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• XNA Notes 006

  - by George Clingerman

  If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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• Feedback on "market manipulation", a peripheral game mechanic for a satirical MMO

  - by BerndBrot

  This question asks for feedback on a specific game-mechanic. Since there is not one right feedback on a game mechanic, I tried to provide enough context and guidelines to still make it possible for users to rate answers and to accept an answer as the best answer (following these criteria from Writer.SE's meta website). Please comment if you have any suggestions on how I could improve the question in that regard. So, let's begin with the game itself and some of its elements which are relevant for this question. Context I'm working on a satirical, text-based multiplayer adventure and role-playing game set in modern-day London. The game resolves around the concept of sin and features a myriad of (venomous) allusions to all the things that go wrong in this world. Players can choose between character classes like bullshit artist (consultant), bankster, lawyer, mobster, celebrity, politician, etc. In order to complete the game, the player has to live so sinfully with regard to any of the seven deadly sins that a demon is willing to offer them a contract of sponsorship. On their quest to live a sinful live, characters explore more and more locations of modern-day London (on a GoogleMap), fight "monsters" like insurance sales agents or Jehovah's Witnesses, and complete quests, like building a PowerPoint presentation out of marketing buzz words or keeping up a number of substance abuse effects in order to progress on the gluttony path. Battles are turn based with both combatants having a deck of cards, with which they try to make their enemy give in to temptations of all sorts. Tempted enemies sometimes become contacts (an item drop mechanic), which can be exploited for various benefits, depending on their area of influence (finance, underworld, bureaucracy, etc.), level of influence, and kind of sway that the player has over them (bribed, seduced, threatened, etc.) Once a contract has been exploited, the player loses that contact. Most actions require turns. Turns are limited, but refill each day. Criteria A number of peripheral game mechanics are supposed to represent real world abuses and mischief in a humorous way integrate real world data and events to strengthen the feeling of relevance of the game's humor with regard to real world problems add fun ways of interacting with other players add ways for players to express themselves through game-play Market manipulation is one such peripheral game mechanic and should fulfill all of these goals. Market manipulation This is my initial design of the mechanic: Players can enter the London Stock Exchange (LSE) (without paying a turn) LSE displays the stock prices of a number of companies in industries like weapons or tobacco as well as some derivatives based on wheat and corn. The stock prices are calculated based on the actual stock prices of these companies and derivatives (in real time) any market manipulations that were conducted by the players any market corrections of the system Players can buy and sell shares with cash, a resource in the game, at current in-game market value (without paying a turn). Players can manipulate the market, i.e. let the price of a share either rise or fall, by some amount, over a certain period of time. Manipulating the market requires 1 turn A contact in the financial sector (see above). The higher the level of influence of the contact, the stronger the effect of the manipulation on the stock price, and/or the shorter it takes for the manipulation to manifest itself. Market manipulation also adds a crime to the player's record. (There are a multitude of ways to take care of that, but it is still another "cost" of market manipulations.) The system continuously corrects market manipulations by letting the in-game prices converge towards their real world counterparts at a rate of 2% of the difference between the two per hour. Because of this market correction mechanism, pushing up prices (and screwing down prices) becomes increasingly difficult the higher (lower) the price already is. Whenever food prices reach a certain level, in-game stories are posted about hunger catastrophes happening somewhere far, far away (maybe with links to real world news stories). Whenever a player sells a certain number of shares with a sufficiently high margin, they are mentioned in that day's in-game financial news. Since the number of stock options is very limited, players will inevitably collide in their efforts to manipulate the market in their favor. Hopefully, it will also be a fun side-arena for guilds and covenants to fight each other. Question(s) What do you think of this mechanism given the criteria for peripheral game mechanics that I specified for my game? Do you have any ideas how the mechanic could be improved with regard to these criteria (or otherwise)? Could it be improved to allow for more expressive game-play, or involve an allusion to some other real world madness (like short selling, leveraging, or some other banking magic)? Are there any game-theoretic problems with this mechanic, like maybe certain dominant individual strategies that, collectively, lead to every player profiting and thus eliminating the idea of market manipulation PVP? Also, if you like (or dislike) this question, feel free to participate in the discussion on GDSE meta: "Should we be more lax with regard to SE's question/answer format to make game design questions possible?"

