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• Incentivizing Work with Development Teams

  - by MarkPearl

  Recently I saw someone on twitter asking about incentives and if anyone had past experience with incentivizing work. I promised to respond with some of the experiences I have had in the past so here goes... **Disclaimer** - these are my experiences with incentives, generally in software development - in some other industries this may not be applicable – this is also my thinking at this point in time, with more experience my opinion may change. Incentivize at the level that you want people to group at If you are wanting to promote a team mentality, incentivize teams. If you want to promote an individual mentality, incentivize individuals. There is nothing worse than mixing this up. Some organizations put a lot of effort in establishing teams and team mentalities but reward individuals. This has a counter effect on the resources they have put towards establishing a team mentality. In the software projects that I work with we want promote cross functional teams that collaborate. Personally, if I was on a team and knew that there was an opportunity to work on a critical component of the system, and that by doing so I would get a bigger bonus, then I would be hesitant to include other people in solving that problem. Thus, I would hinder the teams efforts in being cross functional and reduce collaboration levels. Does that mean everyone in the team should get an even share of an incentive? In most situations I would say yes - even though this may feel counter-intuitive. I have heard arguments put forward that if “person x contributed more than person Y then they should be rewarded more” – This may sound controversial but I would rather treat people how would you like them to perform, not where they currently are at. To add to this approach, if someone is free loading, you bet your bottom dollar that the team is going to make this a lot more transparent if they feel that individual is going to be rewarded at the same level that everyone else is. Bad incentives promote destructive work If you are going to incentivize people, pick you incentives very carefully. I had an experience once with a sales person who was told they would get a bonus provided that they met an ordering target with a particular supplier. What did this person do? They sold everything at cost for the next month or so. They reached the goal, but the company didn't gain anything from it. It was a bad incentive. Expect the same with development teams, if you incentivize zero bug levels, you will get zero code committed to the solution. If you incentivize lines of code, you will get many many lines of bad code. Is there such a thing as a good incentives? Monetary wise, I am not sure there is. I would much rather encourage organizations to pay their people what they are worth upfront. I would also advise against paying money to teams as an incentive or even a bonus or reward for reaching a milestone. Rather have a breakaway for the team that promotes team building as a reward if they reach a milestone than pay them more money. I would also advise against making the incentive the reason for them to reach the milestone. If this becomes the norm it promotes people to begin to only do their job if there is an incentive at the end of the line. This is not a behaviour one wants to encourage. If the team or individual is in the right mind-set, they should not work any harder than they are right now with normal pay.

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• Applying for internship

  - by Margus

  At the moment I'm thinking about applying for internship at Eesti Energia. I seem to be eligible, but before contacting them I need to learn how to compile an informative and complete CV and cover letter. I do not consider myself as shallow minded, but also I'm not sure how to convincingly justify the stand of interest and how internship will help me in my future career. Course of life Tallinna Tehnikagümnaasium 2003 - 2006 Tallinna Tehnikaülikool 2006 – 2009 Military service at Signal Batallion Tallinna Tehnikaülikool 2010 – ... I started my academic career as Computer and Systems Engineer, but as I excelled in programming classes, I changed my major to Software Engineer and taken my specialty in web applications and logic. Nowadays I mainly use Java, Mathematica and C# to solve problems. For 2 times, I have taken part in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, where my team won the nationals and did pretty well in Europe. Also as part of notable thing in my academic career, my team wrote the Kalah game AI, that won in University's main programming class AI tournament. My hobbies are mind games and occasional problem solving. Few years ago I also competed in International Checkers EM (requires being in top 3 in nationals) as part of cadet and junior age group - I did not come close to winning, but I exceeded about half of the players each time. In high school and gymnasium I took part and later was the captain of team, that passes regionals and made it to top 3 of nationals (and later won) in (blitz) russian checkers. That was impressive because, it was a team effort as we only had (depending on year) 2-3 strong players. Although I started programming exactly 9,5 years ago I have no work experience. Well actually thats not true, as I completed my army duty, I was hired for a year (days still counting) to be apart of communicational (emergency) infrastructure action group where I'm the teams IT specialist (it's more complicated). So I consider myself to be aware of: rough conditions, teamwork, high stress tolerance, being on time and what responsibility means. As negative things I can mention: I do not have drivers licence. Although only Estonian and English are noted as requirements, then Russian is most likely required as well and I barely understand some of it. Reasons why I want to apply there, are: I need to do at least 4-6 week traineeship and it's in the right field I have the requirements and tasks seem easy enough Company is well known and has fairly good reputation Family and friend think, that it would be acceptable place to work Myriad of options to do final thesis about open up Work place is located in the same city I live atm. At moment, I see myself having a hard time explain why I would prefer it or where I see myself in 10 years if I was offered a job there. Question I have some idea how Curriculum Vitæ should look like, or I can google for template, but I'm not sure how to write informative one. Last I did one, it looked like: picture + contact information + education. Vaguely I only remember, that cover letter should be custom tailored for each place you apply containing ...

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• Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

  - by jpurdy

  A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

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• Data breakpoints to find points where data gets broken

  - by raccoon_tim

  When working with a large code base, finding reasons for bizarre bugs can often be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Finding out why an object gets corrupted without no apparent reason can be quite daunting, especially when it seems to happen randomly and totally out of context. Scenario Take the following scenario as an example. You have defined the a class that contains an array of characters that is 256 characters long. You now implement a method for filling this buffer with a string passed as an argument. At this point you mistakenly expect the buffer to be 256 characters long. At some point you notice that you require another character buffer and you add that after the previous one in the class definition. You now figure that you don’t need the 256 characters that the first member can hold and you shorten that to 128 to conserve space. At this point you should start thinking that you also have to modify the method defined above to safeguard against buffer overflow. It so happens, however, that in this not so perfect world this does not cross your mind. Buffer overflow is one of the most frequent sources for errors in a piece of software and often one of the most difficult ones to detect, especially when data is read from an outside source. Many mass copy functions provided by the C run-time provide versions that have boundary checking (defined with the _s suffix) but they can not guard against hard coded buffer lengths that at some point get changed. Finding the bug Getting back to the scenario, you’re now wondering why does the second string get modified with data that makes no sense at all. Luckily, Visual Studio provides you with a tool to help you with finding just these kinds of errors. It’s called data breakpoints. To add a data breakpoint, you first run your application in debug mode or attach to it in the usual way, and then go to Debug, select New Breakpoint and New Data Breakpoint. In the popup that opens, you can type in the memory address and the amount of bytes you wish to monitor. You can also use an expression here, but it’s often difficult to come up with an expression for data in an object allocated on the heap when not in the context of a certain stack frame. There are a couple of things to note about data breakpoints, however. First of all, Visual Studio supports a maximum of four data breakpoints at any given time. Another important thing to notice is that some C run-time functions modify memory in kernel space which does not trigger the data breakpoint. For instance, calling ReadFile on a buffer that is monitored by a data breakpoint will not trigger the breakpoint. The application will now break at the address you specified it to. Often you might immediately spot the issue but the very least this feature can do is point you in the right direction in search for the real reason why the memory gets inadvertently modified. Conclusions Data breakpoints are a great feature, especially when doing a lot of low level operations where multiple locations modify the same data. With the exception of some special cases, like kernel memory modification, you can use it whenever you need to check when memory at a certain location gets changed on purpose or inadvertently.

