tell me you don’t love them.  They find it very difficult to do business with Microsoft, even though they want nothing more than to sell and evangelize your platform.  This is a travesty.  Please fix it.  Get Allison Watson and the Microsoft Partner Network on board and have her hire someone who knows how to run a channel program for consumer electronics companies.  Problem solved.  Markets expanded.   8. Make Your Own Hardware In other areas, I know you love your partners.  I help run one, so I appreciate that.  But when it came to Xbox and Zune you built them it yourself (albeit on a contract basis, which is fine).  Windows Phone 7 has a chance to work as an OEM play, but it would work better if you produced the devices.  At least consider building a reference device that sells alongside your OEMs’ offerings.  That’s what Google did with the Nexxus One.  And while that phone was not itself a big seller, it catalyzed two wonderful things : (1) a quality bar was set and (2) partners exceeded it.  Before the Nexxus One, the best Android handset out there was the Motorola Droid. The Nexxus One was better, and the HTC Droid Incredible and Evo 4G are now even better than Google’s phone, which is why Verizon and Sprint decided not to carry it.  Imagine if all Windows Phone 6.x devices were on par with the HTC HD2.  I tend to believe you’d have a lot bigger market share than you do now.   9. Continue with Your Retail Initiative From what I hear, it sounds like it’s going well.  And this goes right along with making your own hardware.  When you build it, they will come.  And then it makes the likes of Best Buy and Staples do better.   10. Make an Acquisition (or Two) TiVo and/or Moxi look ripe for the picking.  With their ability to build stuff people love and your ability to run a business, you might just have something.  But do a better job than you did when you bought Danger.  Buy the ideas, not just the customers, eh?   11. Make Beautiful Stuff You’ve heard this one before, I know.  But I have some head-shrinking advice on this one.  You know that Apple obsesses over its industrial design.  You know that appeals to consumers.  But it seems you think doing so is Apple’s game exclusively and so you shouldn’t even try.  Bull dinky.  Come to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design gallery.  You’ll see that lots of companies and product categories have had very high design value well before Apple existed.  You can do this, and the Zune HD was a great start.  Now run with that.  Find those negative voices in your head that are telling you that you can’t and shut them up.  For good.   12. Burst the Bubble Some of the products you’ve built seem like they were conceived in a bizarro world.  That would appear to be the result of groupthink.  You must do better.  And there’s lots of people willing to advise you.  This includes just about everyone in the Regional Director program, and probably a bunch of MVPs.  Heck, I bet the guys at Engadget could help out too.  Imagine if you let them see the Kin before it shipped.  Talk to high-end gear consumers.  Talk to Best Buy and CostCo customers too.   Signing Off I hope this was of value to you.  As I wrote this I kept telling myself how obvious, even trite, some of these pieces of advice were and then, because of that, doubting they’d really help.  But I decided that they must not be obvious to Microsoft.  Sometimes when you get wrapped up in stuff, it’s hard to clear your head.  I think my head’s pretty clear here though (I’m wrapped up in other stuff), so maybe my perspective can help.  If not, well, then, I guess they all can’t be super nice.

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• ASP.NET MVC Postbacks and HtmlHelper Controls ignoring Model Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  So here's a binding behavior in ASP.NET MVC that I didn't really get until today: HtmlHelpers controls (like .TextBoxFor() etc.) don't bind to model values on Postback, but rather get their value directly out of the POST buffer from ModelState. Effectively it looks like you can't change the display value of a control via model value updates on a Postback operation. To demonstrate here's an example. I have a small section in a document where I display an editable email address: This is what the form displays on a GET operation and as expected I get the email value displayed in both the textbox and plain value display below, which reflects the value in the mode. I added a plain text value to demonstrate the model value compared to what's rendered in the textbox. The relevant markup is the email address which needs to be manipulated via the model in the Controller code. Here's the Razor markup: <div class="fieldcontainer"> <label> Email: &nbsp; <small>(username and <a href="http://gravatar.com">Gravatar</a> image)</small> </label> <div> @Html.TextBoxFor( mod=> mod.User.Email, new {type="email",@class="inputfield"}) @Model.User.Email </div> </div>   So, I have this form and the user can change their email address. On postback the Post controller code then asks the business layer whether the change is allowed. If it's not I want to reset the email address back to the old value which exists in the database and was previously store. The obvious thing to do would be to modify the model. Here's the Controller logic block that deals with that:// did user change email? if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(oldEmail) && user.Email != oldEmail) { if (userBus.DoesEmailExist(user.Email)) { userBus.ValidationErrors.Add("New email address exists already. Please…"); user.Email = oldEmail; } else // allow email change but require verification by forcing a login user.IsVerified = false; }… model.user = user; return View(model); The logic is straight forward - if the new email address is not valid because it already exists I don't want to display the new email address the user entered, but rather the old one. To do this I change the value on the model which effectively does this:model.user.Email = oldEmail; return View(model); So when I press the Save button after entering in my new email address ([email protected]) here's what comes back in the rendered view: Notice that the textbox value and the raw displayed model value are different. The TextBox displays the POST value, the raw value displays the actual model value which are different. This means that MVC renders the textbox value from the POST data rather than from the view data when an Http POST is active. Now I don't know about you but this is not the behavior I expected - initially. This behavior effectively means that I cannot modify the contents of the textbox from the Controller code if using HtmlHelpers for binding. Updating the model for display purposes in a POST has in effect - no effect. (Apr. 25, 2012 - edited the post heavily based on comments and more experimentation) What should the behavior be? After getting quite a few comments on this post I quickly realized that the behavior I described above is actually the behavior you'd want in 99% of the binding scenarios. You do want to get the POST values back into your input controls at all times, so that the data displayed on a form for the user matches what they typed. So if an error occurs, the error doesn't mysteriously disappear getting replaced either with a default value or some value that you changed on the model on your own. Makes sense. Still it is a little non-obvious because the way you create the UI elements with MVC, it certainly looks like your are binding to the model value:@Html.TextBoxFor( mod=> mod.User.Email, new {type="email",@class="inputfield",required="required" }) and so unless one understands a little bit about how the model binder works this is easy to trip up. At least it was for me. Even though I'm telling the control which model value to bind to, that model value is only used initially on GET operations. After that ModelState/POST values provide the display value. Workarounds The default behavior should be fine for 99% of binding scenarios. But if you do need fix up values based on your model rather than the default POST values, there are a number of ways that you can work around this. Initially when I ran into this, I couldn't figure out how to set the value using code and so the simplest solution to me was simply to not use the MVC Html Helper for the specific control and explicitly bind the model via HTML markup and @Razor expression: <input type="text" name="User.Email" id="User_Email" value="@Model.User.Email" /> And this produces the right result. This is easy enough to create, but feels a little out of place when using the @Html helpers for everything else. As you can see by the difference in the name and id values, you also are forced to remember the naming conventions that MVC imposes in order for ModelBinding to work properly which is a pain to remember and set manually (name is the same as the property with . syntax, id replaces dots with underlines). Use the ModelState Some of my original confusion came because I didn't understand how the model binder works. The model binder basically maintains ModelState on a postback, which holds a value and binding errors for each of the Post back value submitted on the page that can be mapped to the model. In other words there's one ModelState entry for each bound property of the model. Each ModelState entry contains a value property that holds AttemptedValue and RawValue properties. The AttemptedValue is essentially the POST value retrieved from the form. The RawValue is the value that the model holds. When MVC binds controls like @Html.TextBoxFor() or @Html.TextBox(), it always binds values on a GET operation. On a POST operation however, it'll always used the AttemptedValue to display the control. MVC binds using the ModelState on a POST operation, not the model's value. So, if you want the behavior that I was expecting originally you can actually get it by clearing the ModelState in the controller code:ModelState.Clear(); This clears out all the captured ModelState values, and effectively binds to the model. Note this will produce very similar results - in fact if there are no binding errors you see exactly the same behavior as if binding from ModelState, because the model has been updated from the ModelState already and binding to the updated values most likely produces the same values you would get with POST back values. The big difference though is that any values that couldn't bind - like say putting a string into a numeric field - will now not display back the value the user typed, but the default field value or whatever you changed the model value to. This is the behavior I was actually expecting previously. But - clearing out all values might be a bit heavy handed. You might want to fix up one or two values in a model but rarely would you want the entire model to update from the model. So, you can also clear out individual values on an as needed basis:if (userBus.DoesEmailExist(user.Email)) { userBus.ValidationErrors.Add("New email address exists already. Please…"); user.Email = oldEmail; ModelState.Remove("User.Email"); } This allows you to remove a single value from the ModelState and effectively allows you to replace that value for display from the model. Why? While researching this I came across a post from Microsoft's Brad Wilson who describes the default binding behavior best in a forum post: The reason we use the posted value for editors rather than the model value is that the model may not be able to contain the value that the user typed. Imagine in your "int" editor the user had typed "dog". You want to display an error message which says "dog is not valid", and leave "dog" in the editor field. However, your model is an int: there's no way it can store "dog". So we keep the old value. If you don't want the old values in the editor, clear out the Model State. That's where the old value is stored and pulled from the HTML helpers. There you have it. It's not the most intuitive behavior, but in hindsight this behavior does make some sense even if at first glance it looks like you should be able to update values from the model. The solution of clearing ModelState works and is a reasonable one but you have to know about some of the innards of ModelState and how it actually works to figure that out.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   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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• How to implement RLE into a tilemap?