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 07, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, March 07, 2010New ProjectsAlgorithminator: Universal .NET algorithm visualizer, which helps you to illustrate any algorithm, written in any .NET language. Still in development.ALToolkit: Contains a set of handy .NET components/classes. Currently it contains: * A Numeric Text Box (an Extended NumericUpDown) * A Splash Screen base fo...Automaton Home: Automaton is a home automation software built with a n-Tier, MVVM pattern utilzing WCF, EF, WPF, Silverlight and XBAP.Developer Controls: Developer Controls contains various controls to help build applications that can script/write code.Dynamic Reference Manager: Dynamic Reference Manager is a set (more like a small group) of classes and attributes written in C# that allows any .NET program to reference othe...indiologic: Utilities of an IndioNeural Cryptography in F#: This project is my magistracy resulting work. It is intended to be an example of using neural networks in cryptography. Hashing functions are chose...Particle Filter Visualization: Particle Filter Visualization Program for the Intel Science and Engineering FairPólya: Efficient, immutable, polymorphic collections. .Net lacks them, we provide them*. * By we, we mean I; and by efficient, I mean hopefully so.project euler solutions from mhinze: mhinze project euler solutionsSilverlight 4 and WCF multi layer: Silverlight 4 and WCF multi layersqwarea: Project for a browser-based, minimalistic, massively multiplayer strategy game. Part of the "Génie logiciel et Cloud Computing" course of the ENS (...SuperSocket: SuperSocket, a socket application framework can build FTP/SMTP/POP server easilyToast (for ASP.NET MVC): Dynamic, developer & designer friendly content injection, compression and optimization for ASP.NET MVCNew ReleasesALToolkit: ALToolkit 1.0: Binary release of the libraries containing: NumericTextBox SplashScreen Based on the VB.NET code, but that doesn't really matter.Blacklist of Providers: 1.0-Milestone 1: Blacklist of Providers.Milestone 1In this development release implemented - Main interface (Work Item #5453) - Database (Work Item #5523)C# Linear Hash Table: Linear Hash Table b2: Now includes a default constructor, and will throw an exception if capacity is not set to a power of 2 or loadToMaintain is below 1.Composure: CassiniDev-Trunk-40745-VS2010.rc1.NET4: A simple port of the CassiniDev portable web server project for Visual Studio 2010 RC1 built against .NET 4.0. The WCF tests currently fail unless...Developer Controls: DevControls: These are the version 1.0 releases of these controls. Download the individually or all together (in a .zip file). More releases coming soon!Dynamic Reference Manager: DRM Alpha1: This is the first release. I'm calling it Alpha because I intend implementing other functions, but I do not intend changing the way current functio...ESB Toolkit Extensions: Tellago SOA ESB Extenstions v0.3: Windows Installer file that installs Library on a BizTalk ESB 2.0 system. This Install automatically configures the esb.config to use the new compo...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.1 Alpha: 0.1 AlphaHome Access Plus+: v3.0.3.0: Version 3.0.3.0 Release Change Log: Added Announcement Box Removed script files that aren't needed Fixed & issue in directory path Stylesheet...Icarus Scene Engine: Icarus Scene Engine 1.10.306.840: Icarus Professional, Icarus Player, the supporting software for Icarus Scene Engine, with some included samples, and the start of a tutorial (with ...mavjuz WndLpt: wndlpt-0.2.5: New: Response to 5 LPT inputs "test i 1" New: Reaction to 12 LPT outputs "test q 8" New: Reaction to all LPT pins "test pin 15" New: Syntax: ...Neural Cryptography in F#: Neural Cryptography 0.0.1: The most simple version of this project. It has a neural network that works just like logical AND and a possibility to recreate neural network from...Password Provider: 1.0.3: This release fixes a bug which caused the program to crash when double clicking on a generic item.RoTwee: RoTwee 6.2.0.0: New feature is as next. 16649 Add hashtag for tweet of tune.Now you can tweet your playing tune with hashtag.Visual Studio DSite: Picture Viewer (Visual C++ 2008): This example source code allows you to view any picture you want in the click of a button. All you got to do is click the button and browser via th...WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.8.00: Whats New File Browser: Folders & Files View reworked File Browser: Folders & Files View reworked File Browser: Folders are displayed as TreeVi...WSDLGenerator: WSDLGenerator 0.0.0.4: - replaced CommonLibrary.dll by CommandLineParser.dll - added better support for custom complex typesMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryAll-In-One Code FrameworkWindows 7 USB/DVD Download Toolニコ生アラートWindows Double ExplorerVirtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2Caliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightArkSwitchMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web Servicespatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterFarseer Physics EngineFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIFluent Assertions