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• Procedual level generation for a platformer game (tilebased) using player physics

  - by Notbad

  I have been searching for information about how to build a 2d world generator (tilebased) for a platformer game I am developing. The levels should look like dungeons with a ceiling and a floor and they will have a high probability of being just made of horizontal rooms but sometimes they can have exits to a top/down room. Here is an example of what I would like to achieve. I'm refering only to the caves part. I know level design won't be that great when generated but I think it is possible to have something good enough for people to enjoy the procedural maps (Note: Supermetrod Spoiler!): http://www.snesmaps.com/maps/SuperMetroid/SuperMetroidMapNorfair.html Well, after spending some time thinking about this I have some ideas to create the maps that I would like to share with you: 1) I have read about celular automatas and I would like to use them to carve the rooms but instead of carving just a tile at once I would like to carve full columns of tiles. Of course this carving system will have some restrictions like how many tiles must be left for the roof and the ceiling, etc... This way I could get much cleaner rooms than using the ussual automata. 2) I want some branching into the rooms. It will have little probability to happen but I definitely want it. Thinking about carving I came to the conclusion that I could be using some sort of path creation algorithm that the carving system would follow to create a path in the rooms. This could be more noticiable if we make the carving system to carve columns with the height of a corridor or with the height of a wide room (this will be added to the system as a param). This way at some point I could spawn a new automa beside the main one to create braches. This new automata should play side by side with the first one to create dead ends, islands (both paths created by the automatas meet at some point or lead to the same room. It would be too long to explain here all the tests I have done, etc... just will try to summarize the problems to see if anyone could bring some light to solve them (I don't mind sharing my successes but I think they aren't too relevant): 1) Zone reachability: How can I make sure that the player will be able to reach all zones I created (mainly when branches happen or vertical rooms are created). When branches are created I have to make sure that there will be a way to get onto the new created branch. I mean a bifurcation that the player could follow. Player will follow the main path or jump to a platform to get onto the other way). On the other hand if an island is created by the meeting of both branches I need to make sure the player will be able to get onto the island too. 2) When a branch is created and corridors are generated for each branch how can I make then both merge or repel to create an island or just make them separated corridors. 3) When I create a branch and an island is created becasue both corridors merge at somepoint or they lead to the same room, is there any way to detect this and randomize where to create the needed platforms to get onto the created isle? This platforms could be created at the start of the island or at the end. I guess part of the problem could be solved using some sort of graph following the created paths but I'm a bit lost in this sea of precedural content creation :). On the other hand I don't expect a solution to the problem but some information to get me moving forward again. Thanks in advance.

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• Building a Repository Pattern against an EF 5 EDMX Model - Part 1

  - by Juan

  I am part of a year long plus project that is re-writing an existing application for a client.  We have decided to develop the project using Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5.  The project will be using a number of technologies and patterns to include Entity Framework 5, WCF Services, and WPF for the client UI.This is my attempt at documenting some of the successes and failures that I will be coming across in the development of the application.In building the data access layer we have to access a database that has already been designed by a dedicated dba. The dba insists on using Stored Procedures which has made the use of EF a little more difficult.  He will not allow direct table access but we did manage to get him to allow us to use Views.  Since EF 5 does not have good support to do Code First with Stored Procedures, my option was to create a model (EDMX) against the existing database views.   I then had to go select each entity and map the Insert/Update/Delete functions to their respective stored procedure. The next step after I had completed mapping the stored procedures to the entities in the EDMX model was to figure out how to build a generic repository that would work well with Entity Framework 5.  After reading the blog posts below, I adopted much of their code with some changes to allow for the use of Ninject for dependency injection.http://www.tcscblog.com/2012/06/22/entity-framework-generic-repository/ http://www.tugberkugurlu.com/archive/generic-repository-pattern-entity-framework-asp-net-mvc-and-unit-testing-triangle IRepository.cs public interface IRepository : IDisposable where T : class { void Add(T entity); void Update(T entity, int id); T GetById(object key); IQueryable Query(Expression> predicate); IQueryable GetAll(); int SaveChanges(); int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities); } GenericRepository.cs public abstract class GenericRepository : IRepository where T : class { public abstract void Add(T entity); public abstract void Update(T entity, int id); public abstract T GetById(object key); public abstract IQueryable Query(Expression> predicate); public abstract IQueryable GetAll(); public int SaveChanges() { return SaveChanges(true); } public abstract int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities); public abstract void Dispose(); } One of the issues I ran into was trying to do an update. I kept receiving errors so I posted a question on Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12585664/an-object-with-the-same-key-already-exists-in-the-objectstatemanager-the-object and came up with the following hack. If someone has a better way, please let me know. DbContextRepository.cs public class DbContextRepository : GenericRepository where T : class { protected DbContext Context; protected DbSet DbSet; public DbContextRepository(DbContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentException("context"); Context = context; DbSet = Context.Set(); } public override void Add(T entity) { if (entity == null) throw new ArgumentException("Cannot add a null entity."); DbSet.Add(entity); } public override void Update(T entity, int id) { if (entity == null) throw new ArgumentException("Cannot update a null entity."); var entry = Context.Entry(entity); if (entry.State == EntityState.Detached) { var attachedEntity = DbSet.Find(id); // Need to have access to key if (attachedEntity != null) { var attachedEntry = Context.Entry(attachedEntity); attachedEntry.CurrentValues.SetValues(entity); } else { entry.State = EntityState.Modified; // This should attach entity } } } public override T GetById(object key) { return DbSet.Find(key); } public override IQueryable Query(Expression> predicate) { return DbSet.Where(predicate); } public override IQueryable GetAll() { return Context.Set(); } public override int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities) { Context.Configuration.ValidateOnSaveEnabled = validateEntities; return Context.SaveChanges(); } #region IDisposable implementation public override void Dispose() { if (Context != null) { Context.Dispose(); GC.SuppressFinalize(this); } } #endregion IDisposable implementation } At this point I am able to start creating individual repositories that are needed and add a Unit of Work.  Stay tuned for the next installment in my path to creating a Repository Pattern against EF5.