  - by Smallbro

  Currently I've been using a 3D array for my tiles in a 2D world but the 3D side comes in when moving down into caves and whatnot. Now this is not memory efficient and I switched over to a 2D array and can now have much larger maps. The only issue I'm having now is that it seems that my tiles cannot occupy the same space as a tile on the same z level. My current structure means that each block has its own z variable. This is what it used to look like: map.blockData[x][y][z] = new Block(); however now it works like this map.blockData[x][y] = new Block(z); I'm not sure why but if I decide to use the same space on say the floor below it wont allow me to. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can add a z-axis to my 2D array? I'm using java but I reckon the concept carries across different languages. Edit: As Will posted, RLE sounds like the best method for achieving a fast 3D array. However I'm struggling to understand how I would even start to implement it? Would I create a 4D array the 4th being something which controls how many to skip? Or would the x-axis simply change altogether and have large gaps in between - for example [5][y][z] would skip 5 tiles? Is there something really obvious here which I am missing? The number of z levels I'm trying to have is around 66, it would be preferably that I can have up to or more than 1000 in x and y.

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• Best Practices vs Reality

  - by RonHill

  On a scale depicting how closely best practices are followed, with "always" on one end and "never" on the other, my current company falls uncomfortably close to the latter. Just a couple trivial examples: We have no code review process There is very little documentation despite a very large code base (and some of it is blatantly incorrect/misleading) Untested/buggy/uncompilable code is frequently checked in to source control It is comically complicated to create a debuggable build for some of our components because of its underlying architecture. Unhandled exceptions are not uncommon in our releases Empty Catch{ } blocks are everywhere. Now, with the understanding that it's neither practical nor realistic to follow ALL best practices ALL the time, my question is this: How closely have commonly accepted best practices been followed at the companies you've worked for? I'm kind of a noob--this is only the second company I've worked for--so I'm not sure if I'm just more of an anal retentive coder or if I've just ended up at mediocre companies. My guess (hope?) is the latter, but a coworker with way more experience than me says every company he's ever worked for is like this. Given the obvious benefits of following most best practices most of the time, I find it hard to believe it's like this everywhere. Am I wrong?

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• SpriteBatch being drawn outside of Stage?

  - by pyko

  Currently working on my first game, though running into some problems with libgx and screen aspect ratio. What I have is a Stage which contains things like menu buttons etc, and the rest of the game is pretty much sprites being drawn with via SpriteBatch. To avoid having multiple SpriteBatches and cameras, I have re-used the ones that are created when Stage is created. stage = new Stage(WIDTH, HEIGHT, true); // keep aspect ratio batch = stage.getSpriteBatch(); camera = (OrthographicCamera) stage.getCamera(); // move camera so 'active' screen is centred stage.getCamera().translate(-stage.getGutterWidth(), -stage.getGutterHeight(), 0); Anything that is Stage/Actor related is drawn fine - all goes within the aspect ratio adjusted boundaries. The problem I'm having is anything that drawn via SpriteBatch, seems to ignore this viewport that is defined by Stage and can be visible outside of the Stage area. batch.begin(); ... sirWuffles.draw(batch); ... batch.end(); For example, in the above, if Sir Wuffles is generated outside of the defined WIDTH/HEIGHT it might still appear in the "gutters" of the screen. Tried to explain it in the below screenshot. It's an exaggerated screen ratio to make the gutters large. I've also covered most of the gutter area in the blue/cyan rectangle so they are very obvious. Does anyone know what is happening? and how to fix it? Currently, my "fix" is to use ShapeRenderer to draw rectangles that correspond to the gutters on top of the sprites...