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• ASP.NET MVC HandleError Attribute

  - by Ben Griswold

  Last Wednesday, I took a whopping 15 minutes out of my day and added ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) to my ASP.NET MVC application.  If you haven’t heard the news (I hadn’t until recently), ELMAH does a killer job of logging and reporting nearly all unhandled exceptions.  As for handled exceptions, I’ve been using NLog but since I was already playing with the ELMAH bits I thought I’d see if I couldn’t replace it. Atif Aziz provided a quick solution in his answer to a Stack Overflow question.  I’ll let you consult his answer to see how one can subclass the HandleErrorAttribute and override the OnException method in order to get the bits working.  I pretty much took rolled the recommended logic into my application and it worked like a charm.  Along the way, I did uncover a few HandleError fact to which I wasn’t already privy.  Most of my learning came from Steven Sanderson’s book, Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework.  I’ve flipped through a bunch of the book and spent time on specific sections.  It’s a really good read if you’re looking to pick up an ASP.NET MVC reference. Anyway, my notes are found a comments in the following code snippet.  I hope my notes clarify a few things for you too. public class LogAndHandleErrorAttribute : HandleErrorAttribute {     public override void OnException(ExceptionContext context)     {         // A word from our sponsors:         //      http://stackoverflow.com/questions/766610/how-to-get-elmah-to-work-with-asp-net-mvc-handleerror-attribute         //      and Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson         //         // Invoke the base implementation first. This should mark context.ExceptionHandled = true         // which stops ASP.NET from producing a "yellow screen of death." This also sets the         // Http StatusCode to 500 (internal server error.)         //         // Assuming Custom Errors aren't off, the base implementation will trigger the application         // to ultimately render the "Error" view from one of the following locations:         //         //      1. ~/Views/Controller/Error.aspx         //      2. ~/Views/Controller/Error.ascx         //      3. ~/Views/Shared/Error.aspx         //      4. ~/Views/Shared/Error.ascx         //         // "Error" is the default view, however, a specific view may be provided as an Attribute property.         // A notable point is the Custom Errors defaultRedirect is not considered in the redirection plan.         base.OnException(context);           var e = context.Exception;                  // If the exception is unhandled, simply return and let Elmah handle the unhandled exception.         // Otherwise, try to use error signaling which involves the fully configured pipeline like logging,         // mailing, filtering and what have you). Failing that, see if the error should be filtered.         // If not, the error simply logged the exception.         if (!context.ExceptionHandled                || RaiseErrorSignal(e)                   || IsFiltered(context))                  return;           LogException(e); // FYI. Simple Elmah logging doesn't handle mail notifications.     }

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Fitting an Image to Screen on Rotation iPhone / iPad ?

