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• In the Groove: PASS Board Year 1, Q3

  - by Denise McInerney

  It's nine months into my first year on the PASS Board and I feel like I've found my rhythm. I've accomplished one of the goals I set out for the year and have made progress on others. Here's a recap of the last few months. Anti-Harassment Policy & Process Completed In April I began work on a Code of Conduct for the PASS Summit. The Board had several good discussions and various PASS members provided feedback. You can read more about that in this blog post. Since the document was focused on issues of harassment we renamed it the "Anti-Harassment Policy " and it was approved by the Board in August. The next step was to refine the guideliness and process for enforcement of the AHP. A subcommittee worked on this and presented an update to the Board at the September meeting. You can read more about that in this post, and you can find the process document here. Global Growth Expanding PASS' reach and making the organization relevant to SQL Server communities around the world has been a focus of the Board's work in 2012. We took the Global Growth initiative out to the community for feedback, and everyone on the Board participated, via Twitter chats, Town Hall meetings, feedback forums and in-person discussions. This community participation helped shape and refine our plans. Implementing the vision for Global Growth goes across all portfolios. The Virtual Chapters are well-positioned to help the organization move forward in this area. One outcome of the Global Growth discussions with the community is the expansion of two of the VCs from country-specific to language-specific. Thanks to the leadership in Brazil & Mexico for taking the lead here. I look forward to continued success for the Portuguese- and Spanish-language Virtual Chapters. Together with the Global Chinese VC PASS is off to a good start in making the VC's truly global. Virtual Chapters The VCs continue to grow and expand. Volunteers recently rebooted the Azure and Virutalization VCs, and a new  Education VC will be launching soon. Every week VCs offer excellent free training on a variety of topics. It's the dedication of the VC leaders and volunteers that make all this possible and I thank them for it. Board meeting The Board had an in-person meeting in September in San Diego, CA.. As usual we covered a number of topics including governance changes to support Global Growth, the upcoming Summit, 2013 events and the (then) upcoming PASS election. Next Up Much of the last couple of months has been focused on preparing for the PASS Summit in Seattle Nov. 6-9. I'll be there all week;  feel free to stop me if you have a question or concern, or just to introduce yourself.  Here are some of the places you can find me: VC Leaders Meeting Tuesday 8:00 am the VC leaders will have a meeting. We'll review some of the year's highlights and talk about plans for the next year Welcome Reception The VCs will be at the Welcome Reception in the new VC Lounge. Come by, learn more about what the VCs have to offer and meet others who share your interests. Exceptional DBA Awards Party I'm looking forward to seeing PASS Women in Tech VC leader Meredith Ryan receive her award at this event sponsored by Red Gate Session Presentation I will be presenting a spotlight session entitled "Stop Bad Data in Its OLTP Tracks" on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. Exhibitor Reception This reception Wednesday evening in the Expo Hall is a great opportunity to learn more about tools and solutions that can help you in your job. Women in Tech Luncheon This year marks the 10th WIT Luncheon at PASS. I'm honored to be on the panel with Stefanie Higgins, Kevin Kline, Kendra Little and Jen Stirrup. This event is on Thursday at 11:30. Community Appreciation Party Thursday evening don't miss this event thanking all of you for everthing you do for PASS and the community. This year we will be at the Experience Music Project and it promises to be a fun party. Board Q & A Friday  9:45-11:15  am the members of the Board will be available to answer your questions. If you have a question for us, or want to hear what other members are thinking about, come by room 401 Friday morning.

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• Simple Project Templates

  - by Geertjan

  The NetBeans sources include a module named "simple.project.templates": In the module sources, Tim Boudreau turns out to be the author of the code, so I asked him what it was all about, and if he could provide some usage code. His response, from approximately this time last year because it's been sitting in my inbox for a while, is below. Sure - though I think the javadoc in it is fairly complete.  I wrote it because I needed to create a bunch of project templates for Javacard, and all of the ways that is usually done were grotesque and complicated.  I figured we already have the ability to create files from templates, and we already have the ability to do substitutions in templates, so why not have a single file that defines the project as a list of file templates to create (with substitutions in the names) and some definitions of what should be in project properties. You can also add files to the project programmatically if you want.Basically, a template for an entire project is a .properties file.  Any line which doesn't have the prefix 'pp.' or 'pvp.' is treated as the definition of one file which should be created in the new project.  Any such line where the key ends in * means that file should be opened once the new project is created.  So, for example, in the nodejs module, the definition looks like: {{projectName}}.js*=Templates/javascript/HelloWorld.js .npmignore=node_hidden_templates/npmignore So, the first line means:  - Create a file with the same name as the project, using the HelloWorld template    - I.e. the left side of the line is the relative path of the file to create, and the right side is the path in the system filesystem for the template to use       - If the template is not one you normally want users to see, just register it in the system filesystem somewhere other than Templates/ (but remember to set the attribute that marks it as a template)  - Include that file in the set of files which should be opened in the editor once the new project is created. To actually create a project, first you just create a new ProjectCreator: ProjectCreator gen = new ProjectCreator( parentFolderOfNewProject ); Now, if you want to programmatically generate any files, in addition to those defined in the template, you can: gen.add (new FileCreator("nbproject", "project.xml", false) {     public DataObject create (FileObject project, Map<String,String> substitutions) throws IOException {          ...     } }); Then pass the FileObject for the project template (the properties file) to the ProjectCreator's createProject method (hmm, maybe it should be the string path to the project template instead, to save the caller trouble looking up the FileObject for the template).  That method looks like this: public final GeneratedProject createProject(final ProgressHandle handle, final String name, final FileObject template, final Map<String, String> substitutions) throws IOException { The name parameter should be the directory name for the new project;  the map is the strings you gathered in the wizard which should be used for substitutions.  createProject should be called on a background thread (i.e. use a ProgressInstantiatingIterator for the wizard iterator and just pass in the ProgressHandle you are given). The return value is a GeneratedProject object, which is just a holder for the created project directory and the set of DataObjects which should be opened when the wizard finishes. I'd love to see simple.project.templates moved out of the javacard cluster, as it is really useful and much simpler than any of the stuff currently done for generating projects.  It would also be possible to do much richer tools for creating projects in apisupport - i.e. choose (or create in the wizard) the templates you want to use, generate a skeleton wizard with a UI for all the properties you'd like to substitute, etc. Here is a partial project template from Javacard - for example usage, see org.netbeans.modules.javacard.wizard.ProjectWizardIterator in javacard.project (or the much simpler one in contrib/nodejs). #This properties file describes what to create when a project template is#instantiated.  The keys are paths on disk relative to the project root. #The values are paths to the templates to use for those files in the system#filesystem.  Any string inside {{ and }}'s will be substituted using properties#gathered in the template wizard.#Special key prefixes are #  pp. - indicates an entry for nbproject/project.properties#  pvp. - indicates an entry for nbproject/private/private.properties #File templates, in format [path-in-project=path-to-template]META-INF/javacard.xml=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/javacard.xmlMETA-INF/MANIFEST.MF=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/EAP_MANIFEST.MF APPLET-INF/applet.xml=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/applet.xmlscripts/{{classnamelowercase}}.scr=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/test.scrsrc/{{packagepath}}/{{classname}}.java*=Templates/javacard/ExtendedApplet.java nbproject/deployment.xml=org-netbeans-modules-javacard/templates/deployment.xml#project.properties contentspp.display.name={{projectname}}pp.platform.active={{activeplatform}} pp.active.device={{activedevice}}pp.includes=**pp.excludes= I will be using the above info in an upcoming blog entry and provide step by step instructions showing how to use them. However, anyone else out there should have enough info from the above to get started yourself!