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• Back to Basics: When does a .NET Assembly Dependency get loaded

  - by Rick Strahl

  When we work on typical day to day applications, it's easy to forget some of the core features of the .NET framework. For me personally it's been a long time since I've learned about some of the underlying CLR system level services even though I rely on them on a daily basis. I often think only about high level application constructs and/or high level framework functionality, but the low level stuff is often just taken for granted. Over the last week at DevConnections I had all sorts of low level discussions with other developers about the inner workings of this or that technology (especially in light of my Low Level ASP.NET Architecture talk and the Razor Hosting talk). One topic that came up a couple of times and ended up a point of confusion even amongst some seasoned developers (including some folks from Microsoft <snicker>) is when assemblies actually load into a .NET process. There are a number of different ways that assemblies are loaded in .NET. When you create a typical project assemblies usually come from: The Assembly reference list of the top level 'executable' project The Assembly references of referenced projects Dynamically loaded at runtime via AppDomain/Reflection loading In addition .NET automatically loads mscorlib (most of the System namespace) the boot process that hosts the .NET runtime in EXE apps, or some other kind of runtime hosting environment (runtime hosting in servers like IIS, SQL Server or COM Interop). In hosting environments the runtime host may also pre-load a bunch of assemblies on its own (for example the ASP.NET host requires all sorts of assemblies just to run itself, before ever routing into your user specific code). Assembly Loading The most obvious source of loaded assemblies is the top level application's assembly reference list. You can add assembly references to a top level application and those assembly references are then available to the application. In a nutshell, referenced assemblies are not immediately loaded - they are loaded on the fly as needed. So regardless of whether you have an assembly reference in a top level project, or a dependent assembly assemblies typically load on an as needed basis, unless explicitly loaded by user code. The same is true of dependent assemblies. To check this out I ran a simple test: I have a utility assembly Westwind.Utilities which is a general purpose library that can work in any type of project. Due to a couple of small requirements for encoding and a logging piece that allows logging Web content (dependency on HttpContext.Current) this utility library has a dependency on System.Web. Now System.Web is a pretty large assembly and generally you'd want to avoid adding it to a non-Web project if it can be helped. So I created a Console Application that loads my utility library: You can see that the top level Console app a reference to Westwind.Utilities and System.Data (beyond the core .NET libs). The Westwind.Utilities project on the other hand has quite a few dependencies including System.Web. I then add a main program that accesses only a simple utillity method in the Westwind.Utilities library that doesn't require any of the classes that access System.Web: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.ReadLine(); } StringUtils.NewStringId() calls into Westwind.Utilities, but it doesn't rely on System.Web. Any guesses what the assembly list looks like when I stop the code on the ReadLine() command? I'll wait here while you think about it… … … So, when I stop on ReadLine() and then fire up Process Explorer and check the assembly list I get: We can see here that .NET has not actually loaded any of the dependencies of the Westwind.Utilities assembly. Also not loaded is the top level System.Data reference even though it's in the dependent assembly list of the top level project. Since this particular function I called only uses core System functionality (contained in mscorlib) there's in fact nothing else loaded beyond the main application and my Westwind.Utilities assembly that contains the method accessed. None of the dependencies of Westwind.Utilities loaded. If you were to open the assembly in a disassembler like Reflector or ILSpy, you would however see all the compiled in dependencies. The referenced assemblies are in the dependency list and they are loadable, but they are not immediately loaded by the application. In other words the C# compiler and .NET linker are smart enough to figure out the dependencies based on the code that actually is referenced from your application and any dependencies cascading down into the dependencies from your top level application into the referenced assemblies. In the example above the usage requirement is pretty obvious since I'm only calling a single static method and then exiting the app, but in more complex applications these dependency relationships become very complicated - however it's all taken care of by the compiler and linker figuring out what types and members are actually referenced and including only those assemblies that are in fact referenced in your code or required by any of your dependencies. The good news here is: That if you are referencing an assembly that has a dependency on something like System.Web in a few places that are not actually accessed by any of your code or any dependent assembly code that you are calling, that assembly is never loaded into memory! Some Hosting Environments pre-load Assemblies The load behavior can vary however. In Console and desktop applications we have full control over assembly loading so we see the core CLR behavior. However other environments like ASP.NET for example will preload referenced assemblies explicitly as part of the startup process - primarily to minimize load conflicts. Specifically ASP.NET pre-loads all assemblies referenced in the assembly list and the /bin folder. So in Web applications it definitely pays to minimize your top level assemblies if they are not used. Understanding when Assemblies Load To clarify and see it actually happen what I described in the first example , let's look at a couple of other scenarios. To see assemblies loading at runtime in real time lets create a utility function to print out loaded assemblies to the console: public static void PrintAssemblies() { var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); foreach (var assembly in assemblies) { Console.WriteLine(assembly.GetName()); } } Now let's look at the first scenario where I have class method that references internally uses System.Web. In the first scenario lets add a method to my main program like this: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.ReadLine(); PrintAssemblies(); } public static void WebLogEntry() { var entry = new WebLogEntry(); entry.UpdateFromRequest(); Console.WriteLine(entry.QueryString); } UpdateFromWebRequest() internally accesses HttpContext.Current to read some information of the ASP.NET Request object so it clearly needs a reference System.Web to work. In this first example, the method that holds the calling code is never called, but exists as a static method that can potentially be called externally at some point. What do you think will happen here with the assembly loading? Will System.Web load in this example? No - it doesn't. Because the WebLogEntry() method is never called by the mainline application (or anywhere else) System.Web is not loaded. .NET dynamically loads assemblies as code that needs it is called. No code references the WebLogEntry() method and so System.Web is never loaded. Next, let's add the call to this method, which should trigger System.Web to be loaded because a dependency exists. Let's change the code to: static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(StringUtils.NewStringId()); Console.WriteLine("--- Before:"); PrintAssemblies(); WebLogEntry(); Console.WriteLine("--- After:"); PrintAssemblies(); Console.ReadLine(); } public static void WebLogEntry() { var entry = new WebLogEntry(); entry.UpdateFromRequest(); Console.WriteLine(entry.QueryString); } Looking at the code now, when do you think System.Web will be loaded? Will the before list include it? Yup System.Web gets loaded, but only after it's actually referenced. In fact, just until before the call to UpdateFromRequest() System.Web is not loaded - it only loads when the method is actually called and requires the reference in the executing code. Moral of the Story So what have we learned - or maybe remembered again? Dependent Assembly References are not pre-loaded when an application starts (by default) Dependent Assemblies that are not referenced by executing code are never loaded Dependent Assemblies are just in time loaded when first referenced in code All of this is nothing new - .NET has always worked like this. But it's good to have a refresher now and then and go through the exercise of seeing it work in action. It's not one of those things we think about everyday, and as I found out last week, I couldn't remember exactly how it worked since it's been so long since I've learned about this. And apparently I'm not the only one as several other people I had discussions with in relation to loaded assemblies also didn't recall exactly what should happen or assumed incorrectly that just having a reference automatically loads the assembly. The moral of the story for me is: Trying at all costs to eliminate an assembly reference from a component is not quite as important as it's often made out to be. For example, the Westwind.Utilities module described above has a logging component, including a Web specific logging entry that supports pulling information from the active HTTP Context. Adding that feature requires a reference to System.Web. Should I worry about this in the scope of this library? Probably not, because if I don't use that one class of nearly a hundred, System.Web never gets pulled into the parent process. IOW, System.Web only loads when I use that specific feature and if I am, well I clearly have to be running in a Web environment anyway to use it realistically. The alternative would be considerably uglier: Pulling out the WebLogEntry class and sticking it into another assembly and breaking up the logging code. In this case - definitely not worth it. So, .NET definitely goes through some pretty nifty optimizations to ensure that it loads only what it needs and in most cases you can just rely on .NET to do the right thing. Sometimes though assembly loading can go wrong (especially when signed and versioned local assemblies are involved), but that's subject for a whole other post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET  CSharp   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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• What Gets Measured Gets Managed