  - by user356937

  I have been playing around with one of the iPhone examples from Apple' web site (ScrollViewSuite) . I am trying to tweak it a bit so that when I rotate the the iPad the image will fit into the screen in landscape mode vertical. I have been successful in getting the image to rotate, but the image is larger than the height of the landscape screen, so the bottom is below the screen. I would like to image to scale to the height of the landscape screen. I have been playing around with various autoSizingMask attributes without success. The imageView is called "zoomView" this is the actual image which loads into a scrollView called imageScrollView. I am trying to achieve the screen to rotate and look like this.... olsonvox.com/photos/correct.png However, this is what My screen is looking like. olsonvox.com/photos/incorrect.png I would really appreciate some advice or guidance. Below is the RootViewController.m for the project. Blade # import "RootViewController.h" #define ZOOM_VIEW_TAG 100 #define ZOOM_STEP 1.5 #define THUMB_HEIGHT 150 #define THUMB_V_PADDING 25 #define THUMB_H_PADDING 25 #define CREDIT_LABEL_HEIGHT 25 #define AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD 30 @interface RootViewController (ViewHandlingMethods) - (void)toggleThumbView; - (void)pickImageNamed:(NSString *)name; - (NSArray *)imageNames; - (void)createThumbScrollViewIfNecessary; - (void)createSlideUpViewIfNecessary; @end @interface RootViewController (AutoscrollingMethods) - (void)maybeAutoscrollForThumb:(ThumbImageView *)thumb; - (void)autoscrollTimerFired:(NSTimer *)timer; - (void)legalizeAutoscrollDistance; - (float)autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:(float)proximity; @end @interface RootViewController (UtilityMethods) - (CGRect)zoomRectForScale:(float)scale withCenter:(CGPoint)center; @end @implementation RootViewController - (void)loadView { [super loadView]; imageScrollView = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:[[self view]bounds]]; // this code makes the image resize to the width and height properly. imageScrollView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleLeftMargin | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin| UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin| UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleBottomMargin; // TRY SETTNG CENTER HERE SOMEHOW&gt;.... [imageScrollView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor blackColor]]; [imageScrollView setDelegate:self]; [imageScrollView setBouncesZoom:YES]; [[self view] addSubview:imageScrollView]; [self toggleThumbView]; // intitializes with the first image. [self pickImageNamed:@"lookbook1"]; } - (void)dealloc { [imageScrollView release]; [slideUpView release]; [thumbScrollView release]; [super dealloc]; } #pragma mark UIScrollViewDelegate methods - (UIView *)viewForZoomingInScrollView:(UIScrollView *)scrollView { UIView *view = nil; if (scrollView == imageScrollView) { view = [imageScrollView viewWithTag:ZOOM_VIEW_TAG]; } return view; } /************************************** NOTE **************************************/ /* The following delegate method works around a known bug in zoomToRect:animated: */ /* In the next release after 3.0 this workaround will no longer be necessary */ /**********************************************************************************/ - (void)scrollViewDidEndZooming:(UIScrollView *)scrollView withView:(UIView *)view atScale:(float)scale { [scrollView setZoomScale:scale+0.01 animated:NO]; [scrollView setZoomScale:scale animated:NO]; } #pragma mark TapDetectingImageViewDelegate methods - (void)tapDetectingImageView:(TapDetectingImageView *)view gotSingleTapAtPoint:(CGPoint)tapPoint { // Single tap shows or hides drawer of thumbnails. [self toggleThumbView]; } - (void)tapDetectingImageView:(TapDetectingImageView *)view gotDoubleTapAtPoint:(CGPoint)tapPoint { // double tap zooms in float newScale = [imageScrollView zoomScale] * ZOOM_STEP; CGRect zoomRect = [self zoomRectForScale:newScale withCenter:tapPoint]; [imageScrollView zoomToRect:zoomRect animated:YES]; } - (void)tapDetectingImageView:(TapDetectingImageView *)view gotTwoFingerTapAtPoint:(CGPoint)tapPoint { // two-finger tap zooms out float newScale = [imageScrollView zoomScale] / ZOOM_STEP; CGRect zoomRect = [self zoomRectForScale:newScale withCenter:tapPoint]; [imageScrollView zoomToRect:zoomRect animated:YES]; } #pragma mark ThumbImageViewDelegate methods - (void)thumbImageViewWasTapped:(ThumbImageView *)tiv { [self pickImageNamed:[tiv imageName]]; [self toggleThumbView]; } - (void)thumbImageViewStartedTracking:(ThumbImageView *)tiv { [thumbScrollView bringSubviewToFront:tiv]; } // CONTROLS DRAGGING AND DROPPING THUMBNAILS... - (void)thumbImageViewMoved:(ThumbImageView *)draggingThumb { // check if we've moved close enough to an edge to autoscroll, or far enough away to stop autoscrolling [self maybeAutoscrollForThumb:draggingThumb]; /* The rest of this method handles the reordering of thumbnails in the thumbScrollView. See */ /* ThumbImageView.h and ThumbImageView.m for more information about how this works. */ // we'll reorder only if the thumb is overlapping the scroll view if (CGRectIntersectsRect([draggingThumb frame], [thumbScrollView bounds])) { BOOL draggingRight = [draggingThumb frame].origin.x &gt; [draggingThumb home].origin.x ? YES : NO; /* we're going to shift over all the thumbs who live between the home of the moving thumb */ /* and the current touch location. A thumb counts as living in this area if the midpoint */ /* of its home is contained in the area. */ NSMutableArray *thumbsToShift = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; // get the touch location in the coordinate system of the scroll view CGPoint touchLocation = [draggingThumb convertPoint:[draggingThumb touchLocation] toView:thumbScrollView]; // calculate minimum and maximum boundaries of the affected area float minX = draggingRight ? CGRectGetMaxX([draggingThumb home]) : touchLocation.x; float maxX = draggingRight ? touchLocation.x : CGRectGetMinX([draggingThumb home]); // iterate through thumbnails and see which ones need to move over for (ThumbImageView *thumb in [thumbScrollView subviews]) { // skip the thumb being dragged if (thumb == draggingThumb) continue; // skip non-thumb subviews of the scroll view (such as the scroll indicators) if (! [thumb isMemberOfClass:[ThumbImageView class]]) continue; float thumbMidpoint = CGRectGetMidX([thumb home]); if (thumbMidpoint &gt;= minX &amp;&amp; thumbMidpoint &lt;= maxX) { [thumbsToShift addObject:thumb]; } } // shift over the other thumbs to make room for the dragging thumb. (if we're dragging right, they shift to the left) float otherThumbShift = ([draggingThumb home].size.width + THUMB_H_PADDING) * (draggingRight ? -1 : 1); // as we shift over the other thumbs, we'll calculate how much the dragging thumb's home is going to move float draggingThumbShift = 0.0; // send each of the shifting thumbs to its new home for (ThumbImageView *otherThumb in thumbsToShift) { CGRect home = [otherThumb home]; home.origin.x += otherThumbShift; [otherThumb setHome:home]; [otherThumb goHome]; draggingThumbShift += ([otherThumb frame].size.width + THUMB_H_PADDING) * (draggingRight ? 