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• The Joy Of Hex

  - by Jim Giercyk

  While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s.  Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order.       CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language.     CHARACTER:  The character level is what is rendered by the computer.  A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable.  Each character represents 1 BYTE of data.  For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks.  Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte.  In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here:  http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX:  Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16.  Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch.  Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F.  Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10.  Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal.  DECIMAL:  The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions.  It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex.  In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module.  Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex.  This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day.  BINARY:  Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s.  It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0.  In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s?  Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ).  Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from  another in the computers head (or CPU).  Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time.  A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster.  There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference.    DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111   Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte.  I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing.  This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned.  It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes.  There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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• Lazy HTML attributes wrapping in Internet Explorer

  - by AGS777

  Having encountered this Internet Explorer (all versions) behavior several times previously, I eventually decided to share this most probably useless knowledge. Excuse my lengthy explanations because I am going to show the behavior along with a very simple case when one can come across it inadvertently. Let's say I want to implement some simple templating solution in JavaScript. I wrote an HTML template with an intention to bind data to it on the client side: Please note, that name of the “sys-template” class is just a coincidence. I do not use any ASP.NET AJAX code in this simple example. As you can see we need to replace placeholders (property name wrapped with curly braces) with actual data. Also, as you can see, many of the placeholders are situated within attribute values and it is where the danger lies. I am going to use <a /> element HTML as a template and replace each placeholder pattern with respective properties’ values with a little bit of jQuery like this: You can find complete code along with the contextFormat() method definition at the end of the post. Let’s assume that value for the name property (that we want to put in the title attribute) of the first data item is “first tooltip”. So it consists of two words. When the replacement occurred, title attribute should contain the “first tooltip” text which we are going to see as a tooltip for the <a /> element. But let’s run the sample code in Internet Explorer and check it out. What you’ll see is that only the first word of the supposed “title” attribute’s content is shown. So, were is the rest of my attribute and what happened? The answer is obvious once you see the result of jQuery(“.sys-template”).html() line for the given HTML markup. In IE you’ll get the following <A id={id} class={cssClass} title={name} href="{source}" myAttr="{attr}">Link to {source}</A> See any difference between this HTML and the one shown earlier? No? Then look carefully. While the original HTML of the <a /> element is well-formed and all the attributes are correctly quoted, when you take the same HTML back in Internet Explorer (it doesn’t matter whether you use html() method from jQuery library or IE’s innerHTML directly), you lose attributes’ quotes for some of the attributes. Then, after replacement, we’ll get following HTML for our first data item. I marked the attribute value in question with italic: <A id=1 class=first title=first tooltip href="first.html" myAttr="firstAttr">Link to first.html</A> Now you can easily imagine for yourself what happens when this HTML is inserted into the document and why we do not see the second (and any subsequent words if any) of our title attribute in the tooltip. There are still two important things to note. The first one (and it actually the reason why I named the post “lazy wrapping” is that if value of the HTML attribute does contains spaces in the original HTML, then it WILL be wrapped with quotation marks. For example, if I wrote following on my page (note the trailing space for the title attribute value) <a href="{source}" title="{name}  " id="{id}" myAttr="{attr}" class="{cssClass}">Link to {source}</a> then I would have my placeholder quoted correctly and the result of the replacement would render as expected: The second important thing to note is that there are exceptions for the lazy attributes wrapping rule in IE. As you can see href attribute value did not contain spaces exactly as all the other attributes with placeholders, but it was still returned correctly quoted Custom attribute myAttr is also quoted correctly when returned back from document, though its placeholder value does not contain spaces either. Now, on account of the highly unlikely probability that you found this information useful and need a solution to the problem the aforementioned behavior introduces for Internet Explorer browser, I can suggest a simple workaround – manually quote the mischievous attributes prior the placeholder pattern is replaced. Using the code of contextFormat() method shown below, you would need to add following line right before the return statement: result = result.replace(/=({([^}]+)})/g, '="$1"'); Below please find original sample code:

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• Remote Workers...We're Not That Bad!

  - by user12601034

  I work from home a lot – my team is located in different cities and countries, my manager is in a different city, and most of our work is done via conference calls, email and collaboration through Oracle Social Network. We’ve figured out how to be effective and involve team members, regardless of where we are all located. When I mention that I work from home, a lot of my friends will laugh, roll their eyes or use their fingers to make quotation marks around “work from home.” Their belief is that I’m sitting at home, eating bon-bons and watching television. The attempts at humor only multiply when they know that my husband also mostly works from home. So, it was with great joy that I read the Lifehacker article Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged. I’m not going to re-write the article for you, but four highlights from the article include: Proximity breeds complacency –because communicating with employees sitting next to you is so easy, you may not do it well. Absence makes people try harder to connect – because you have to make an effort to connect to your team, you tend to pay better attention when you do connect Leaders of virtual team make better use of tools – when working remotely, you will use technology (many different forms of it) to connect with your team. This daily use of the tools makes you more proficient with those tools Leaders of far-flung teams maximize the time spent together – getting together takes effort, time and money, so leaders tend to filter out distractions when teams do get together. These points made me happy because I’ve seen the same things play out in my team located around the world. And I’m not saying that a virtual team is more effective than a co-located team – but my virtual team doesn’t have the option of filing into a conference room for a face-to-face meeting whenever we want. Instead, we have to figure out how to work effectively without meeting face-to-face. Am I more engaged as a remote worker? I’d like to think that I am. I’ve been on calls with colleagues at 3am – this would never happen if my only option was to be in the office. I can leave my “office” to pick up my kids from school…and I’m willingly back online after kids are in bed to finish up anything I need to. Oracle Social Network lets me use my iPad to engage with my teammates when I’m waiting at music lessons, the doctor’s office or any place else with a network connection. I feel like I’m more connected with my team, and I feel like I’m more connected with my family life. So yes, I am a remote worker, and I am engaged. If you lead a virtual team, I challenge you to increase the ways that you communicate to effectively engage your team. If you are on a virtual team, I challenge you to think about how you might interact with team members to keep both them and yourself engaged in your work. And if you have some great ideas on how to make virtual teams (and workers) effective and engaged, please share those ideas in the comments! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get a bon-bon...   :) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

  - by andrewbrust

  Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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• How do I prevent the concurrent execution of a javascript function?