  - by steve.diamond

  OK, so if I were to claim credit for inventing that expression, I guess I could share the mantle with Al Gore, creator of the Internet. But here's the point: How many of us acquire CRM systems without specifically benchmarking several key performance indicators across sales, marketing and service BEFORE and AFTER deployment of said system? Yes, this may sound obvious and it might provoke the, "Well of course, Diamond!" response, but is YOUR company doing this? Can you define in quantitative terms the delta across multiple parameters? I just trolled the Web site of one of my favorite sales consultancy firms, The Alexander Group. Right on their home page is a brief appeal citing the importance of benchmarking. The corresponding landing page states, "The fact that hundreds of sales executives now track how their sales forces spend time means they attach great value to understanding how much time sellers actually devote to selling." The opportunity is to extend this conversation to benchmarking the success that companies derive from the investment they make in CRM systems, i.e., to the automation side of the equation. To a certain extent, the 'game' is analogous to achieving optimal physical fitness. One may never quite get there, but beyond the 95% threshold of "excellence," she/he may be entering the realm of splitting infinitives. But at the very start, and to quote verbiage from the aforementioned Alexander Group Web page, what gets measured gets managed. And getting to that 95% level along several key indicators would be a high quality problem indeed, don't you think? Yes, this could be a "That's so 90's" conversation, but is it really?

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• Path is too long

  - by kaleidoscope

  Bugged by the irritating "Path is too long after being fully qualified" error while running in the Development Fabric? The solution is pretty funny and not so obvious unfortunately. The culprit here is not your app, but the Development Fabric. The DevFab accumulates a lot of temporary junk comprising of local storage locations, cached binaries, configuration, diagnostics information and cached compiled web site content files over its lifetime. They are typically stored at C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\dftmp. The Azure Tools will periodically clean this up, but some time you have to play janitor and take the law in your hands ;). The csrun.exe has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. One of them is the ability to clean the development fabric's temporary junk accumulated over time. You can do this by  running the Azure command prompt with elevated privileges and running csrun.exe /devfabric:shutdown and then csrun.exe /devfabric:clean If the problem still persists then the application directory structure could indeed be too long. A workaround to this is changing the Development Fabric temporary directory to point to a shorter path. The temporary directory path can be addressed by an environment variable _CSRUN_STATE_DIRECTORY. You can try setting its value to something like "C:\WA" or "C:\A" this will reduce some 25+ characters from your path. Do not forget to close Visual Studio and expressly shutdown the dev fab with csrun.exe /devfabric:shutdown (Under elevated privileges of course). Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/IUnknown/archive/2010/02/03/no-more-path-is-too-long.aspx  :D   Sarang, K

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• Streaming Netflix Media with My Wii

  - by Ben Griswold

  Late last year, I wrote about Streaming Media with my Sony Blu-ray Disc Player. I am still digging the Blu-ray player setup but guess what showed up in the mail yesterday?   That’s right!  A free Netflix disc which now let’s me instantly watch TV episodes and movies via my Wii console.  I popped the disc into the console and in less than 2 minutes the brain-numbingly simple activation was complete.  (Full-disclosure: I already had my Wi-Fi connection configured, but I’m confident that the Netflix installation disc would have helpfully walked me through this additional step if need be.) As it turns out, the Wii Netflix UI offers far more options than what one gets with the Blu-ray setup.  Not only can I view my Instant Queue, but there’s a list of recently watched movies, a list of recommended titles by category, the star rating system, movies information and nearly everything you find on the web.  I reread Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability on a flight back from Orlando on Wednesday, so my current view of the world may be a little skewed but, the brilliance of Netflix Wii’s user interface is undeniable. It’s not like the Blu-ray navigation is complicated but the Wii navigation feels familiar and intuitive. How intuitive?  Well, you won’t find a single bit of help text on any of the Wii screens – just a simple and obvious point-and-click navigation system.  And the UI is really pretty (which is still very important if you ask me) and so easy it became fun. Did I mention the media streaming works!  Yep, we watched 2 half-hour kid videos yesterday without any streaming issues at all.  If you have a Netflix account and a Wii, order your disc and give it a go. It’s good stuff.

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• What are the reasons why Clojure is hyped and PicoLisp widely ignored?

  - by Thorsten

  I recently discovered the Lisp family of programming languages, and it's definitely one of the more diverse and widespread families in the programming language world. I like Elisp because that most wonderful tool Emacs is an Elisp interpreter. But I was looking for one more Lisp dialect to learn and thought Clojure would be the obvious choice nowadays - until I discovered the well hidden gem PicoLisp. That must be the most intelligent programming environment I have ever seen, like taking the best ideas from Lisp and Smalltalk and adding performance and practicability - and the beauty of parsimony. There is even an Emacs-mode for it. PicoLisp must be the productivity world champion when it comes to building business applications with database and web-client - and that's a very common task. It seems that throwing more and more hardware cores at your PicoLisp application makes it faster and faster, and the database is very performant anyway. However, reactions to PicoLisp in in general mailing-lists etc. are almost hostile (envy?), and there is absolutely no hype and very little publicity (ie not one book published). Are there real justified reasons for this (except the vast amount of java-libs accessible by Clojure, I know that one)? Or is the mainstream it getting wrong again (see C vs Lisp, Java vs Smalltalk, Windows vs Linux) and will come to the conclusion 10 years later that the JVM was good as in between solution, but a really fast Lisp interpreter on multicore machines is much better and allows much cleaner concepts? PS 1: Please note: I'm not interested in Scheme or any Common Lisp dialect, although they might be fine languages. It's just PicoLisp vs Clojure. PS 2: another thing I like about PicoLisp is its similarity to Elisp in certain aspects (both are descendants from MacLisp?) - it's easier to learn two similar languages. There is so much "dynamic binding bashing" on the web, but two of the most appealing Lisp applications use it.