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; JustTrace Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  JustTrace is made by Telerik which is mainly known for its collection of UI controls. The current version (2012.3.1127.0) does include a performance and memory profiler which does cost 614€ and is currently with a special offer for 306€ on sale. It does include one year of free upgrades. The uneven € numbers are calculated from the 799€ and 50% dicsount price. The UI is already in Metro style and simple to use. Multi process, attach, method recording filter are not supported. It looks like JustTrace is like Ants a Just My Code profiler. For stuff where you do not have the pdbs or you want to dig deeper into the BCL code you will not get far. After getting the profile data you get in the All Methods grid a plain list with hit count and own time. The method list for all methods is also suspiciously short which is a clear sign that you will not get far during the analysis of foreign code. But at least there is also a memory profiler included. For this I have to choose in the first window for Profiling Type “Memory Profiler” to check the memory consumption of VS.  There are some interesting number to see but I do really miss from YourKit the thread stack window. How am I supposed to get a clue when much memory is allocated and the CPU consumption is high in which places I should look? The Snapshot summary gives a rough overview which is ok for a first impression. Next is Assemblies? This gives you a list of all loaded assemblies. Not terribly useful.   The By Type view gives you exactly what it is supposed to do. You have to keep in mind that this list is filtered by the types you did check in the Assemblies list. The By Type instance list does only show types from assemblies which do not originate from Microsoft. By default mscorlib and System are not checked. That is the reason why for the first time my By Type window looked like The idea behind this feature is to show only your instances because you are ultimately responsible for the overall memory consumption. I am not sure if I do like this feature because by default it does hide too much. I do want to see at least how many strings and arrays are allocated. A simple namespace filter would also do it in my opinion. Now you can examine all string instances and look who in the object graph does keep a reference on them. That is nice but YourKit has the big plus that you can also look into the string contents.  I am also not sure how in the graph cycles are visualized and what will happen if you have thousands of objects referencing you. That's pretty much it about JustTrace. It can help the average developer to pinpoint performance and memory issues by just looking at his own code and instances. Showing them more will not help them because the sheer amount of information will overwhelm them. And you need to have a pretty good understanding how the GC and the CLR does work. When you have a performance issue at a customer machine it is sometimes very helpful to be able a bring a profiler onto the machine (no pdbs, …) and to get a full snapshot of all processes which are in the problematic use case involved. For these more advanced use cased JustTrace is certainly the wrong tool. Next: SpeedTrace

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• How'd they do it: Millions of tiles in Terraria

  - by William 'MindWorX' Mariager

  I've been working up a game engine similar to Terraria, mostly as a challenge, and while I've figured out most of it, I can't really seem to wrap my head around how they handle the millions of interactable/harvestable tiles the game has at one time. Creating around 500.000 tiles, that is 1/20th of what's possible in Terraria, in my engine causes the frame-rate to drop from 60 to around 20, even tho I'm still only rendering the tiles in view. Mind you, I'm not doing anything with the tiles, only keeping them in memory. Update: Code added to show how I do things. This is part of a class, which handles the tiles and draws them. I'm guessing the culprit is the "foreach" part, which iterates everything, even empty indexes. ... public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { foreach (Tile tile in this.Tiles) { if (tile != null) { if (tile.Position.X < -this.Offset.X + 32) continue; if (tile.Position.X > -this.Offset.X + 1024 - 48) continue; if (tile.Position.Y < -this.Offset.Y + 32) continue; if (tile.Position.Y > -this.Offset.Y + 768 - 48) continue; tile.Draw(spriteBatch, gameTime); } } } ... Also here is the Tile.Draw method, which could also do with an update, as each Tile uses four calls to the SpriteBatch.Draw method. This is part of my autotiling system, which means drawing each corner depending on neighboring tiles. texture_* are Rectangles, are set once at level creation, not each update. ... public virtual void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { if (this.type == TileType.TileSet) { spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position, texture_tl, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(8, 0), texture_tr, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(0, 8), texture_bl, this.BlendColor); spriteBatch.Draw(this.texture, this.realm.Offset + this.Position + new Vector2(8, 8), texture_br, this.BlendColor); } } ... Any critique or suggestions to my code is welcome. Update: Solution added. Here's the final Level.Draw method. The Level.TileAt method simply checks the inputted values, to avoid OutOfRange exceptions. ... public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, GameTime gameTime) { Int32 startx = (Int32)Math.Floor((-this.Offset.X - 32) / 16); Int32 endx = (Int32)Math.Ceiling((-this.Offset.X + 1024 + 32) / 16); Int32 starty = (Int32)Math.Floor((-this.Offset.Y - 32) / 16); Int32 endy = (Int32)Math.Ceiling((-this.Offset.Y + 768 + 32) / 16); for (Int32 x = startx; x < endx; x += 1) { for (Int32 y = starty; y < endy; y += 1) { Tile tile = this.TileAt(x, y); if (tile != null) tile.Draw(spriteBatch, gameTime); } } } ...

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• Memory is full with vertex buffer

  - by Christian Frantz

  I'm having a pretty strange problem that I didn't think I'd run into. I was able to store a 50x50 grid in one vertex buffer finally, in hopes of better performance. Before I had each cube have an individual vertex buffer and with 4 50x50 grids, this slowed down my game tremendously. But it still ran. With 4 50x50 grids with my new code, that's only 4 vertex buffers. With the 4 vertex buffers, I get a memory error. When I load the game with 1 grid, it takes forever to load and with my previous version, it started up right away. So I don't know if I'm storing chunks wrong or what but it stumped me -.- for (int x = 0; x < 50; x++) { for (int z = 0; z < 50; z++) { for (int y = 0; y <= map[x, z]; y++) { SetUpVertices(); SetUpIndices(); cubes.Add(new Cube(device, new Vector3(x, map[x, z] - y, z), grass)); } } } vertexBuffer = new VertexBuffer(device, typeof(VertexPositionTexture), vertices.Count(), BufferUsage.WriteOnly); vertexBuffer.SetData<VertexPositionTexture>(vertices.ToArray()); indexBuffer = new IndexBuffer(device, typeof(short), indices.Count(), BufferUsage.WriteOnly); indexBuffer.SetData(indices.ToArray()); Thats how theyre stored. The array I'm reading from is a byte array which defines the coordinates of my map. Now with my old version, I used the same loading from an array so that hasn't changed. The only difference is the one vertex buffer instead of 2500 for a 50x50 grid. cubes is just a normal list that holds all my cubes for the vertex buffer. Another thing that just came to mind would be my draw calls. If I'm setting an effect for each cube in my cube list, that's probably going to take a lot of memory. How can I avoid doing this? I need the foreach method to set my cubes to the right position foreach (Cube block in cube.cubes) { effect.VertexColorEnabled = false; effect.TextureEnabled = true; Matrix center = Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-0.5f, -0.5f, -0.5f)); Matrix scale = Matrix.CreateScale(1f); Matrix translate = Matrix.CreateTranslation(block.cubePosition); effect.World = center * scale * translate; effect.View = cam.view; effect.Projection = cam.proj; effect.FogEnabled = false; effect.FogColor = Color.CornflowerBlue.ToVector3(); effect.FogStart = 1.0f; effect.FogEnd = 50.0f; cube.Draw(effect); noc++; }