  - by RyanV

  I am making a ticker similar to the "From the AP" one at The Huffington Post, using jQuery. The ticker rotates through a ul, either by user command (clicking an arrow) or by an auto-scroll. Each list-item is display:none by default. It is revealed by the addition of a "showHeadline" class which is display:list-item. HTML for the UL Looks like this: <ul class="news" id="news"> <li class="tickerTitle showHeadline">Test Entry</li> <li class="tickerTitle">Test Entry2</li> <li class="tickerTitle">Test Entry3</li> </ul> When the user clicks the right arrow, or the auto-scroll setTimeout goes off, it runs a tickForward() function: function tickForward(){ var $active = $('#news li.showHeadline'); var $next = $active.next(); if($next.length==0) $next = $('#news li:first'); $active.stop(true, true); $active.fadeOut('slow', function() {$active.removeClass('showHeadline');}); setTimeout(function(){$next.fadeIn('slow', function(){$next.addClass('showHeadline');})}, 1000); if(isPaused == true){ } else{ startScroll() } }; This is heavily inspired by Jon Raasch's A Simple jQuery Slideshow. Basically, find what's visible, what should be visible next, make the visible thing fade and remove the class that marks it as visible, then fade in the next thing and add the class that makes it visible. Now, everything is hunky-dory if the auto-scroll is running, kicking off tickForward() once every three seconds. But if the user clicks the arrow button repeatedly, it creates two negative conditions: Rather than advance quickly through the list for just the number of clicks made, it continues scrolling at a faster-than-normal rate indefinitely. It can produce a situation where two (or more) list items are given the .showHeadline class, so there's overlap on the list. I can see these happening (especially #2) because the tickForward() function can run concurrently with itself, producing different sets of $active and $next. So I think my question is: What would be the best way to prevent concurrent execution of the tickForward() method? Some things I have tried or considered: Setting a Flag: When tickForward() runs, it sets an isRunning flag to true, and sets it back to false right before it ends. The logic for the event handler is set to only call tickForward() if isRunning is false. I tried a simple implementation of this, and isRunning never appeared to be changed. The jQuery queue(): I think it would be useful to queue up the tickForward() commands, so if you clicked it five times quickly, it would still run as commanded but wouldn't run concurrently. However, in my cursory reading on the subject, it appears that a queue has to be attached to the object its queue applies to, and since my tickForward() method affects multiple lis, I don't know where I'd attach it.

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• Would Ruby on Rails be appropriate for this Foreign Language project?

  - by Lynne Overesch-Maister

  I'm a Spanish professor & computer groupie. About 15 years ago, I authored in HyperCard a series of verb conjugation programs that are now completely out of date with respect to System OS X. I would like to redo these programs myself because I had a lot of fun doing them last time (mostly I coded while my son played in Leaps and Bounds, you know, one of those places where parents take their kids & let them run wild through the tubes...). Colleagues have mentioned using Flash, Director, and various other solutions, but I saw a presentation on RoR at our SIDLIT conference today, and was inspired. I will be parsing and comparing strings (and there are other features on top of that, but that is the main one), "adding" strings relationally indexed in some kind of database(s). It will also have to handle various foreign characters (accents, upside down question marks, etc.). On top of the main process of the program, it will have to provide a practice vs. test mode, keep track of specific answers as well as totals right/wrong, and print a report. Would this be either easier and/or more efficiently done in RoR than in other languages. I am pretty sure that it will work on a Microsoft server, right? Because I think that is where most of our stuff is. I would be programming either on a Mac or a PC, whichever you think is easier. So, in summary, is RoR the way for me to go with this project? If I have some (little) experience programming in Hypercard and C, should I be able to pick RoR up fairly quickly? What things will I need to start (I already saw something called Redhills foreign key migration plugin, which I assume would be beneficial)? I still have my old scripts from hypercard, however what I would really like to do is to combine all six of my former tense-specific programs into one larger program. I figure that it wouldn't be too hard to reference the individual tenses in some way--could that be a class? Many thanks for any help you can give me on this forum.

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• Simple Grouping With TableSorter Plugin

  - by HurnsMobile

  Im playing around with the Tablesorter plug-in for jQuery and was trying to get a very simple grouping functionality added into it. Using the follow html/js works great until you click sort again and reverse the order. The headers get moved to the bottom of the group when this happens. The following is my (admitedly hacky) attempt at it. Does anyone have any ideas? <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>Table Manipulation Test</title> <link type="text/css" href="css/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="tablesorter/themes/green/style.css" type="text/css"/> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="tablesorter/jquery.tablesorter.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $("#test_table").tablesorter({ sortForce: [[3,0]] }); $(".group_details").hide(); $(".group_header").click(function(){ var group = $(this).attr("group"); var $expander = $(this).children("td.expanderguy") if ($("." + group + ":visible").length){ $("." + group + "").fadeOut('fast'); $expander.html("<img src='icons/plus.gif'>"); } else{ $("." + group + "").fadeIn('fast'); $expander.html("<img src='icons/minus.gif'>"); } }); } ); </script> <style type="text/css"> .group_header td{ background-color: #888888; !important } </style> </head> <body> <table id="test_table" class="tablesorter"> <thead> <tr><th>First Name</th><th>Last Name</th><th>Email</th><th>Due Date</th><th>Amount Due</th></tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr class="group_header" group="group1"><td class="expanderguy"><img src="icons/plus.gif"></td><td></td><td></td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td></td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Flavian</td><td>Wenceslas</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Gordian</td><td>Ives</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$1700</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Saladin</td><td>Tarquin</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$1700</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Urban</td><td>Cyprian</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$1500</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Sargon</td><td>Swithun</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$1100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Pompey</td><td>Ladislas</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$300</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group1"><td>Attila</td><td>Hiawatha</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Monday, June 7</td><td>$200</td></tr> <tr class="group_header" group="group2"><td class="expanderguy"><img src="icons/plus.gif"></td><td></td><td></td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td></td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Bruce</td><td>Fenton</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$1700</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Wade</td><td>Sequoia</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$1400</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Eddie</td><td>Jerold</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$1100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Lynn</td><td>Lucan</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$1200</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Taegan</td><td>Tadg</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Clyde</td><td>Reed</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$6100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Alaois</td><td>Art</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$2100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group2"><td>Gilbert</td><td>Patsy</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Tuesday, June 8</td><td>$1500</td></tr> <tr class="group_header" group="group3"><td class="expanderguy"><img src="icons/plus.gif"></td><td></td><td></td><td>Wednesday, June 9</td><td></td></tr> <tr class="group_details group3" ><td>Clem</td><td>Eben</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Wednesday, June 9</td><td>$2100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group3" ><td>Elijah</td><td>Julyan</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Wednesday, June 9</td><td>$2100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group3" ><td>Marvyn</td><td>Damian</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Wednesday, June 9</td><td>$1100</td></tr> <tr class="group_details group3" ><td>Sawyer</td><td>Ryker</td><td>[email protected]</td><td>Wednesday, June 9</td><td>$500</td></tr> </tbody> </table> </body>

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• Lucene: Wildcards are missing from index

  - by Eleasar

  Hi - i am building a search index that contains special names - containing ! and ? and & and + and ... I have to tread the following searches different: me & you me + you But whatever i do (did try with queryparser escaping before indexing, escaped it manually, tried different indexers...) - if i check the search index with Luke they do not show up (question marks and @-symbols and the like show up) The logic behind is that i am doing partial searches for a live suggestion (and the fields are not that large) so i split it up into "m" and "me" and "+" and "y" and "yo" and "you" and then index it (that way it is way faster than a wildcard query search (and the index size is not a big problem). So what i would need is to also have this special wildcard characters be inserted into the index. This is my code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Lucene.Net.Analysis; using Lucene.Net.Util; namespace AnalyzerSpike { public class CustomAnalyzer : Analyzer { public override TokenStream TokenStream(string fieldName, TextReader reader) { return new ASCIIFoldingFilter(new LowerCaseFilter(new CustomCharTokenizer(reader))); } } public class CustomCharTokenizer : CharTokenizer { public CustomCharTokenizer(TextReader input) : base(input) { } public CustomCharTokenizer(AttributeSource source, TextReader input) : base(source, input) { } public CustomCharTokenizer(AttributeFactory factory, TextReader input) : base(factory, input) { } protected override bool IsTokenChar(char c) { return c != ' '; } } } The code to create the index: private void InitIndex(string path, Analyzer analyzer) { var writer = new IndexWriter(path, analyzer, true); //some multiline textbox that contains one item per line: var all = new List<string>(txtAllAvailable.Text.Replace("\r","").Split('\n')); foreach (var item in all) { writer.AddDocument(GetDocument(item)); } writer.Optimize(); writer.Close(); } private static Document GetDocument(string name) { var doc = new Document(); doc.Add(new Field( "name", DeNormalizeName(name), Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.ANALYZED)); doc.Add(new Field( "raw_name", name, Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.NOT_ANALYZED)); return doc; } (Code is with Lucene.net in version 1.9.x (EDIT: sorry - was 2.9.x) but is compatible with Lucene from Java) Thx

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• How do I change a child's parent in NHibernate when cascade is delete-all-orphan?