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• Webcast: Best Practices for Speeding Virtual Infrastructure Deployment with Oracle VM

  - by Honglin Su

  We announced Oracle VM Blade Cluster Reference Configuration last month, see the blog. The new Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration can help reduce the time to deploy virtual infrastructure by up to 98 percent when compared to multi-vendor configurations. Customers and partners have shown lots of interests. Join Oracle's experts to learn the best practices for speeding virtual infrastructure deployment with Oracle VM, register the webcast (1/25/2011) here.   Virtualization has already been widely accepted as a means to increase IT flexibility and help IT services align better with changing business needs. The flexibility of a virtualized IT infrastructure enables new applications to be rapidly deployed, capacity to be easily scaled, and IT resources to be quickly redirected. The net result is that IT can bring greater value to the business, making virtualization an obvious win from a business perspective. However, building a virtualized infrastructure typically requires assembling and integrating multiple components (e.g. servers, storage, network, virtualization, and operating systems). This infrastructure must be deployed and tested before applications can even be installed. It can take weeks or months to plan, architect, configure, troubleshoot, and deploy a virtualized infrastructure. The process is not only time-consuming, but also error-prone, making it hard to achieve a timely and profitable return on investment.  Oracle is the only vendor that can offer a fully integrated virtualization infrastructure with all of the necessary hardware and software components. The Oracle VM blade cluster reference configuration is a single-vendor solution that addresses every layer of the virtualization stack with Oracle hardware and software components, see the figure below. It enables quick and easy deployment of the virtualized infrastructure using components that have been tested together and are all supported together by Oracle. To learn more about Oracle's virtualization offerings, visit http://oracle.com/virtualization.

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• Implementing a wrapping wire (like the Worms Ninja Rope) in a 2D physics engine

  - by Andrew Russell

  I've been trying out some rope-physics recently, and I've found that the "standard" solution - making a rope from a series of objects strung together with springs or joints - is unsatisfying. Especially when rope swinging is relevant to gameplay. I don't really care about a rope's ability to wrap up or sag (this can be faked for visuals anyway). For gameplay, what is important is the ability for the rope to wrap around the environment and then subsequently unwrap. It doesn't even have to behave like rope - a "wire" made up of straight line segments would do. Here's an illustration: This is very similar to the "Ninja Rope" from the game Worms. Because I'm using a 2D physics engine - my environment is made up of 2D convex polygons. (Specifically I am using SAT in Farseer.) So my question is this: How would you implement the "wrapping" effect? It seems pretty obvious that the wire will be made up of a series of line segments that "split" and "join". And the final (active) segment of that line, where the moving object attaches, will be a fixed-length joint. But what is the maths / algorithm involved for determining when and where the active line segment needs to be split? And when it needs to be joined with the previous segment? (Previously this question also asked about doing this for a dynamic environment - I've decided to split that off into other questions.)

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• What happens to C# 4 optional parameters when compiling against 3.5?

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Here’s a method declaration that uses optional parameters: public Path Copy( Path destination, bool overwrite = false, bool recursive = false) Something you may not know is that Visual Studio 2010 will let you compile this against .NET 3.5, with no error or warning. You may be wondering (as I was) how it does that. Well, it takes the easy and rather obvious way of not trying to be too smart and just ignores the optional parameters. So if you’re compiling against 3.5 from Visual Studio 2010, the above code is equivalent to: public Path Copy( Path destination, bool overwrite, bool recursive) The parameters are not optional (no such thing in C# 3), and no overload gets magically created for you. If you’re building a library that is going to have both 3.5 and 4.0 versions, and you want 3.5 users to have reasonable overloads of your methods, you’ll have to provide those yourself, which means that providing a version with optional parameters for the benefit of 4.0 users is not going to provide that much value, except for the ability to provide named parameters out of order. I guess that’s not so bad… Providing all of the following overloads will compile against both 3.5 and 4.0: public Path Copy(Path destination)public Path Copy(Path destination, bool overwrite)public Path Copy( Path destination, bool overwrite = false, bool recursive = false)

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• WP7 &ndash; Oh, You Wanted to Develop On Your New Phone? That&rsquo;ll Cost Ya!

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Had an interesting Twitter convo today about WP7 development. Question was raised on how to use a WP7 device as the deployment target from within VS.NET. Thinking that this would be an *obvious* question, I replied that you need to set the right value in one of the drop lists in the IDE… I did this, hooked up my device, then tried to run my app, just as a final test that it was as easy as I thought it would be. It wasn’t. So first, your phone can’t be locked, so make sure you unlock it. Also, don’t kill the Zune software when you notice it automagically started – its needed for VS.NET to deploy to your device. Finally, you need to register your device for development. Aiden Caine has a great article on what you need to do for this, but in a nutshell you need to launch the Windows Phone Developer Registration program found in the Windows Phone Developer Tools folder. Now, here’s the catch to all of this: You must have a Windows Phone AppHub account. As in paid account. That’s right – to do development on your actual device, you need to have a $99 ($120 in Canada) AppHub developer membership. Now, I get this – if Microsoft didn’t put this restriction, then they’d be back in Mobile 6.x land where anyone could install whatever app to whoever, whenever, and without any standards being upheld. This is the same thing that Apple does with their marketplace, its not something unprecedented. But, it is something that will be new to the majority of Microsoft developers that have lived without application restrictions for years. Now, if you’re in the US then you have the opportunity to get a rebate on that $99 fee from Microsoft if you publish two apps successfully. You can get more details on this offer here.

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• SOA Checklist

  - by pat.shepherd

  In a recent meeting, the customer brought up a valid question: “How do I know if a problem/system is a good candidate for using SOA (vs. using old but trusted techniques).  I put this checklist together.  If you can answer yes to 2 or more of these, it might well be a good candidate.  This is V1, and I will likely update it over time.  Comments (that are not spam or sales pitches) appreciated. Part of the conversation was also around the fact that SOA has two faces to it; one is around the obvious reuse possibilities. The other, that often gets forgotten, is that SOA provides goodness in terms of simplifying integration even where opportunities to reuse those integrations are small; at least the integrations are standards-based and more flexible.  I did not write a lot of verbiage about each of them, for example “Business Process” implies that there is a set of step-wise actions that need to take place in a coordinated fashion that include integrating with systems (and sometimes people for approvals and other human-only actions) in the process.  