1 : -1); } // change the home of the dragging thumb, but don't send it there because it's still being dragged CGRect home = [draggingThumb home]; home.origin.x += draggingThumbShift; [draggingThumb setHome:home]; } } - (void)thumbImageViewStoppedTracking:(ThumbImageView *)tiv { // if the user lets go of the thumb image view, stop autoscrolling [autoscrollTimer invalidate]; autoscrollTimer = nil; } #pragma mark Autoscrolling methods - (void)maybeAutoscrollForThumb:(ThumbImageView *)thumb { autoscrollDistance = 0; // only autoscroll if the thumb is overlapping the thumbScrollView if (CGRectIntersectsRect([thumb frame], [thumbScrollView bounds])) { CGPoint touchLocation = [thumb convertPoint:[thumb touchLocation] toView:thumbScrollView]; float distanceFromLeftEdge = touchLocation.x - CGRectGetMinX([thumbScrollView bounds]); float distanceFromRightEdge = CGRectGetMaxX([thumbScrollView bounds]) - touchLocation.x; if (distanceFromLeftEdge &lt; AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD) { autoscrollDistance = [self autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:distanceFromLeftEdge] * -1; // if scrolling left, distance is negative } else if (distanceFromRightEdge &lt; AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD) { autoscrollDistance = [self autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:distanceFromRightEdge]; } } // if no autoscrolling, stop and clear timer if (autoscrollDistance == 0) { [autoscrollTimer invalidate]; autoscrollTimer = nil; } // otherwise create and start timer (if we don't already have a timer going) else if (autoscrollTimer == nil) { autoscrollTimer = [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:(1.0 / 60.0) target:self selector:@selector(autoscrollTimerFired:) userInfo:thumb repeats:YES]; } } - (float)autoscrollDistanceForProximityToEdge:(float)proximity { // the scroll distance grows as the proximity to the edge decreases, so that moving the thumb // further over results in faster scrolling. return ceilf((AUTOSCROLL_THRESHOLD - proximity) / 5.0); } - (void)legalizeAutoscrollDistance { // makes sure the autoscroll distance won't result in scrolling past the content of the scroll view float minimumLegalDistance = [thumbScrollView contentOffset].x * -1; float maximumLegalDistance = [thumbScrollView contentSize].width - ([thumbScrollView frame].size.width + [thumbScrollView contentOffset].x); autoscrollDistance = MAX(autoscrollDistance, minimumLegalDistance); autoscrollDistance = MIN(autoscrollDistance, maximumLegalDistance); } - (void)autoscrollTimerFired:(NSTimer*)timer { [self legalizeAutoscrollDistance]; // autoscroll by changing content offset CGPoint contentOffset = [thumbScrollView contentOffset]; contentOffset.x += autoscrollDistance; [thumbScrollView setContentOffset:contentOffset]; // adjust thumb position so it appears to stay still ThumbImageView *thumb = (ThumbImageView *)[timer userInfo]; [thumb moveByOffset:CGPointMake(autoscrollDistance, 0)]; } #pragma mark View handling methods - (void)toggleThumbView { [self createSlideUpViewIfNecessary]; // no-op if slideUpView has already been created CGRect frame = [slideUpView frame]; if (thumbViewShowing) { frame.origin.y = 0; } else { frame.origin.y = -225; } [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:nil]; [UIView setAnimationDuration:0.3]; [slideUpView setFrame:frame]; [UIView commitAnimations]; thumbViewShowing = !thumbViewShowing; } - (void)pickImageNamed:(NSString *)name { // first remove previous image view, if any [[imageScrollView viewWithTag:ZOOM_VIEW_TAG] removeFromSuperview]; UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@.jpg", name]]; TapDetectingImageView *zoomView = [[TapDetectingImageView alloc] initWithImage:image]; zoomView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth ; [zoomView setDelegate:self]; [zoomView setTag:ZOOM_VIEW_TAG]; [imageScrollView addSubview:zoomView]; [imageScrollView setContentSize:[zoomView frame].size]; [zoomView release]; // choose minimum scale so image width fits screen float minScale = [imageScrollView frame].size.width / [zoomView frame].size.width; [imageScrollView setMinimumZoomScale:minScale]; [imageScrollView setZoomScale:minScale]; [imageScrollView setContentOffset:CGPointZero]; } - (NSArray *)imageNames { // the filenames are stored in a plist in the app bundle, so create array by reading this plist NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Images" ofType:@"plist"]; NSData *plistData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path]; NSString *error; NSPropertyListFormat format; NSArray *imageNames = [NSPropertyListSerialization propertyListFromData:plistData mutabilityOption:NSPropertyListImmutable format:&amp;format errorDescription:&amp;error]; if (!imageNames) { NSLog(@"Failed to read image names. Error: %@", error); [error release]; } return imageNames; } - (void)createSlideUpViewIfNecessary { if (!slideUpView) { [self createThumbScrollViewIfNecessary]; CGRect bounds = [[self view] bounds]; float thumbHeight = [thumbScrollView frame].size.height; float labelHeight = CREDIT_LABEL_HEIGHT; // create label giving credit for images UILabel *creditLabel = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, thumbHeight, bounds.size.width, labelHeight)]; [creditLabel setBackgroundColor:[UIColor clearColor]]; [creditLabel setTextColor:[UIColor whiteColor]]; // [creditLabel setFont:[UIFont fontWithName:@"Helvetica" size:16]]; // [creditLabel setText:@"SAMPLE TEXT"]; [creditLabel setTextAlignment:UITextAlignmentCenter]; // create container view that will hold scroll view and label CGRect frame = CGRectMake(0.0, -225.00, bounds.size.width+256, thumbHeight + labelHeight); slideUpView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleTopMargin; slideUpView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:frame]; [slideUpView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor blackColor]]; [slideUpView setOpaque:NO]; [slideUpView setAlpha:.75]; [[self view] addSubview:slideUpView]; // add subviews to container view [slideUpView addSubview:thumbScrollView]; [slideUpView addSubview:creditLabel]; [creditLabel release]; } } - (void)createThumbScrollViewIfNecessary { if (!thumbScrollView) { float scrollViewHeight = THUMB_HEIGHT + THUMB_V_PADDING; float scrollViewWidth = [[self view] bounds].size.width; thumbScrollView = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, scrollViewWidth, scrollViewHeight)]; [thumbScrollView setCanCancelContentTouches:NO]; [thumbScrollView setClipsToBounds:NO]; // now place all the thumb views as subviews of the scroll view // and in the course of doing so calculate the content width float xPosition = THUMB_H_PADDING; for (NSString *name in [self imageNames]) { UIImage *thumbImage = [UIImage imageNamed:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@_thumb.jpg", name]]; if (thumbImage) { ThumbImageView *thumbView = [[ThumbImageView alloc] initWithImage:thumbImage]; [thumbView setDelegate:self]; [thumbView setImageName:name]; CGRect frame = [thumbView frame]; frame.origin.y = THUMB_V_PADDING; frame.origin.x = xPosition; [thumbView setFrame:frame]; [thumbView setHome:frame]; [thumbScrollView addSubview:thumbView]; [thumbView release]; xPosition += (frame.size.width + THUMB_H_PADDING); } } [thumbScrollView setContentSize:CGSizeMake(xPosition, scrollViewHeight)]; } } #pragma mark Utility methods - (CGRect)zoomRectForScale:(float)scale withCenter:(CGPoint)center { CGRect zoomRect; // the zoom rect is in the content view's coordinates. // At a zoom scale of 1.0, it would be the size of the imageScrollView's bounds. // As the zoom scale decreases, so more content is visible, the size of the rect grows. zoomRect.size.height = [imageScrollView frame].size.height / scale; zoomRect.size.width = [imageScrollView frame].size.width / scale; // choose an origin so as to get the right center. zoomRect.origin.x = center.x - (zoomRect.size.width / 2.0); zoomRect.origin.y = center.y - (zoomRect.size.height / 2.0); return zoomRect; } #pragma mark - #pragma mark Rotation support // Ensure that the view controller supports rotation and that the split view can therefore show in both portrait and landscape. - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation { return YES; } @end