  - by Daniel T.

  I have two entities in a bi-directional one-to-many relationship: public class Storage { public IList<Box> Boxes { get; set; } } public class Box { public Storage CurrentStorage { get; set; } } And the mapping: <class name="Storage"> <bag name="Boxes" cascade="all-delete-orphan" inverse="true"> <key column="Storage_Id" /> <one-to-many class="Box" /> </bag> </class> <class name="Box"> <many-to-one name="CurrentStorage" column="Storage_Id" /> </class> A Storage can have many Boxes, but a Box can only belong to one Storage. I have them mapped so that the one-to-many has a cascade of all-delete-orphan. My problem arises when I try to change a Box's Storage. Assuming I already ran this code: var storage1 = new Storage(); var storage2 = new Storage(); storage1.Boxes.Add(new Box()); Session.Create(storage1); Session.Create(storage2); The following code will give me an exception: // get the first and only box in the DB var existingBox = Database.GetBox().First(); // remove the box from storage1 existingBox.CurrentStorage.Boxes.Remove(existingBox); // add the box to storage2 after it's been removed from storage1 var storage2 = Database.GetStorage().Second(); storage2.Boxes.Add(existingBox); Session.Flush(); // commit changes to DB I get the following exception: NHibernate.ObjectDeletedException : deleted object would be re-saved by cascade (remove deleted object from associations) This exception occurs because I have the cascade set to all-delete-orphan. The first Storage detected that I removed the Box from its collection and marks it for deletion. However, when I added it to the second Storage (in the same session), it attempts to save the box again and the ObjectDeletedException is thrown. My question is, how do I get the Box to change its parent Storage without encountering this exception? I know one possible solution is to change the cascade to just all, but then I lose the ability to have NHibernate automatically delete a Box by simply removing it from a Storage and not re-associating it with another one. Or is this the only way to do it and I have to manually call Session.Delete on the box in order to remove it?

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• IE6 CSS tooltip not appearing

  - by Lauren

  I'm using a tooltip that works in FF, Chrome, and IE7-8, but in IE6 it doesn't appear. You can go to this page http://www.avaline.com/ Bags/ Eco-Friendly-Bags/R1500 and login with [email protected] password:test02, then hit the "add to cart" button and hover over the question marks to see (or not see) the tooltips. This is the relevant HTML and CSS: <DIV class=oewBox id=oewImpLocDiv style="BACKGROUND-IMAGE: url(/images/img/org4.gif)"> <A class=tooltip href="#"><SPAN class=""><STRONG>More than 2 imprint locations?</STRONG> Test </SPAN></A> </DIV> <style> /* Rule from element "style" attribute */ element.style { BACKGROUND-IMAGE: url(/images/img/org4.gif) } /* Rule N°8 from inline stylesheet */ .oewBox { PADDING-RIGHT: 8px; PADDING-LEFT: 40px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 16px; MARGIN: 0px 0px 6px; PADDING-TOP: 6px; BORDER-BOTTOM: #ff7c14 3px solid } /* Rule N°7 from inline stylesheet */ .oewBox { BACKGROUND-POSITION: 0px 0px; BACKGROUND-IMAGE: none; BACKGROUND-REPEAT: no-repeat } /* Rule N°11 from /site/av-files/mainstyles.css */ A:active { COLOR: #3b88c4; TEXT-DECORATION: none } /* Rule N°10 from /site/av-files/mainstyles.css */ A:hover { COLOR: #000; TEXT-DECORATION: none } /* Rule N°9 from /site/av-files/mainstyles.css */ A:visited { COLOR: #3b88c4; TEXT-DECORATION: underline } /* Rule N°8 from /site/av-files/mainstyles.css */ A:link { COLOR: #3b88c4; TEXT-DECORATION: underline } /* Rule N°7 from /site/av-files/mainstyles.css */ A { COLOR: #3b88c4; TEXT-DECORATION: underline } /* Rule N°52 from inline stylesheet */ A.tooltip { BACKGROUND: url(/images/img/question.gif) no-repeat; FLOAT: right; WIDTH: 19px; HEIGHT: 20px } /* Rule N°54 from inline stylesheet */ A.tooltip:hover SPAN { BORDER-RIGHT: #ff7c14 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #ff7c14 1px solid; DISPLAY: inline; BACKGROUND: #ffffff; BORDER-LEFT: #ff7c14 1px solid; COLOR: #000; BORDER-BOTTOM: #ff7c14 1px solid; POSITION: absolute } /* Rule N°53 from inline stylesheet */ A.tooltip SPAN { PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; DISPLAY: none; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 11px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 2px; MARGIN-LEFT: -245px; WIDTH: 230px; PADDING-TOP: 2px } </style>

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• Separating positive values from 'zero' values in an XSLT for-each statement

  - by danielle

  I am traversing an XML file (that contains multiple tables) using XSLT. Part of the job of the page is to get the title of each table, and present that title with along with the number of items that table contains (i.e. "Problems (5)"). I am able to get the number of items, but I now need to separate the sections with 0 (zero) items in them, and put them at the bottom of the list of table titles. I'm having trouble with this because the other items with positive numbers need to be left in their original order/not sorted. Here is the code for the list of titles: <ul> <xsl:for-each select="n1:component/n1:structuredBody/n1:component/n1:section/n1:title"> <li style="list-style-type:none;"> <div style = "padding:3px"><a href="#{generate-id(.)}"> <xsl:variable name ="count" select ="count(../n1:entry)"/> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test = "$count != 0"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> (<xsl:value-of select="$count"/>) </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <div id = "zero"><xsl:value-of select="."/> (<xsl:value-of select="$count"/>)</div> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </a> </div> </li> </xsl:for-each> </ul> Right now, the "zero" div just marks each link as gray. Any help regarding how to place the "zero" divs at the bottom of the list would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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• asp.net web forms best practice to retrieve dynamic server control values