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• Keep basic game physics separate from basic game object? [on hold]

  - by metamorphosis

  If anybody has dealt with a similar situation I'd be interested in your experience/wisdom, I'm developing a 2D game library in C++, I have game objects which have very basic physics, they also have movement classes attached to differing states, for example, a different movement type based on whether the character is jumping, on ice, whatever. In terms of storing velocity and acceleration impulses, are they best held by the object? Or by the associated movement class? The reason I ask is that I can see advantages to both approaches- if you store physics data in the movement class, you have to pass physics information between class instances when a state change occurs (ie. impulses, gravity etc) but the class has total control over whether those physics are updated or not. An obvious example of how this would be useful was if an object was affected by something which caused it to ignore gravity, or something like that. on the other hand if you store the physics data in the object class, it feels more logical, you don't have to go around passing physics impulses and gravity etc, however the control that the movement class has over the object's physics becomes more convoluted. Basically the difference is between: object->physics stacks (acceleration impulses etc) ->physics functions ->movement type <-movement type makes physics function calls through object and object->movement type->physics stacks ->physics functions ->object forwards external physics calls onto movement type ->object transfers physics stacks between movement types when state change occurs Are there best practices here?

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• Failed to load viewstate.The control tree into which viewstate is being loaded...etc

  - by alaa9jo

  Two days ago,a colleague of mine tried to publish an asp.net website (which is built in VS2008 using framework 3.5) to our server,he configured everything in IIS (he made sure that the selected asp.net version is 2.0) and launched the website..at first it was working great but when he tried to click on a specific treeview...BOOM..: "Failed to load viewstate. The control tree into which viewstate is being loaded must match the control tree that was used to save viewstate during the previous request. For example, when adding controls dynamically, the controls added during a post-back must match the type and position of the controls added during the initial request." In that page there were these control: a TreeView and a Placeholder,when the user selects any node then it's controls will be created dynamically into that placeholder..for the first time it's working fine but when (s)he select another node then that issue appears. He called me to help him with this issue,for me this is the first time I see such an issue,scratch my head then I decided to eliminate the possibilities of this issue one by one,at the development machine it's working perfectly,he published the website at the local IIS and again..it's working perfectly,I took a copy of the website and published it into my laptop but no issues at all,so this is means that it's not an issue in the code. So there is something missing/wrong in our server [it has Windows Server 2003],we went to the server and checked on the web-config and the configurations on IIS...nothing wrong so far,so I decided to check if the framework 3.5 is installed or not and the answer: it wasn't installed Of course he assumed that it was installed and there was nothing to tell if it wasn't from the "ASP.Net version" in IIS because frameworks 3.0 and 3.5 will not be listed there [2.0 will be listed there instead],the only way to check if it was installed or not is to search for the framework in this path:[WINDOWS Folder]\Microsoft.NET\Framework or check if it was installed in Add or remove programs. The obvious solution for his case: We installed Framework 3.5 SP1 into our server,did a restart to the machine and it worked ! If anyone faced the same issue and solved it using the same solution or with a different one please post it here to share experience.

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• What is your definition of a programmer?

  - by Amir Rezaei

  The definition of a programmer is not obvious. It has happened that I have asked questions in this forum where people believe it don’t belong here because it’s not programmer related. I thought this question may clarify the definition. What characteristics, roles and activities do you think defines a programmer? Is there a typical programmer? The technology changes so fast that it may be hard to be typical programmer. From wikipedia: A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to programming may also be known as a programmer analyst. A programmer's primary computer language (C, C++, Java, Lisp, Delphi etc.) is often prefixed to the above titles, and those who work in a web environment often prefix their titles with web. The term programmer can be used to refer to a software developer, software engineer, computer scientist, or software analyst. However, members of these professions typically possess other software engineering skills, beyond programming; for this reason, the term programmer is sometimes considered an insulting or derogatory oversimplification of these other professions. This has sparked much debate amongst developers, analysts, computer scientists, programmers, and outsiders who continue to be puzzled at the subtle differences in these occupations

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• A client wants us to screen work machines for pornography. Is it possible?

  - by Scant Roger

  A long-time client has asked us to help screen their work machines for pornography. They're worried about liability if sensitive materials were found. Their main concerns (for obvious reasons) are video, audio, and image files. If possible, they'd also like to scan text-based documents for inappropriate content. They have a hierarchy of not-for-work content starting with blatantly illegal (I don't have to list details), moving down to obviously offensive, and also including things that may be offensive to some - think lingerie ads, joke cards featuring butt cracks, and anything related to Howie Mandel. My questions are: Is this ethical? I think it is since every employee legally agrees that their work machine belongs to the company and is subject to search. The screenings are not to occur on personal machines brought to work. Is it feasible? I've done a lot of image processing/indexing but this seems like a whole new world of complexity. Any references to successful techniques for discovering porn? Is it appropriate for me to archive the results when something is discovered?

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• Achieving forward compatibility with C++11

  - by mcmcc

  I work on a large software application that must run on several platforms. Some of these platforms support some features of C++11 (e.g. MSVS 2010) and some don't support any (e.g. GCC 4.3.x). I see this situation continuing on for several years (my best guess: 3-5 years). Given that, I would like set up a compatibility interface such that (to whatever degree possible) people can write C++11 code that will still compile with older compilers with a minimum of maintenance. Overall, the goal is to minimize #ifdef's as much as reasonably possible while still enabling basic C++11 syntax/features on the platforms that support them, and provide emulation on the platforms that don't. Let's start with std::move(). The most obvious way to achieve compatibility would be to put something like this in a common header file: #if !defined(HAS_STD_MOVE) namespace std { // C++11 emulation template <typename T> inline T& move(T& v) { return v; } template <typename T> inline const T& move(const T& v) { return v; } } #endif // !defined(HAS_STD_MOVE) This allow people to write things like std::vector<Thing> x = std::move(y); ... with impugnity. It does what they want in C++11 and it does the best it can in C++03. When we finally drop the last of the C++03 compilers, this code can remain as is. However, according to the standard, it is illegal to inject new symbols into the std namespace. That's the theory. My question is, practically speaking, is there any harm in doing this as a way of achieving forward compatibility?