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• Local LINQtoSQL Database For Your Windows Phone 7 Application

  - by Tim Murphy

  There aren’t many applications that are of value without having some for of data store.  In Windows Phone development we have a few options.  You can store text directly to isolated storage.  You can also use a number of third party libraries to create or mimic databases in isolated storage.  With Mango we gained the ability to have a native .NET database approach which uses LINQ to SQL.  In this article I will try to bring together the components needed to implement this last type of data store and fill in some of the blanks that I think other articles have left out. Defining A Database The first things you are going to need to do is define classes that represent your tables and a data context class that is used as the overall database definition.  The table class consists of column definitions as you would expect.  They can have relationships and constraints as with any relational DBMS.  Below is an example of a table definition. First you will need to add some assembly references to the code file. using System.ComponentModel;using System.Data.Linq;using System.Data.Linq.Mapping; You can then add the table class and its associated columns.  It needs to implement INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyPropertyChanging.  Each level of the class needs to be decorated with the attribute appropriate for that part of the definition.  Where the class represents the table the properties represent the columns.  In this example you will see that the column is marked as a primary key and not nullable with a an auto generated value. You will also notice that the in the column property’s set method It uses the NotifyPropertyChanging and NotifyPropertyChanged methods in order to make sure that the proper events are fired. [Table]public class MyTable: INotifyPropertyChanged, INotifyPropertyChanging{ public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if(PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } public event PropertyChangingEventHandler PropertyChanging; private void NotifyPropertyChanging(string propertyName) { if(PropertyChanging != null) { PropertyChanging(this, new PropertyChangingEventArgs(propertyName)); } } private int _TableKey; [Column(IsPrimaryKey = true, IsDbGenerated = true, DbType = "INT NOT NULL Identity", CanBeNull = false, AutoSync = AutoSync.OnInsert)] public int TableKey { get { return _TableKey; } set { NotifyPropertyChanging("TableKey"); _TableKey = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("TableKey"); } } The last part of the database definition that needs to be created is the data context.  This is a simple class that takes an isolated storage location connection string its constructor and then instantiates tables as public properties. public class MyDataContext: DataContext{ public MyDataContext(string connectionString): base(connectionString) { MyRecords = this.GetTable<MyTable>(); } public Table<MyTable> MyRecords;} Creating A New Database Instance Now that we have a database definition it is time to create an instance of the data context within our Windows Phone app.  When your app fires up it should check if the database already exists and create an instance if it does not.  I would suggest that this be part of the constructor of your ViewModel. db = new MyDataContext(connectionString);if(!db.DatabaseExists()){ db.CreateDatabase();} The next thing you have to know is how the connection string for isolated storage should be constructed.  The main sticking point I have found is that the database cannot be created unless the file mode is read/write.  You may have different connection strings but the initial one needs to be similar to the following. string connString = "Data Source = 'isostore:/MyApp.sdf'; File Mode = read write"; Using you database Now that you have done all the up front work it is time to put the database to use.  To make your life a little easier and keep proper separation between your view and your viewmodel you should add a couple of methods to the viewmodel.  These will do the CRUD work of your application.  What you will notice is that the SubmitChanges method is the secret sauce in all of the methods that change data. private myDataContext myDb;private ObservableCollection<MyTable> _viewRecords;public ObservableCollection<MyTable> ViewRecords{ get { return _viewRecords; } set { _viewRecords = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("ViewRecords"); }}public void LoadMedstarDbData(){ var tempItems = from MyTable myRecord in myDb.LocalScans select myRecord; ViewRecords = new ObservableCollection<MyTable>(tempItems);}public void SaveChangesToDb(){ myDb.SubmitChanges();}public void AddMyTableItem(MyTable newScan){ myDb.LocalScans.InsertOnSubmit(newScan); myDb.SubmitChanges();}public void DeleteMyTableItem(MyTable newScan){ myDb.LocalScans.DeleteOnSubmit(newScan); myDb.SubmitChanges();} Updating existing database What happens when you need to change the structure of your database?  Unfortunately you have to add code to your application that checks the version of the database which over time will create some pollution in your codes base.  On the other hand it does give you control of the update.  In this example you will see the DatabaseSchemaUpdater in action.  Assuming we added a “Notes” field to the MyTable structure, the following code will check if the database is the latest version and add the field if it isn’t. if(!myDb.DatabaseExists()){ myDb.CreateDatabase();}else{ DatabaseSchemaUpdater dbUdater = myDb.CreateDatabaseSchemaUpdater(); if(dbUdater.DatabaseSchemaVersion < 2) { dbUdater.AddColumn<MyTable>("Notes"); dbUdater.DatabaseSchemaVersion = 2; dbUdater.Execute(); }} Summary This approach does take a fairly large amount of work, but I think the end product is robust and very native for .NET developers.  It turns out to be worth the investment. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 7,LINQ to SQL,LINQ,Database,Isolated Storage

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• Software and/(x)or Hardware Projects for Pre-School Kids

  - by haylem

  I offered to participate at my kid's pre-school for various activities (yes, I'm crazy like that), and one of them is to help them discover extra-curricular (big word for a pre-school, but by lack of a better one... :)) hobbies, which may or may not relate to a professional activity. At first I thought that it wouldn't be really easy to have pre-schoolers relate to programming or the internal workings of a computer system in general (and I'm more used to teaching middle-school to university-level students), but then I thought there must be a way. So I'm trying to figure out ways to introduce very young kids (3yo) to computer systems in a fun and preferably educational way. Of course, I don't expect them to start smashing the stack for fun and profit right away (or at least not voluntarily, though I could use the occasion for some toddler tests...), but I'm confident there must be ways to get them interested in both: using the systems, becoming curious about understanding what they do, interacting with the systems to modify them. I guess this setting is not really relevant after all, it's pretty much the same as if you were aiming to achieve the same for your own kids at home. Ideas Considering we're talking 3yo pre-schoolers here, and that at this age some kids are already quite confident using a mouse (some even a keyboard, if not for typing, at least to press some buttons they've come to associate with actions) while others have not yet had any interaction with computers of any kind, it needs to be: rather basic, demonstrated and played with in less then 5 or 10 minutes, doable in in groups or alone, scalable and extendable in complexity to accommodate their varying abilities. The obvious options are: basic smallish games to play with, interactive systems like LOGO, Kojo, Squeak and clones (possibly even simpler than that), or thngs like Lego Systems. I guess it can be a thing to reflect on both at the software and the hardware levels: it could be done with a desktop or laptop machine, a tablet, a smartphone (or a crap-phone, for that matter, as long as you can modify it), or even get down to building something from scratch (Raspberry Pi and Arduino being popular options at the moment). I can probably be in the form of games, funny visualizations (which are pretty much games) w/ Prototype, virtual worlds to explore. I also thought on the moment (and I hope this won't offend anyone) that some approaches to teaching pets could work (reward systems, haptic feedback and such things could quickly point a kid in the right direction to understanding how things work, in a similar fashion - I'm not suggesting to shock the kids!). Hmm, Is There an Actual Question in There? What type of systems do you think might be a good fit, both in terms of hardware and software? Do you have seen such systems, or have anything in mind to work on? Are you aware of some research in this domain, with tangible results? Any input is welcome. It's not that I don't see options: there are tons, but I have a harder time pinpointing a more concrete and definite type of project/activity, so I figure some have valuable ideas or existing ones. Note: I am not advocating that every kid should learn to program, be interested in computer systems, or that all of them in a class would even care enough to follow such an introduction with more than a blank stare. I don't buy into the "everybody would benefit from learning to program" thing. Wouldn't hurt, but not necessary in any way. But if I can walk out of there with a few of them having smiled using the thing (or heck, cried because others took them away from them), that'd be good enough. Related Questions I've seen and that seem to complement what I'm looking for, but not exactly for the same age groups or with the same goals: Teaching Programming to Kids Recommendations for teaching kids math concepts & skills for programming?