  - by Andrew Florko

  I populate web form with dynamic list of exams from database. I want user to enter examination marks for each exam. There is list of exam titles and textbox near each title. I create list with repeater control: <asp:Repeater ID="rptExams" runat="server" onitemdatabound="rptExams_ItemDataBound" > <ItemTemplate> <tr> <td> <asp:Literal runat="server" ID="ltTitle"/> </td> <td> <asp:HiddenField runat="server" ID="hfId"/> <asp:Textbox runat="server" ID="tbMark"/> </td> </tr> </ItemTemplate> </asp:Repeater> And bind data to repeater on page_init: class Exam { public int Id { get; set;} public string Title { get; set;} } ... // this list is retrieved from database actually Exam[] Exams = new Exam[] { new Exam { Id = 1, Title = "Math"}, new Exam { Id = 2, Title = "History"} }; ... protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e) { rptExams.DataSource = Exams; rptExams.DataBind(); } So far so good. Then I have to retrieve data on postback. I have two ways but both of them looks ugly. Idea is to store dynamically created databounded controls on ItemDataBoundEvent in Page_Init stage, and process their values in Page_Load stage. It looks like this: private Dictionary<HiddenField, TextBox> Id2Mark = new Dictionary<HiddenField, TextBox>(); protected void rptExams_ItemDataBound(object sender, RepeaterItemEventArgs e) { ... if (IsPostBack) { var tbMark = (TextBox)e.Item.FindControl("tbMark"); var hfId = (HiddenField)e.Item.FindControl("hfId"); // store dynamically created controls Id2Mark.Add(hfId, tbMark); } ... } protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (IsPostBack) { foreach (var pair in Id2Mark) { int examId = Int32.Parse(pair.Key.Value); string mark = pair.Value.Text; // PROCESS } ... I'm completely sure there is a better way to retrieve data from dynamically created controls. Thank you in advance!

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• How to cache queries in EJB and return result efficient (performance POV)

  - by Maxym

  I use JBoss EJB 3.0 implementation (JBoss 4.2.3 server) At the beginning I created native query all the time using construction like Query query = entityManager.createNativeQuery("select * from _table_"); Of couse it is not that efficient, I performed some tests and found out that it really takes a lot of time... Then I found a better way to deal with it, to use annotation to define native queries: @NamedNativeQuery( name = "fetchData", value = "select * from _table_", resultClass=Entity.class ) and then just use it Query query = entityManager.createNamedQuery("fetchData"); the performance of code line above is two times better than where I started from, but still not that good as I expected... then I found that I can switch to Hibernate annotation for NamedNativeQuery (anyway, JBoss's implementation of EJB is based on Hibernate), and add one more thing: @NamedNativeQuery( name = "fetchData2", value = "select * from _table_", resultClass=Entity.class, readOnly=true) readOnly - marks whether the results are fetched in read-only mode or not. It sounds good, because at least in this case of mine I don't need to update data, I wanna just fetch it for report. When I started server to measure performance I noticed that query without readOnly=true (by default it is false) returns result with each iteration better and better, and at the same time another one (fetchData2) works like "stable" and with time difference between them is shorter and shorter, and after 5 iterations speed of both was almost the same... The questions are: 1) is there any other way to speed query using up? Seems that named queries should be prepared once, but I can't say it... In fact if to create query once and then just use it it would be better from performance point of view, but it is problematic to cache this object, because after creating query I can set parameters (when I use ":variable" in query), and it changes query object (isn't it?). well, is here any way to cache them? Or named query is the best option I can use? 2) any other approaches how to make results retrieveng faster. I mean, for instance I don't need those Entities to be attached, I won't update them, all I need is just fetch collection of data. Maybe readOnly is the only available way, so I can't speed it up, but who knows :) P.S. I don't ask about DB performance, all I need now is how not to create query all the time, so use it efficient, and to "allow" EJB to do less job with the same result concerning data returning.

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• php pdo connection scope

  - by Scarface

  Hey guys I have a connection class I found for pdo. I am calling the connection method on the page that the file is included on. The problem is that within functions the $conn variable is not defined even though I stated the method was public (bare with me I am very new to OOP), and I was wondering if anyone had an elegant solution other then using global in every function. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. CONNECTION class PDOConnectionFactory{ // receives the connection public $con = null; // swich database? public $dbType = "mysql"; // connection parameters // when it will not be necessary leaves blank only with the double quotations marks "" public $host = "localhost"; public $user = "user"; public $senha = "password"; public $db = "database"; // arrow the persistence of the connection public $persistent = false; // new PDOConnectionFactory( true ) <--- persistent connection // new PDOConnectionFactory() <--- no persistent connection public function PDOConnectionFactory( $persistent=false ){ // it verifies the persistence of the connection if( $persistent != false){ $this->persistent = true; } } public function getConnection(){ try{ // it carries through the connection $this->con = new PDO($this->dbType.":host=".$this->host.";dbname=".$this->db, $this->user, $this->senha, array( PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => $this->persistent ) ); // carried through successfully, it returns connected return $this->con; // in case that an error occurs, it returns the error; }catch ( PDOException $ex ){ echo "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. We have a bunch of monkies working really hard to fix the problem. Check back soon: ".$ex->getMessage(); } } // close connection public function Close(){ if( $this->con != null ) $this->con = null; } } PAGE USED ON include("includes/connection.php"); $db = new PDOConnectionFactory(); $conn = $db->getConnection(); function test(){ try{ $sql = 'SELECT * FROM topic'; $stmt = $conn->prepare($sql); $result=$stmt->execute(); } catch(PDOException $e){ echo $e->getMessage(); } } test();

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• php regex guitar tab (tabs or tablature, a type of music notation)

  - by John

  I am in the process of creating a guitar tab to rtttl (Ring Tone Text Transfer Language) converter in PHP. In order to prepare a guitar tab for rtttl conversion I first strip out all comments (comments noted by #- and ended with -#), I then have a few lines that set tempo, note the tunning and define multiple instruments (Tempo 120\nDefine Guitar 1\nDefine Bass 1, etc etc) which are stripped out of the tab and set aside for later use. Now I essentially have nothing left except the guitar tabs. Each tab is prefixed with it's instrument name in conjunction with the instrument name noted prior. Some times we have tabs for 2 separate instruments that are linked because they are to be played together, ie a Guitar and a Bass Guitar playing together. Example 1, Standard Guitar Tab: |Guitar 1 e|--------------3-------------------3------------| B|------------3---3---------------3---3----------| G|----------0-------0-----------0-------0--------| D|--------0-----------0-------0-----------0------| A|------2---------------2---2---------------2----| E|----3-------------------3-------------------3--| Example 2, Conjunction Tab: |Guitar 1 e|--------------3-------------------3------------| B|------------3---3---------------3---3----------| G|----------0-------0-----------0-------0--------| D|--------0-----------0-------0-----------0------| A|------2---------------2---2---------------2----| E|----3-------------------3-------------------3--| | | |Bass 1 G|----------0-------0-----------0-------0--------| D|--------2-----------2-------2-----------2------| A|------3---------------3---3---------------3----| E|----3-------------------3-------------------3--| I have considered other methods of identifying the tabs with no solid results. I am hoping that someone who does regular expressions could help me find a way to identify a single guitar tab and if possible also be able to match a tab with multiple instruments linked together. Once the tabs are in an array I will go through them one line at a time and convert them into rtttl lines (exploded at each new line "\n"). I do not want to separate the guitar tabs in the document via explode "\n\n" or something similar because it does not identify the guitar tab, rather, it is identifying the space between the tabs - not on the tabs themselves. I have been messing with this for about a week now and this is the only major hold up I have. Everything else is fairly simple. As of current, I have tried many variations of the regex pattern. Here is one of the most recent test samples: <?php $t = " |Guitar 1 e|--------------3-------------------3------------| B|------------3---3---------------3---3----------| G|----------0-------0-----------0-------0--------| D|--------0-----------0-------0-----------0------| A|------2---------------2---2---------------2----| E|----3-------------------3-------------------3--| |Guitar 1 e|--------------3-------------------3------------| B|------------3---3---------------3---3----------| G|----------0-------0-----------0-------0--------| D|--------0-----------0-------0-----------0------| A|------2---------------2---2---------------2----| E|----3-------------------3-------------------3--| | | |Bass 1 G|----------0-------0-----------0-------0--------| D|--------2-----------2-------2-----------2------| A|------3---------------3---3---------------3----| E|----3-------------------3-------------------3--| "; preg_match_all("/^.*?(\\|).*?(\\|)/is",$t,$p); print_r($p); ?> It is also worth noting that inside the tabs, where the dashes and #'s are, you may also have any variation of letters, numbers and punctuation. The beginning of each line marks the tuning of each string with one of the following case insensitive: a,a#,b,c,c#,d,d#,e,f,f#,g or g. Thanks in advance for help with this most difficult problem.