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• 14 WordPress Photo Blog & Portfolio Themes

  - by Aditi

  The best thing you can do to preserve your memories is to capture them. Photographs can help you relive all those sweet moments you had with your special someone or the ones closest to you. With the sudden explosion in the number of blogs on blogosphere it was quite obvious that many bloggers would like to share their most cherished memories on their blog. We saw blogs full of images along with the intricate details and now we are presenting you some WordPress themes to help you showcase your photography or make a photo blog so that you can share those small delights you captured with your special ones, no matter where they are. These WordPress photo blog themes are not just limited for personal use as some of them have been designed especially for professional use. Graphix Price: $69 Single & $149 Developer Package | DownLoad DeepFocus Price: $39 Package | DownLoad ReCapture Price: $50 or $75 Package | DownLoad PhotoGraphic Price: $50 or $75 Package | DownLoad PhotoLand Price: $39 Single & $99 Developer Package | DownLoad SimplePress Perfect Theme for showcasing your Portfolio, very simple & easy to navigate. Lots of Features. Price: $39 Single & $99 Developer Package | DownLoad ePhoto Price: $39 Single & $99 Developer Package | DownLoad Outline Price: $50 or $75 Package | DownLoad Gallery The theme features a simple options panel for easy setup, automatic resizing & cropping for thumbnails, and 5 colour styles. Price: $49 | DownLoad eGallery eGallery is one of the best theme to showcase your images. It has some features which you don’t see in any other themes of this kind. It’s particularly nice if you want to encourage social interaction as readers can rate and comment on your images. It is compatible with all major web browsers. Price: $39 | DownLoad Photoblog Price: $49 | DownLoad Ultra Web Studio Price: $30 | DownLoad Showtime Ultimate WordPress Theme for you to create your web portfolio, 3 different styles. Price: $40 | DownLoad Boomerang Price: $35 | DownLoad Related posts:6 PhotoBlog Portfolio WordPress Themes Wootube WordPress Video Blog Theme 7 Portfolio WordPress Themes

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• Investigation: Can different combinations of components effect Dataflow performance?

  - by jamiet

  Introduction The Dataflow task is one of the core components (if not the core component) of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and often the most misunderstood. This is not surprising, its an incredibly complicated beast and we’re abstracted away from that complexity via some boxes that go yellow red or green and that have some lines drawn between them. Example dataflow In this blog post I intend to look under that facade and get into some of the nuts and bolts of the Dataflow Task by investigating how the decisions we make when building our packages can affect performance. I will do this by comparing the performance of three dataflows that all have the same input, all produce the same output, but which all operate slightly differently by way of having different transformation components. I also want to use this blog post to challenge a common held opinion that I see perpetuated over and over again on the SSIS forum. That is, that people assume adding components to a dataflow will be detrimental to overall performance. Its not surprising that people think this –it is intuitive to think that more components means more work- however this is not a view that I share. I have always been of the opinion that there are many factors affecting dataflow duration and the number of components is actually one of the less important ones; having said that I have never proven that assertion and that is one reason for this investigation. I have actually seen evidence that some people think dataflow duration is simply a function of number of rows and number of components. I’ll happily call that one out as a myth even without any investigation!  The Setup I have a 2GB datafile which is a list of 4731904 (~4.7million) customer records with various attributes against them and it contains 2 columns that I am going to use for categorisation: [YearlyIncome] [BirthDate] The data file is a SSIS raw format file which I chose to use because it is the quickest way of getting data into a dataflow and given that I am testing the transformations, not the source or destination adapters, I want to minimise external influences as much as possible. In the test I will split the customers according to month of birth (12 of those) and whether or not their yearly income is above or below 50000 (2 of those); in other words I will be splitting them into 24 discrete categories and in order to do it I shall be using different combinations of SSIS’ Conditional Split and Derived Column transformation components. The 24 datapaths that occur will each input to a rowcount component, again because this is the least resource intensive means of terminating a datapath. The test is being carried out on a Dell XPS Studio laptop with a quad core (8 logical Procs) Intel Core i7 at 1.73GHz and Samsung SSD hard drive. Its running SQL Server 2008 R2 on Windows 7. The Variables Here are the three combinations of components that I am going to test:     One Conditional Split - A single Conditional Split component CSPL Split by Month of Birth and income category that will use expressions on [YearlyIncome] & [BirthDate] to send each row to one of 24 outputs. This next screenshot displays the expression logic in use: Derived Column & Conditional Split - A Derived Column component DER Income Category that adds a new column [IncomeCategory] which will contain one of two possible text values {“LessThan50000”,”GreaterThan50000”} and uses [YearlyIncome] to determine which value each row should get. A Conditional Split component CSPL Split by Month of Birth and Income Category then uses that new column in conjunction with [BirthDate] to determine which of the same 24 outputs to send each row to. Put more simply, I am separating the Conditional Split of #1 into a Derived Column and a Conditional Split. The next screenshots display the expression logic in use: DER Income Category         CSPL Split by Month of Birth and Income Category       Three Conditional Splits - A Conditional Split component that produces two outputs based on [YearlyIncome], one for each Income Category. Each of those outputs will go to a further Conditional Split that splits the input into 12 outputs, one for each month of birth (identical logic in each). In this case then I am separating the single Conditional Split of #1 into three Conditional Split components. The next screenshots display the expression logic in use: CSPL Split by Income Category         CSPL Split by Month of Birth 1& 2       Each of these combinations will provide an input to one of the 24 rowcount components, just the same as before. For illustration here is a screenshot of the dataflow containing three Conditional Split components: As you can these dataflows have a fair bit of work to do and remember that they’re doing that work for 4.7million rows. I will execute each dataflow 10 times and use the average for comparison. I foresee three possible outcomes: The dataflow containing just one Conditional Split (i.e. #1) will be quicker There is no significant difference between any of them One of the two dataflows containing multiple transformation components will be quicker Regardless of which of those outcomes come to pass we will have learnt something and that makes this an interesting test to carry out. Note that I will be executing the dataflows using dtexec.exe rather than hitting F5 within BIDS. The Results and Analysis The table below shows all of the executions, 10 for each dataflow. It also shows the average for each along with a standard deviation. All durations are in seconds. I’m pasting a screenshot because I frankly can’t be bothered with the faffing about needed to make a presentable HTML table. It is plain to see from the average that the dataflow containing three conditional splits is significantly faster, the other two taking 43% and 52% longer respectively. This seems strange though, right? Why does the dataflow containing the most components outperform the other two by such a big margin? The answer is actually quite logical when you put some thought into it and I’ll explain that below. Before progressing, a side note. The standard deviation for the “Three Conditional Splits” dataflow is orders of magnitude smaller – indicating that performance for this dataflow can be predicted with much greater confidence too. The Explanation I refer you to the screenshot above that shows how CSPL Split by Month of Birth and salary category in the first dataflow is setup. Observe that there is a case for each combination of Month Of Date and Income Category – 24 in total. These expressions get evaluated in the order that they appear and hence if we assume that Month of Date and Income Category are uniformly distributed in the dataset we can deduce that the expected number of expression evaluations for each row is 12.5 i.e. 1 (the minimum) + 24 (the maximum) divided by 2 = 12.5. Now take a look at the screenshots for the second dataflow. We are doing one expression evaluation in DER Income Category and we have the same 24 cases in CSPL Split by Month of Birth and Income Category as we had before, only the expression differs slightly. In this case then we have 1 + 12.5 = 13.5 expected evaluations for each row – that would account for the slightly longer average execution time for this dataflow. Now onto the third dataflow, the quick one. CSPL Split by Income Category does a maximum of 2 expression evaluations thus the expected number of evaluations per row is 1.5. CSPL Split by Month of Birth 1 & CSPL Split by Month of Birth 2 both have less work to do than the previous Conditional Split components because they only have 12 cases to test for thus the expected number of expression evaluations is 6.5 There are two of them so total expected number of expression evaluations for this dataflow is 6.5 + 6.5 + 1.5 = 14.5. 14.5 is still more than 12.5 & 13.5 though so why is the third dataflow so much quicker? Simple, the conditional expressions in the first two dataflows have two boolean predicates to evaluate – one for Income Category and one for Month of Birth; the expressions in the Conditional Split in the third dataflow however only have one predicate thus they are doing a lot less work. To sum up, the difference in execution times can be attributed to the difference between: MONTH(BirthDate) == 1 && YearlyIncome <= 50000 and MONTH(BirthDate) == 1 In the first two dataflows YearlyIncome <= 50000 gets evaluated an average of 12.5 times for every row whereas in the third dataflow it is evaluated once and once only. Multiply those 11.5 extra operations by 4.7million rows and you get a significant amount of extra CPU cycles – that’s where our duration difference comes from. The Wrap-up The obvious point here is that adding new components to a dataflow isn’t necessarily going to make it go any slower, moreover you may be able to achieve significant improvements by splitting logic over multiple components rather than one. Performance tuning is all about reducing the amount of work that needs to be done and that doesn’t necessarily mean use less components, indeed sometimes you may be able to reduce workload in ways that aren’t immediately obvious as I think I have proven here. Of course there are many variables in play here and your mileage will most definitely vary. I encourage you to download the package and see if you get similar results – let me know in the comments. The package contains all three dataflows plus a fourth dataflow that will create the 2GB raw file for you (you will also need the [AdventureWorksDW2008] sample database from which to source the data); simply disable all dataflows except the one you want to test before executing the package and remember, execute using dtexec, not within BIDS. If you want to explore dataflow performance tuning in more detail then here are some links you might want to check out: Inequality joins, Asynchronous transformations and Lookups Destination Adapter Comparison Don’t turn the dataflow into a cursor SSIS Dataflow – Designing for performance (webinar) Any comments? Let me know! @Jamiet