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• Using WKA in Large Coherence Clusters (Disabling Multicast)

  - by jpurdy

  Disabling hardware multicast (by configuring well-known addresses aka WKA) will place significant stress on the network. For messages that must be sent to multiple servers, rather than having a server send a single packet to the switch and having the switch broadcast that packet to the rest of the cluster, the server must send a packet to each of the other servers. While hardware varies significantly, consider that a server with a single gigabit connection can send at most ~70,000 packets per second. To continue with some concrete numbers, in a cluster with 500 members, that means that each server can send at most 140 cluster-wide messages per second. And if there are 10 cluster members on each physical machine, that number shrinks to 14 cluster-wide messages per second (or with only mild hyperbole, roughly zero). It is also important to keep in mind that network I/O is not only expensive in terms of the network itself, but also the consumption of CPU required to send (or receive) a message (due to things like copying the packet bytes, processing a interrupt, etc). Fortunately, Coherence is designed to rely primarily on point-to-point messages, but there are some features that are inherently one-to-many: Announcing the arrival or departure of a member Updating partition assignment maps across the cluster Creating or destroying a NamedCache Invalidating a cache entry from a large number of client-side near caches Distributing a filter-based request across the full set of cache servers (e.g. queries, aggregators and entry processors) Invoking clear() on a NamedCache The first few of these are operations that are primarily routed through a single senior member, and also occur infrequently, so they usually are not a primary consideration. There are cases, however, where the load from introducing new members can be substantial (to the point of destabilizing the cluster). Consider the case where cluster in the first paragraph grows from 500 members to 1000 members (holding the number of physical machines constant). During this period, there will be 500 new member introductions, each of which may consist of several cluster-wide operations (for the cluster membership itself as well as the partitioned cache services, replicated cache services, invocation services, management services, etc). Note that all of these introductions will route through that one senior member, which is sharing its network bandwidth with several other members (which will be communicating to a lesser degree with other members throughout this process). While each service may have a distinct senior member, there's a good chance during initial startup that a single member will be the senior for all services (if those services start on the senior before the second member joins the cluster). It's obvious that this could cause CPU and/or network starvation. In the current release of Coherence (3.7.1.3 as of this writing), the pure unicast code path also has less sophisticated flow-control for cluster-wide messages (compared to the multicast-enabled code path), which may also result in significant heap consumption on the senior member's JVM (from the message backlog). This is almost never a problem in practice, but with sufficient CPU or network starvation, it could become critical. For the non-operational concerns (near caches, queries, etc), the application itself will determine how much load is placed on the cluster. Applications intended for deployment in a pure unicast environment should be careful to avoid excessive dependence on these features. Even in an environment with multicast support, these operations may scale poorly since even with a constant request rate, the underlying workload will increase at roughly the same rate as the underlying resources are added. Unless there is an infrastructural requirement to the contrary, multicast should be enabled. If it can't be enabled, care should be taken to ensure the added overhead doesn't lead to performance or stability issues. This is particularly crucial in large clusters.

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• Don’t string together XML

  - by KyleBurns

  XML has been a pervasive tool in software development for over a decade.  It provides a way to communicate data in a manner that is simple to understand and free of platform dependencies.  Also pervasive in software development is what I consider to be the anti-pattern of using string manipulation to create XML.  This usually starts with a “quick and dirty” approach because you need an XML document and looks like (for all of the examples here, we’ll assume we’re writing the body of a method intended to take a Contact object and return an XML string): return string.Format("<Contact><BusinessName>{0}</BusinessName></Contact>", contact.BusinessName);   In the code example, I created (or at least believe I created) an XML document representing a simple contact object in one line of code with very little overhead.  Work’s done, right?  No it’s not.  You see, what I didn’t realize was that this code would be used in the real world instead of my fantasy world where I own all the data and can prevent any of it containing problematic values.  If I use this code to create a contact record for the business “Sanford & Son”, any XML parser will be incapable of processing the data because the ampersand is special in XML and should have been encoded as &amp;. Following the pattern that I have seen many times over, my next step as a developer is going to be to do what any developer in his right mind would do – instruct the user that ampersands are “bad” and they cannot be used without breaking computers.  This may work in many cases and is often accompanied by logic at the UI layer of applications to block these “bad” characters, but sooner or later someone is going to figure out that other applications allow for them and will want the same.  This often leads to the creation of “cleaner” functions that perform a replace on the strings for every special character that the person writing the function can think of.  The cleaner function will usually grow over time as support requests reveal characters that were missed in the initial cut.  Sooner or later you end up writing your own somewhat functional XML engine. I have never been told by anyone paying me to write code that they would like to buy a somewhat functional XML engine.  My employer/customer’s needs have always been for something that may use XML, but ultimately is functionality that drives business value. I’m not going to build an XML engine. So how can I generate XML that is always well-formed without writing my own engine?  Easy – use one of the ones provided to you for free!  If you’re in a shop that still supports VB6 applications, you can use the DomDocument or MXXMLWriter object (of the two I prefer MXXMLWriter, but I’m not going to fully describe either here).  For .Net Framework applications prior to the 3.5 framework, the code is a little more verbose than I would like, but easy once you understand what pieces are required:             using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())             {                 using (XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw))                 {                     writer.WriteStartDocument();                     writer.WriteStartElement("Contact");                     writer.WriteElementString("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName);                     writer.WriteEndElement(); // end Contact element                     writer.WriteEndDocument();                     writer.Flush();                     return sw.ToString();                 }             }   Looking at that code, it’s easy to understand why people are drawn to the initial one-liner.  Lucky for us, the 3.5 .Net Framework added the System.Xml.Linq.XElement object.  This object takes away a lot of the complexity present in the XmlTextWriter approach and allows us to generate the document as follows: return new XElement("Contact", new XElement("BusinessName", contact.BusinessName)).ToString();   While it is very common for people to use string manipulation to create XML, I’ve discussed here reasons not to use this method and introduced powerful APIs that are built into the .Net Framework as an alternative.  I’ve given a very simplistic example here to highlight the most basic XML generation task.  For more information on the XmlTextWriter and XElement APIs, check out the MSDN library.