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• Graph Tour with Uniform Cost Search in Java

  - by user324817

  Hi. I'm new to this site, so hopefully you guys don't mind helping a nub. Anyway, I've been asked to write code to find the shortest cost of a graph tour on a particular graph, whose details are read in from file. The graph is shown below: http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/8907/graphr.jpg This is for an Artificial Intelligence class, so I'm expected to use a decent enough search method (brute force has been allowed, but not for full marks). I've been reading, and I think that what I'm looking for is an A* search with constant heuristic value, which I believe is a uniform cost search. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to apply this in Java. Basically, here's what I have: Vertex class - ArrayList<Edge> adjacencies; String name; int costToThis; Edge class - final Vertex target; public final int weight; Now at the moment, I'm struggling to work out how to apply the uniform cost notion to my desired goal path. Basically I have to start on a particular node, visit all other nodes, and end on that same node, with the lowest cost. As I understand it, I could use a PriorityQueue to store all of my travelled paths, but I can't wrap my head around how I show the goal state as the starting node with all other nodes visited. Here's what I have so far, which is pretty far off the mark: public static void visitNode(Vertex vertex) { ArrayList<Edge> firstEdges = vertex.getAdjacencies(); for(Edge e : firstEdges) { e.target.costToThis = e.weight + vertex.costToThis; queue.add(e.target); } Vertex next = queue.remove(); visitNode(next); } Initially this takes the starting node, then recursively visits the first node in the PriorityQueue (the path with the next lowest cost). My problem is basically, how do I stop my program from following a path specified in the queue if that path is at the goal state? The queue currently stores Vertex objects, but in my mind this isn't going to work as I can't store whether other vertices have been visited inside a Vertex object. Help is much appreciated! Josh

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• pdo connection scope

  - by Scarface

  Hey guys I have a connection class I found for pdo. I am calling the connection method on the page that the file is included on. The problem is that within functions the $conn variable is not defined even though I stated the method was public (bare with me I am very new to OOP), and I was wondering if anyone had an elegant solution other then using global in every function. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. CONNECTION class PDOConnectionFactory{ // receives the connection public $con = null; // swich database? public $dbType = "mysql"; // connection parameters // when it will not be necessary leaves blank only with the double quotations marks "" public $host = "localhost"; public $user = "user"; public $senha = "password"; public $db = "database"; // arrow the persistence of the connection public $persistent = false; // new PDOConnectionFactory( true ) <--- persistent connection // new PDOConnectionFactory() <--- no persistent connection public function PDOConnectionFactory( $persistent=false ){ // it verifies the persistence of the connection if( $persistent != false){ $this->persistent = true; } } public function getConnection(){ try{ // it carries through the connection $this->con = new PDO($this->dbType.":host=".$this->host.";dbname=".$this->db, $this->user, $this->senha, array( PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => $this->persistent ) ); // carried through successfully, it returns connected return $this->con; // in case that an error occurs, it returns the error; }catch ( PDOException $ex ){ echo "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. We have a bunch of monkies working really hard to fix the problem. Check back soon: ".$ex->getMessage(); } } // close connection public function Close(){ if( $this->con != null ) $this->con = null; } } PAGE USED ON include("includes/connection.php"); $db = new PDOConnectionFactory(); $conn = $db->getConnection(); function test(){ try{ $sql = 'SELECT * FROM topic'; $stmt = $conn->prepare($sql); $result=$stmt->execute(); } catch(PDOException $e){ echo $e->getMessage(); } } test();

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• Gmail and Live are making all messages from my server as spam.

  - by Ryan Kearney

  I'm getting very weird results here. When my server sends an email to my @hotmail or @gmail account, it's marked as spam. When I send email through my server from Outlook to @hotmail, it doesn't get marked as spam, but it still gets marked as spam in gmail. They seem to get through fine on Yahoo though. My servers hostname A record points to an IP address whose PTR record points back to the same domain name. The TXT record has a SPF record in it to allow email to be sent from that servers IP. I moved from a VPS to a Dedicated server when this started to happen. From what I can see, the email headers are identical. Here's one of my email headers that gmail marks as spam. Some fields were repalced. MYGMAILACCOUNT is the email address of the account the email was addressed to. USER is the name of the account on the system it was sent from HOSTNAME is the servers FQDN IPADDR is the IP Address of the Hostname MYDOMAIN is my domain name Delivered-To: MYGMAILACCOUNT Received: by 10.220.77.82 with SMTP id f18cs263483vck; Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:58:02 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.150.16.4 with SMTP id 4mr3886702ybp.110.1267343881628; Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:58:01 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <USER@HOSTNAME> Received: from HOSTNAME (HOSTNAME [IPADDR]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 17si4604419yxe.134.2010.02.27.23.58.01; Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:58:01 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of USER@HOSTNAME designates IPADDR as permitted sender) client-ip=IPADDR; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of USER@HOSTNAME designates IPADDR as permitted sender) smtp.mail=USER@HOSTNAME Received: from USER by HOSTNAME with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from <USER@HOSTNAME>) id 1Nle2K-0000t8-Bd for MYGMAILACCOUNT; Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:57:36 -0500 To: Ryan Kearney <MYGMAILACCOUNT> Subject: [Email Subject] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: webmaster@MYDOMAIN Message-Id: <E1Nle2K-0000t8-Bd@HOSTNAME> Sender: <USER@HOSTNAME> Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:57:36 -0500 X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - HOSTNAME X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - gmail.com X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [503 500] / [47 12] X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - HOSTNAME Anyone have any ideas as to why all mail leaving my server gets marked as spam? EDIT: I already used http://www.mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx to check if my servers IP's are blacklisted and they are in fact not. That's what I thought at first, but it isn't the case. Update Mar 1, 2010 I received the following email from Microsoft Thank you for writing to Windows Live Hotmail Domain Support. My name is * and I will be assisting you today. We have identified that messages from your IP are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. This is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft and is built around the technology of machine learning. It learns to recognize what is and isn't spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless. E-mails from IPs are filtered based upon a combination of IP reputation and the content of individual emails. The reputation of an IP is influenced by a number of factors. Among these factors, which you as a sender can control, are: The IP's Junk Mail Reporting complaint rate The frequency and volume in which email is sent The number of spam trap account hits The RCPT success rate So I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that I got an IP address with little or no history in sending email. I've confirmed that I'm not on any blacklists. I'm guessing it's one of those things that will work itself out in a month or so. I'll post when I hear more.