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• Ignoring Robots - Or Better Yet, Counting Them Separately

  - by [email protected]

  It is quite common to have web sessions that are undesirable from the point of view of analytics. For example, when there are either internal or external robots that check the site's health, index it or just extract information from it. These robotic session do not behave like humans and if their volume is high enough they can sway the statistics and models.One easy way to deal with these sessions is to define a partitioning variable for all the models that is a flag indicating whether the session is "Normal" or "Robot". Then all the reports and the predictions can use the "Normal" partition, while the counts and statistics for Robots are still available.In order for this to work, though, it is necessary to have two conditions:1. It is possible to identify the Robotic sessions.2. No learning happens before the identification of the session as a robot.The first point is obvious, but the second may require some explanation. While the default in RTD is to learn at the end of the session, it is possible to learn in any entry point. This is a setting for each model. There are various reasons to learn in a specific entry point, for example if there is a desire to capture exactly and precisely the data in the session at the time the event happened as opposed to including changes to the end of the session.In any case, if RTD has already learned on the session before the identification of a robot was done there is no way to retract this learning.Identifying the robotic sessions can be done through the use of rules and heuristics. For example we may use some of the following:Maintain a list of known robotic IPs or domainsDetect very long sessions, lasting more than a few hours or visiting more than 500 pagesDetect "robotic" behaviors like a methodic click on all the link of every pageDetect a session with 10 pages clicked at exactly 20 second intervalsDetect extensive non-linear navigationNow, an interesting experiment would be to use the flag above as an output of a model to see if there are more subtle characteristics of robots such that a model can be used to detect robots, even if they fall through the cracks of rules and heuristics.In any case, the basic and simple technique of partitioning the models by the type of session is simple to implement and provides a lot of advantages.

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• Fixing up Configurations in BizTalk Solution Files

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Just a quick one this, but useful for mature BizTalk solutions, where over time the configuration settings can get confused, meaning Debug configurations building in Release mode, or Deployment configurations building in Development mode. That can cause issues in the build which aren't obvious, so it's good to fix up the configurations. It's time-consuming in VS or in a text editor, so this bit of PowerShell may come in useful - just substitute your own solution path in the $path variable: $path = 'C:\x\y\z\x.y.z.Integration.sln' $backupPath = [System.String]::Format('{0}.bak', $path) [System.IO.File]::Copy($path, $backupPath, $True) $sln = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($path)   $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|.NET.Build.0 = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|.NET.Build.0 = Development|.NET') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|.NET.Deploy.0 = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|.NET.Deploy.0 = Development|.NET') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Development|.NET') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Any CPU.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Any CPU.Build.0 = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Any CPU.Build.0 = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.Build.0 = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|Mixed Platforms.Build.0 = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Debug|Any CPU', '.Deployment|.NET.ActiveCfg = Release|Any CPU') $sln = $sln.Replace('.Debug|.NET.ActiveCfg = Deployment|.NET', '.Debug|.NET.ActiveCfg = Development|.NET')   [System.IO.File]::WriteAllText($path, $sln) The script creates a backup of the solution file first, and then fixes up all the configs to use the correct builds. It's a simple search and replace list, so if there are any patterns that need to be added let me know and I'll update the script. A RegEx replace would be neater, but when it comes to hacking solution files, I prefer the conservative approach of knowing exactly what you're changing.

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