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• Using 3rd Party JavaScript Plugins Hardwired With &lsquo;document.write&rsquo;

  - by ToStringTheory

  Introduction Have you ever had the need to implement a 3rd party JavaScript plugin, but your needs didn’t fit the model and usage defined by the API or documentation of the plugin?  Recently I ran into this issue when I was trying to implement a web snapshot plugin into our site.  To use their plugin, you had to include a script tag to the plugin on their server with an API key.  The second part of the usage was to include a <script> tag around a function call wherever you wanted a snapshot to appear. The Problem When trying to use the service, the images did not display.  I checked a couple of things and didn’t find anything wrong at first..  It wasn’t until I looked at the function that was called by the inline script did I find the issue – a call to the webservice, followed by a call to ‘document.write’ in its callback.  The solution in which I was trying to implement the plugin happened to be in response to an AJAX call after the document had completely loaded.  After the page has loaded, document.write does nothing. My first thought for a solution was to just cache the script from the service, and edit it do something like a return function or callback that I could use to edit the document from.  However, I quickly discovered that there is no way to cache the script from the service, as it had a hash in the function where it would call the server.  The hash was updated every few seconds/minutes, expiring old hashes.  This meant that I wouldn’t be able to edit the script and upload a new version to my server, as the script would not work after a few minutes from originally getting the script from the service. Solution The solution eluded me until I realized that this was JavaScript I was dealing with.  A language designed so that you could do just about anything to any library, function, or object…  At this point, the solution was simple – take control of the document.write function.  Using a buffer variable, and a simple function call, it is eerily simple to perform: //what would have been output to the document var buffer = ""; //store a reference to the real document.write var dw = document.write; //redefine document.write to store to our buffer document.write = function (str) {buffer += str;} //execute the function containing calls to document.write eval('{function encapsulated in <script></script> tags}'); //restore the original document.write function (just in case) document.write = dw; That’s it.  Instead of using the script tags where I wanted to include a snapshot, I called a function passing in the URL to the page I wanted a snapshot of.  After that last line of code, what would have been output to the document (or not in the case of the ajax call) was instead stored in buffer. Conclusion While the solution itself is simple, coming from a background much more footed in the .Net platform, I believe that this is a prime example of always keeping the language that you are working in in mind.  While this may seem obvious at first, as I KNEW I was in JavaScript, I never thought of taking control of the document.write function because I am more accustomed to the .Net world.  I can’t simply replace the functionality of Console.WriteLine.

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• No Customer Left Behind

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development What does customer experience mean to you? Is it a strategy for your executives? A new buzz word and marketing term? A bunch of CRM technology with social software added on? For me, customer experience is a customer-centric worldview that produces a deeper understanding of your business and what it takes to achieve sustainable, differentiated success. It requires you to prioritize and examine the journey your customers are on with your brand, so you can answer the question, "How can we drive greater value for our business by delivering a better customer experience?" Businesses that embrace a customer-centric worldview understand their business at a much deeper level than most. They know who their customers are, what their value is, what they do, what they say, what they want, and ultimately what that means to their business. "Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?" We're all consumers who have our own experiences with many brands. Good or bad, some of those experiences stay with us. So viscerally we understand the concept of customer experience from the stories we share. One that stands out in my mind happened as I was preparing to leave for a 12-month job assignment in Europe. I wanted to put my cable television subscription on hold. I wasn't leaving for another vendor. I wasn't upset. I just had a situation where it made sense to put my $180 per month account on pause until I returned. Unfortunately, there was no way for this cable company to acknowledge that I was a loyal customer with a logical request - and to respond accordingly. So, ultimately, they lost my business. Research shows us that it costs six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Heavily funding the efforts of getting new customers and underfunding the efforts of serving the needs of your existing (who are your greatest advocates) is a vicious and costly cycle. "Hey, These Guys Suck!" I love my Apple iPad because it's so easy to use. The explosion of these types of technologies, combined with new media channels, has raised our expectations and made us hyperaware of what's going on and what's available. In addition, social media has given us a megaphone to share experiences both positive and negative with greater impact. We are now an always-on culture that thrives on our ability to access, connect, and share anywhere anytime. If we don't get the service, product, or value we expect, it is easy to tell many people about it. We also can quickly learn where else to get what we want. Consumers have the power of influence and choice at a global scale. The businesses that understand this principle are able to leverage that power to their advantage. The ones that don't, suffer from it. Which camp are you in?Note: This is Part 1 in a three-part series. Stop back for Part 2 on November 19.

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• I am not satisfied with my career and accomplished nothing in my life. what should I do now [on hold]

  - by user2906155

  After my complete my College education I got chance to work on software programming. I work on few software and now nothing make me feel good. I don't like web-programming. Can't have too much mind to play with other people in team a designer or a senior. it's totally time wasting for me. We do integration without any source code control. copy through pen drive. I write in too many language for web-programming but know nothing about any language specially. I don't like to have a BOSS. I would like to do something on my own. From last 3 year I thing I will got a better job but I am unable to get it. I am not good at Programming nor my English is native. I have a big list for pay then my salary. I have problem with nothing. my atmosphere is about illiterate people. they abuse 24 hours a day. this thing make me sick. people watch CRIME patrol my home (watching rape in TV because it's happen to someone). I do my work from home. I don't like to live in my state. All state is one of the biggest illiterate state of my country. Once I apply for a Job in China and it's look like I can get thing Job but I don't get it. My family doesn't want me to settle anywhere else. I told my family 4 time a day that I can't live in this worst situation. Everyone (including the person who I work for) tell me that you can do it only you have money. Now I really don't know how to make money. My job not allow me to work for anyone. My productivity going down since I don't learn anything new. I thing if this happen to me for next 2 year I don't have any knowledge more then a peon. I hate it. When I was in other city then I see that if I spent 7 days their all my 7 days going better. even I go for travelling in green places then I like it. but all I hate it where I work for. When I work on other city then I see my productivity are improved and I don't hate my work. I listen a song "If you don't your love what are you doing it for". I seriously don' t know what I still live here because this place gave me nothing but depression and trouble. for people I clear that I don't belong to RICH or middle class family. All I got is doing something on my own or help of someone. affording a rental place make my run on footpath. All I save in one month is just 10$ (approximately) (actually I afford some guys's education now). Can a programmer live worst life like this. I really not happy. Today is a festival in India and I don't celebrate it because I really hate myself. I want to do suicide. someone guide me how to start solving this headache