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• Courier Maildrop error user unknown. Command output: Invalid user specified

  - by cad

  Hello I have a problem with maildrop. I have read dozens of webs/howto/emails but couldnt solve it. My objective is moving automatically spam messages to a spam folder. My email server is working perfectly. It marks spam in subject and headers using spamassasin. My box has: Ubuntu 9.04 Web: Apache2 + Php5 + MySQL MTA: Postfix 2.5.5 + SpamAssasin + virtual users using mysql IMAP: Courier 0.61.2 + Courier AuthLib WebMail: SquirrelMail I have read that I could use Squirrelmail directly (not a good idea), procmail or maildrop. As I already have maildrop in the box (from courier) I have configured the server to use maildrop (added an entry in transport table for a virtual domain). I found this error in email: This is the mail system at host foo.net I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster. If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message. The mail system <[email protected]>: user unknown. Command output: Invalid user specified. Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected] Action: failed Status: 5.1.1 Diagnostic-Code: x-unix; Invalid user specified. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: test <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 19:49:57 +0100 Subject: fail fail An this in the logs May 1 18:50:18 foo.net postfix/smtpd[14638]: connect from mail-bw0-f212.google.com[209.85.218.212] May 1 18:50:19 foo.net postfix/smtpd[14638]: 8A9E9DC23F: client=mail-bw0-f212.google.com[209.85.218.212] May 1 18:50:19 foo.net postfix/cleanup[14643]: 8A9E9DC23F: message-id=<[email protected]> May 1 18:50:19 foo.net postfix/qmgr[14628]: 8A9E9DC23F: from=<[email protected]>, size=1858, nrcpt=1 (queue active) May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/pickup[14627]: 1D4B4DC2AA: uid=5002 from=<[email protected]> May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/cleanup[14643]: 1D4B4DC2AA: message-id=<[email protected]> May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/pipe[14644]: 8A9E9DC23F: to=<[email protected]>, relay=spamassassin, delay=3.8, delays=0.55/0.02/0/3.2, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered via spamassassin service) May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/qmgr[14628]: 8A9E9DC23F: removed May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/qmgr[14628]: 1D4B4DC2AA: from=<[email protected]>, size=2173, nrcpt=1 (queue active) **May 1 18:50:23 foo.netpostfix/pipe[14648]: 1D4B4DC2AA: to=<[email protected]>, relay=maildrop, delay=0.22, delays=0.06/0.01/0/0.15, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (user unknown. Command output: Invalid user specified. )** May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/cleanup[14643]: 4C2BFDC240: message-id=<[email protected]> May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/qmgr[14628]: 4C2BFDC240: from=<>, size=3822, nrcpt=1 (queue active) May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/bounce[14651]: 1D4B4DC2AA: sender non-delivery notification: 4C2BFDC240 May 1 18:50:23 foo.net postfix/qmgr[14628]: 1D4B4DC2AA: removed May 1 18:50:24 foo.net postfix/smtp[14653]: 4C2BFDC240: to=<[email protected]>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.211.97]:25, delay=0.91, delays=0.02/0.03/0.12/0.74, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1272739824 37si5422420ywh.59) May 1 18:50:24 foo.net postfix/qmgr[14628]: 4C2BFDC240: removed My config files: http://lar3d.net/main.cf (/etc/postfix) http://lar3d.net/master.c (/etc/postfix) http://lar3d.net/local.cf (/etc/spamassasin) http://lar3d.net/maildroprc (maildroprc) If I change master.cf line (as suggested here) maildrop unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/lib/courier/bin/maildrop -d ${recipient} with maildrop unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/lib/courier/bin/maildrop -d vmail ${recipient} I get the email in /home/vmail/MailDir instead of the correct dir (/home/vmail/foo.net/info/.SPAM ) After reading a lot I have some guess but not sure. - Maybe I have to install userdb? - Maybe is something related with mysql, but everything is working ok - If I try with procmail I will face same problem... - What are flags DRhu for? Couldnt find doc about them - In some places I found maildrop line with more parameters flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/lib/courier/bin/maildrop -d $ ${recipient} ${extension} ${recipient} ${user} ${nexthop} ${sender} I am really lost. Dont know how to continue. If you have any idea or need another config file please let me know. Thanks!!!

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• Regression testing with Selenium GRID