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• Best way to process a queue in C# (PDF treatment)

  - by Bartdude

  First of all let me expose what I would like to do : I already dispose of a long-time running webapp developed in ASP.NET (C#) 2.0. In this app, users can upload standard PDF files (text+pics). The app is running in production on a Windows Server 2003 and has a dedicated database server (SQL server 2008) also running Windows Server 2003. I myself am a quite experienced web developer, but never actually programmed anything non-web (or at least nothing serious). I plan on adding a functionality to the webapp for which I would need a jpg snapshot of each page of the PDF. Creating these "thumbnails" isn't the big deal as such, I already do it inside my webapp using ghostscript. I've only done it on 1 page documents for now though, and the new functionality will need to process bigger documents. In order for this process to be transparent aswell for the admins as the final users, I would like to implement some kind of queue to delay the processing of the thumbnails. There again, no problem to create the queue, it will consist of records in a table, with enough info to find the pdf document back. Then I will need to process this queue, and that's were my interrogations start. Obviously the best solution to process it isn't an ASP script or so, so I will have to get out of my known environment. No problem, but I have no idea which direction to go. Therefore, a few questions : What should I develop ? I presumably need something that is "standby" on the server, runs when needed, then returns to idle state until further notice.Should I be looking into Windows service ? Is there another more appropriate type of project ? Depending on the first answer, what will be the approach ? Should I have somehow SQL server "tell" the program/service/... to process the queue, or should I have that program/service/... periodically check the state of the queue and treat new items. In both case, which functionality can I use ? we're not talking about hundreds of PDF a day (max 50 maybe), I can totally afford to treat the queue 1 item at a time. Can you confirm I don't have to look much further on threads and so ? (I found a lot of answers talking about threads in queue treatment, but it looks quite overkill for my needs) Maybe linked to the previous question : what about concurrent call to the program, whatever it is ? Let's suppose it is currently running, and a new record comes in the queue, what should be the behaviour ? I don't need much detailed answers and would already be happy with answers like "You can do the processing with a service, and yes it's possible to have sqlserver on machine A trigger a service start on machine B" or "You have to develop xxx and then use the scheduler to run it every xxx minutes". I don't mind reading articles and so, but I can hardly afford to spend too much time learning stuff to finally realize I went the wrong way for this project, so basically I'm trying to narrow down the scope of matters I need to investigate. Thanks for reading me, I hope I'll find some helping hands on here :-)

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• JUnit Easymock Unexpected method call

  - by Lancelot

  Hi, I'm trying to setup a test in JUnit w/ EasyMock and I'm running into a small issue that I can't seem to wrap my head around. I was hoping someone here could help. Here is a simplified version of the method I'm trying to test: public void myMethod() { //Some code executing here Obj myObj = this.service.getObj(param); if (myObj.getExtId() != null) { OtherObj otherObj = new OtherObj(); otherObj.setId(myObj.getExtId()); this.dao.insert(otherObj); } //Some code executing there } Ok so using EasyMock I've mocked the service.getObj(myObj) call and that works fine. My problem comes when JUnit hits the dao.insert(otherObj) call. EasyMock throws a "Unexpected Method Call" on it. I wouldn't mind mocking that dao in my test and using expectLastCall().once(); on it, but that assumes that I have a handle on the "otherObj" that's passed as a parameter at insert time... Which of course I don't since it's conditionally created within the context of the method being tested. Anyone has ever had to deal with that and somehow solved it? Thanks.

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• Using Visual Studio 2008 to Assemble, Link, Debug, and Execute MASM 6.11 Assembly Code

  - by Kreychek

  I would like to use Visual Studio 2008 to the greatest extent possible while effectively compiling/linking/building/etc code as if all these build processes were being done by the tools provided with MASM 6.11. The exact version of MASM does not matter, so long as it's within the 6.x range, as that is what my college is using to teach 16-bit assembly. I have done some research on the subject and have come to the conclusion that there are several options: Reconfigure VS to call the MASM 6.11 executables with the same flags, etc as MASM 6.11 would natively do. Create intermediary batch file(s) to be called by VS to then invoke the proper commands for MASM's linker, etc. Reconfigure VS's built-in build tools/rules (assembler, linker, etc) to provide an environment identical to the one used by MASM 6.11. Option (2) was brought up when I realized that the options available in VS's "External Tools" interface may be insufficient to correctly invoke MASM's build tools, thus a batch file to interpret VS's strict method of passing arguments might be helpful, as a lot of my learning about how to get this working involved my manually calling ML.exe, LINK.exe, etc from the command prompt. Below are several links that may prove useful in answering my question. Please keep in mind that I have read them all and none are the actual solution. I can only hope my specifying MASM 6.11 doesn't prevent anyone from contributing a perhaps more generalized answer. Similar method used to Option (2), but users on the thread are not contactable: http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-284051.html (also, I have my doubts about the necessity of an intermediary batch file) Out of date explanation to my question: http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~downeyt/cop3402/masmaul.html Probably the closest thing I've come to a definitive solution, but refers to a suite of tools from something besides MASM, also uses a batch file: http://www.kipirvine.com/asm/gettingStarted/index.htm#16-bit I apologize if my terminology for the tools used in each step of the code - exe process is off, but since I'm trying to reproduce the entirety of steps in between completion of writing the code and generating an executable, I don't think it matters much.

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• Problem with jqGrid in Internet Explorer 8

  - by Dave Swersky

  I have developed an ASP.NET MVC (version 2 RC) application with a ton of jqGrids. It's working like a champ in Firefox, but I've discovered a problem in IE8. The "Main View" grids can be filtered by a search box or one of a few dropdowns above the grid. I use some javascript to reset the url for the grid, then trigger a reload, thusly: function filterByName(filter) { if (filter == 'All') { $('#list').setGridParam({ url: 'Application/GetApplications' }); $('#list').trigger("reloadGrid"); } else { $('#list').setGridParam({ url: 'Application/GetAppByName/' + filter + '/' }); $('#list').trigger("reloadGrid"); } } This works like magic in Firefox, but I'm getting an HTTP 400 Bad Request when I do this in IE8. The IE8 client-side debugger is like flint and tinder compared to Firebug's flamethrower, so I'm not having much luck figuring out why it breaks in IE8. Has anyone seen this? Also, the jqGrid "trigger" method here is swallowing the AJAX exception. Is there a way to get it to bubble up so I can get to the exception details? UPDATE: The problem was with the syntax in my "onchange" event for the dropdowns. I was using: onchange="filterByMnemonic($('#drpMnemonic')[0].value); Which Firefox apparently doesn't mind but IE sees that as nuthin'. This, however, works in both browsers: onchange = "filterByMnemonic($('#drpMnemonic > option:selected').attr('value'));"

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• Why were namespaces removed from ECMAScript consideration?

  - by Bob

  Namespaces were once a consideration for ECMAScript (the old ECMAScript 4) but were taken out. As Brendan Eich says in this message: One of the use-cases for namespaces in ES4 was early binding (use namespace intrinsic), both for performance and for programmer comprehension -- no chance of runtime name binding disagreeing with any earlier binding. But early binding in any dynamic code loading scenario like the web requires a prioritization or reservation mechanism to avoid early versus late binding conflicts. Plus, as some JS implementors have noted with concern, multiple open namespaces impose runtime cost unless an implementation works significantly harder. For these reasons, namespaces and early binding (like packages before them, this past April) must go. But I'm not sure I understand all of that. What exactly is a prioritization or reservation mechanism and why would either of those be needed? Also, must early binding and namespaces go hand-in-hand? For some reason I can't wrap my head around the issues involved. Can anyone attempt a more fleshed out explanation? Also, why would namespaces impose runtime costs? In my mind I can't help but see little difference in concept between a namespace and a function using closures. For instance, Yahoo and Google both have YAHOO and google objects that "act like" namespaces in that they contain all of their public and private variables, functions, and objects within a single access point. So why, then, would a namespace be so significantly different in implementation? Maybe I just have a misconception as to what a namespace is exactly.

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• XNA vs SlimDX for offscreen renderer

  - by Groky

  Hello, I realise there are numerous questions on here asking about choosing between XNA and SlimDX, but these all relate to game programming. A little background: I have an application that renders scenes from XML descriptions. Currently I am using WPF 3D and this mostly works, except that WPF has no way to render scenes offscreen (i.e. on a server, without displaying them in a window), and also rendering to a bitmap causes WPF to fallback to software rendering. So I'm faced with having to write my own renderer. Here are the requirements: Mix of 3D and 2D elements. Relatively few elements per scene (tens of meshes, tens of 2D elements). Large scenes (up to 3000px square for print). Only a single frame will be rendered (i.e. FPS is not an issue). Opacity masks. Pixel shaders. Software fallback (servers may or may not have a decent gfx card). Possibility of being rendered offscreen. As you can see it's pretty simple stuff and WPF can manage it quite nicely except for the not-being-able-to-export-the-scene problem. In particular I don't need many of the things usually needed in game development. So bearing that in mind, would you choose XNA or SlimDX? The non-rendering portion of the code is already written in C#, so want to stick with that.

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• No OpenID endpoint found

  - by azamsharp

  I am trying to use the DotNetOpenId library to add OpenID support on a test website. For some reason it keeps giving me the following error when running on FireFix. Keep in mind that I am using localhost as I am testing it on my local machine. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Web.UI.WebControls; using DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Extensions.ProviderAuthenticationPolicy; using DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Extensions.SimpleRegistration; using DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.RelyingParty; namespace TableSorterDemo { public partial class Login : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { var openid = new OpenIdRelyingParty(); if (openid.GetResponse() != null) { switch (openid.GetResponse().Status) { case AuthenticationStatus.Authenticated: var fetch = openid.GetResponse().GetExtension(typeof(ClaimsResponse)) as ClaimsResponse; var nick = fetch.Nickname; var email = fetch.Email; break; } } } protected void OpenIdLogin1_LoggedIn(object sender, OpenIdEventArgs e) { var openid = new OpenIdRelyingParty(); if(openid.GetResponse() != null) { switch(openid.GetResponse().Status) { case AuthenticationStatus.Authenticated: var fetch = openid.GetResponse().GetExtension(typeof (ClaimsResponse)) as ClaimsResponse; var nick = fetch.Nickname; var email = fetch.Email; break; } } } protected void OpenIdLogin1_LoggingIn(object sender, OpenIdEventArgs e) { var openid = new OpenIdRelyingParty(); var req = openid.CreateRequest(OpenIdLogin1.Text); var fetch = new ClaimsRequest(); fetch.Email = DemandLevel.Require; fetch.Nickname = DemandLevel.Require; req.AddExtension(fetch); req.RedirectToProvider(); return; } } } Also, if I run the same page in Chrome then I get the following: Login failed: This message has already been processed. This could indicate a replay attack in progress.

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• How does [self.tableView reloadData] know what data to reload?

  - by Scott Pendleton

  It bugs me to death that my viewcontroller, which happens to be a tableViewController, knows without being told that its property that is an NSArray or an NSDictionary holds the data that is to be loaded into the table for display. Seems like I should explicitly say something like: [self.tableView useData:self.MyArray]; Because, THAT'S WHAT I WANT TO DO! I want to have more than one array inside my tableViewController, and switch between one and the other programmatically. Please do not give me an answer like: "Never mind what you want to do, just set up two different tableViewControllers." No. I want to do it my way. I notice that when a tableViewController makes use of a searchViewController, you can do this: if (tableView == self.searchDisplayController.searchResultsTableView) { YES! I have even been able to do this: self.tableView = self.searchDisplayController.searchResultsTableView; [self.tableView reloadData]; But nowhere can I find how to set self.tableView back to the main datasource! I'm so tired of sifting, sifting through code for incomplete nuggets of enlightenment. Allow me to understate that Apple's documentation is grossly inadequate. It's astounding that so many slick iPhone programs came to be created. People said that once I went Mac, I'd never go back to Windows. Well, I'm anything but a convert.

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• How to play non buffered .wav with MediaStreamSource implementation in Silverlight 4?

  - by kyrisu

  Background I'm trying to stream a wave file in Silverlight 4 using MediaStreamSource implementation found here. The problem is I want to play the file while it's still buffering, or at least give user some visual feedback while it's buffering. For now my code looks like that: private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(new Uri(App.Current.Host.Source, "../test.wav")); //request.ContentType = "audio/x-wav"; request.AllowReadStreamBuffering = false; request.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(RequestCallback), request); } private void RequestCallback(IAsyncResult ar) { this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate() { HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)ar.AsyncState; HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.EndGetResponse(ar); WaveMediaStreamSource wavMss = new WaveMediaStreamSource(response.GetResponseStream()); try { me.SetSource(wavMss); } catch (InvalidOperationException) { // This file is not valid } me.Play(); }); } The problem is that after settings request.AllowREadStreamBuffer to false the stream does not support seeking and the above mentioned implementation throws an exception (keep in mind I've put some of the position setting logic into if(stream.CanSeek) block): Read is not supported on the main thread when buffering is disabled Question Is there a way to play wav stream without buffering it in advance?

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