  - by Ben Adderson

  A lot of software teams out there are tasked with supporting and maintaining systems that have grown organically over time, and the web team here at Red Gate is no exception. We're about to embark on our first significant refactoring endeavour for some time, and as such its clearly paramount that the code be tested thoroughly for regressions. Unfortunately we currently find ourselves with a codebase that isn't very testable - the three layers (database, business logic and UI) are currently tightly coupled. This leaves us with the unfortunate problem that, in order to confidently refactor the code, we need unit tests. But in order to write unit tests, we need to refactor the code :S To try and ease the initial pain of decoupling these layers, I've been looking into the idea of using UI automation to provide a sort of system-level regression test suite. The idea being that these tests can help us identify regressions whilst we work towards a more testable codebase, at which point the more traditional combination of unit and integration tests can take over. Ending up with a strong battery of UI tests is also a nice bonus :) Following on from my previous posts (here, here and here) I knew I wanted to use Selenium. I also figured that this would be a good excuse to put my xUnit [Browser] attribute to good use. Pretty quickly, I had a raft of tests that looked like the following (this particular example uses Reflector Pro). In a nut shell the test traverses our shopping cart and, for a particular combination of number of users and months of support, checks that the price calculations all come up with the correct values. [BrowserTheory] [Browser(Browsers.Firefox3_6, "http://www.red-gate.com")] public void Purchase1UserLicenceNoSupport(SeleniumProvider seleniumProvider) {     //Arrange     _browser = seleniumProvider.GetBrowser();     _browser.Open("http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingCart/ProductOption.aspx?Product=ReflectorPro");                  //Act     _browser = ShoppingCartHelpers.TraverseShoppingCart(_browser, 1, 0, ".NET Reflector Pro");     //Assert     var priceResult = PriceHelpers.GetNewPurchasePrice(db, "ReflectorPro", 1, 0, Currencies.Euros);         Assert.Equal(priceResult.Price, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl01_Price"));     Assert.Equal(priceResult.Tax, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Tax"));     Assert.Equal(priceResult.Total, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Total")); } These tests are pretty concise, with much of the common code in the TraverseShoppingCart() and GetNewPurchasePrice() methods. The (inevitable) problem arose when it came to execute these tests en masse. Selenium is a very slick tool, but it can't mask the fact that UI automation is very slow. To give you an idea, the set of cases that covers all of our products, for all combinations of users and support, came to 372 tests (for now only considering purchases in dollars). In the world of automated integration tests, that's a very manageable number. For unit tests, it's a trifle. However for UI automation, those 372 tests were taking just over two hours to run. Two hours may not sound like a lot, but those cases only cover one of the three currencies we deal with, and only one of the many different ways our systems can be asked to calculate a price. It was already pretty clear at this point that in order for this approach to be viable, I was going to have to find a way to speed things up. Up to this point I had been using Selenium Remote Control to automate Firefox, as this was the approach I had used previously and it had worked well. Fortunately,  the guys at SeleniumHQ also maintain a tool for executing multiple Selenium RC tests in parallel: Selenium Grid. Selenium Grid uses a central 'hub' to handle allocation of Selenium tests to individual RCs. The Remote Controls simply register themselves with the hub when they start, and then wait to be assigned work. The (for me) really clever part is that, as far as the client driver library is concerned, the grid hub looks exactly the same as a vanilla remote control. To create a new browser session against Selenium RC, the following C# code suffices: new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.red-gate.com"); This assumes that the RC is running on the local machine, and is listening on port 4444 (the default). Assuming the hub is running on your local machine, then to create a browser session in Selenium Grid, via the hub rather than directly against the control, the code is exactly the same! Behind the scenes, the hub will take this request and hand it off to one of the registered RCs that provides the "*firefox" execution environment. It will then pass all communications back and forth between the test runner and the remote control transparently. This makes running existing RC tests on a Selenium Grid a piece of cake, as the developers intended. For a more detailed description of exactly how Selenium Grid works, see this page. Once I had a test environment capable of running multiple tests in parallel, I needed a test runner capable of doing the same. Unfortunately, this does not currently exist for xUnit (boo!). MbUnit on the other hand, has the concept of concurrent execution baked right into the framework. So after swapping out my assembly references, and fixing up the resulting mismatches in assertions, my example test now looks like this: [Test] public void Purchase1UserLicenceNoSupport() {    //Arrange    ISelenium browser = BrowserHelpers.GetBrowser();    var db = DbHelpers.GetWebsiteDBDataContext();    browser.Start();    browser.Open("http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingCart/ProductOption.aspx?Product=ReflectorPro");                 //Act     browser = ShoppingCartHelpers.TraverseShoppingCart(browser, 1, 0, ".NET Reflector Pro");    var priceResult = PriceHelpers.GetNewPurchasePrice(db, "ReflectorPro", 1, 0, Currencies.Euros);    //Assert     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Price, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl01_Price"));     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Tax, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Tax"));     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Total, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Total")); } This is pretty much the same as the xUnit version. The exceptions are that the attributes have changed,  the //Arrange phase now has to handle setting up the ISelenium object, as the attribute that previously did this has gone away, and the test now sets up its own database connection. Previously I was using a shared database connection, but this approach becomes more complicated when tests are being executed concurrently. To avoid complexity each test has its own connection, which it is responsible for closing. For the sake of readability, I snipped out the code that closes the browser session and the db connection at the end of the test. With all that done, there was only one more step required before the tests would execute concurrently. It is necessary to tell the test runner which tests are eligible to run in parallel, via the [Parallelizable] attribute. This can be done at the test, fixture or assembly level. Since I wanted to run all tests concurrently, I marked mine at the assembly level in the AssemblyInfo.cs using the following: [assembly: DegreeOfParallelism(3)] [assembly: Parallelizable(TestScope.All)] The second attribute marks all tests in the assembly as [Parallelizable], whilst the first tells the test runner how many concurrent threads to use when executing the tests. I set mine to three since I was using 3 RCs in separate VMs. With everything now in place, I fired up the Icarus* test runner that comes with MbUnit. Executing my 372 tests three at a time instead of one at a time reduced the running time from 2 hours 10 minutes, to 55 minutes, that's an improvement of about 58%! I'd like to have seen an improvement of 66%, but I can understand that either inefficiencies in the hub code, my test environment or the test runner code (or some combination of all three most likely) contributes to a slightly diminished improvement. That said, I'd love to hear about any experience you have in upping this efficiency. Ultimately though, it was a saving that was most definitely worth having. It makes regression testing via UI automation a far more plausible prospect. The other obvious point to make is that this approach scales far better than executing tests serially. So if ever we need to improve performance, we just register additional RC's with the hub, and up the DegreeOfParallelism. *This was just my personal preference for a GUI runner. The MbUnit/Gallio installer also provides a command line runner, a TestDriven.net runner, and a Resharper 4.5 runner. For now at least, Resharper 5 isn't supported.

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• WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

  - by andrewbrust

  Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

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• Launching a WPF Window in a Separate Thread, Part 1

  - by Reed

  Typically, I strongly recommend keeping the user interface within an application’s main thread, and using multiple threads to move the actual “work” into background threads.  However, there are rare times when creating a separate, dedicated thread for a Window can be beneficial.  This is even acknowledged in the MSDN samples, such as the Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads sample.  However, doing this correctly is difficult.  Even the referenced MSDN sample has major flaws, and will fail horribly in certain scenarios.  To ease this, I wrote a small class that alleviates some of the difficulties involved. The MSDN Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads Sample shows how to launch a new thread with a WPF Window, and will work in most cases.  The sample code (commented and slightly modified) works out to the following: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create and show the Window Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Set the apartment state newWindowThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); // Make the thread a background thread newWindowThread.IsBackground = true; // Start the thread newWindowThread.Start(); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This sample creates a thread, marks it as single threaded apartment state, and starts the Dispatcher on that thread. That is the minimum requirements to get a Window displaying and handling messages correctly, but, unfortunately, has some serious flaws. The first issue – the created thread will run continuously until the application shuts down, given the code in the sample.  The problem is that the ThreadStart delegate used ends with running the Dispatcher.  However, nothing ever stops the Dispatcher processing.  The thread was created as a Background thread, which prevents it from keeping the application alive, but the Dispatcher will continue to pump dispatcher frames until the application shuts down. In order to fix this, we need to call Dispatcher.InvokeShutdown after the Window is closed.  This would require modifying the above sample to subscribe to the Window’s Closed event, and, at that point, shutdown the Dispatcher: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This eliminates the first issue.  Now, when the Window is closed, the new thread’s Dispatcher will shut itself down, which in turn will cause the thread to complete. The above code will work correctly for most situations.  However, there is still a potential problem which could arise depending on the content of the Window1 class.  This is particularly nasty, as the code could easily work for most windows, but fail on others. The problem is, at the point where the Window is constructed, there is no active SynchronizationContext.  This is unlikely to be a problem in most cases, but is an absolute requirement if there is code within the constructor of Window1 which relies on a context being in place. While this sounds like an edge case, it’s fairly common.  For example, if a BackgroundWorker is started within the constructor, or a TaskScheduler is built using TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() with the expectation of synchronizing work to the UI thread, an exception will be raised at some point.  Both of these classes rely on the existence of a proper context being installed to SynchronizationContext.Current, which happens automatically, but not until Dispatcher.Run is called.  In the above case, SynchronizationContext.Current will return null during the Window’s construction, which can cause exceptions to occur or unexpected behavior. Luckily, this is fairly easy to correct.  We need to do three things, in order, prior to creating our Window: Create and initialize the Dispatcher for the new thread manually Create a synchronization context for the thread which uses the Dispatcher Install the synchronization context Creating the Dispatcher is quite simple – The Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher property gets the current thread’s Dispatcher and “creates a new Dispatcher if one is not already associated with the thread.”  Once we have the correct Dispatcher, we can create a SynchronizationContext which uses the dispatcher by creating a DispatcherSynchronizationContext.  Finally, this synchronization context can be installed as the current thread’s context via SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext.  These three steps can easily be added to the above via a single line of code: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create our context, and install it: SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new DispatcherSynchronizationContext( Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher)); Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This now forces the synchronization context to be in place before the Window is created and correctly shuts down the Dispatcher when the window closes. However, there are quite a few steps.  In my next post, I’ll show how to make this operation more reusable by creating a class with a far simpler API…

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