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• HR According to Batman

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Any idea who that guy is running alongside the Caped Crusader? That’s Nightwing, but you may know him as Robin…well, the first Robin anyway. There were actually like 5 Robin’s according to Wikipedia: Dick Grayson, the original, who’s parents were circus performers killed by a gangster. Jason Todd, who was caught trying to steal tires off of the Batmobile. Tim Drake, who saw Dick’s parents die and figured out who Batman and Robin were. and a few others that get into recent time travel/altered reality storylines. What does this have to do with HR? Well, it somewhat ties in with an article by Alex Papadimoulis from 2008. In the article he talks about the “Cravath System”. The Craveth system was developed by a law firm called Cravath, Swaine & Moore back in the 19th century. In a nutshell, they believed in hiring the best and brightest straight out of school. These aspiring lawyers would then begin a fight for survival in the firm, with the strong surviving. In what’s termed the “Up and Out” rule, employees needed to be promoted within 3 years or leave the company. They should achieve partner within 7 – 8 years and no later than 10 after initially coming on board (read all about the system on Wikipedia here). Back to Alex’s article, he quotes from a book published in 1947 about the lawfirm: Under the “Cravath system” of taking a substantial number of men annually and keeping a current constantly moving up in the office, and its philosophy of tenure, men are constantly leaving… it is often difficult to keep the best men long enough to determine whether they shall be made partners, for Cravath-trained men are always in demand, usually at premium salaries. And so we see a pattern forming here: 1. Hire a whole whack of smart college graduates 2. Put them to work 3. The ones that stick around should move up the ladder. The ones that don’t stick around served the company well and left to expound the quality of the Cravath firm. Those that didn’t fall into either of those categories were just let go. There’s some interesting undercurrents to these ideas. If you stick around, you better keep your feet moving! I was at a Microsoft shindig a few months back, and was talking to a Microsoft employee. He shared that at MS you have 5 years to achieve a “senior” position within the company. Once you hit that mark, you can stay there for the rest of your career (he told about a guy who’s a “senior” developer and has been for the last 20+ years working on audio drivers for Windows), but you *must* hit that mark within the timeframe. What we see with Microsoft is Cravath’s system in action, whether intentional or not: bring in smart young people and see which ones stick. You need to give people something to work towards. Saying “You must reach this level or else!” is one way to look at it. The other way is to see achieving a higher rank in the organization as something for ambitious employees to reach towards. It’s important for an organization to always have the next generation of executives waiting in the wings, and unless you’re encouraging that early on you may find yourself in a position of needing to fill positions that nobody has been working towards. Now, you might suggest that this isn’t that big of a deal because you could just hire someone from outside the organization, but the Cravath system holds to the tenet of promoting internally; develop your own talent, since your business is the best place for the future leadership to learn teh business from. It’s OK for people to quit. Alex’s article really drives this point home, but its worth noting here also: its OK for your people to quit. In fact its inevitable…and more inevitable that it’ll be good people that leave. Some will stay and work towards the internal awards of promotion, but a number will get experience, serve the organization well, and then move on to something else. This should be expected and treated as a natural business occurrence. The idea of an alumni of an organization begins to come into play here: “That guy used to work for <insert company here>”. There’s a benefit in that: those best and brightest will be drawn to your organization and your reputation will permeate your market through former staff that are sought after because of how well you nurtured them. The Batman Hook All of this brings us back to Batman and his HR practice: when Dick decided he’d had enough of the Robin schtick, he quit and became his own…but he was always associated with Batman and people understood where his training had come from. To the Dark Knight’s credit, he continued training partners under the Robin brand. Luckily he didn’t have to worry about firing any of them (the ship sort of sails when you reveal a secret identity), although there was that unfortunate “quitting” of the second Robin when the Joker blew him up…but regardless, we see the Cravath system at work: bring in talent, expect great things, and be ok with whatever they decide for their careers. It’s an interesting way to approach HR, and luckily for us our business isn’t as dangerous or over-the-top as the caped crusader’s.

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• $.fadeTo/fadeOut() operations on Table Rows in IE fail

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here’s a a small problem that one of customers ran into a few days ago: He was playing around with some of the sample code I’ve put out for one of my simple jQuery demos which deals with providing a simple pulse behavior plug-in: $.fn.pulse = function(time) { if (!time) time = 2000; // *** this == jQuery object that contains selections $(this).fadeTo(time, 0.20, function() { $(this).fadeTo(time, 1); }); return this; } it’s a very simplistic plug-in and it works fine for simple pulse animations. However he ran into a problem where it didn’t work when working with tables – specifically pulsing a table row in Internet Explorer. Works fine in FireFox and Chrome, but IE not so much. It also works just fine in IE as long as you don’t try it on tables or table rows specifically. Applying against something like this (an ASP.NET GridView): var sel = $("#gdEntries>tbody>tr") .not(":first-child") // no header .not(":last-child") // no footer .filter(":even") .addClass("gridalternate"); // *** Demonstrate simple plugin sel.pulse(2000); fails in IE. No pulsing happens in any version of IE. After some additional experimentation with single rows and various ways of selecting each and still failing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the various fade operations in jQuery simply won’t work correctly in IE (any version). So even something as ‘elemental’ as this: var el = $("#gdEntries>tbody>tr").get(0);$(el).fadeOut(2000); is not working correctly. The item will stick around for 2 seconds and then magically disappear. Likewise: sel.hide().fadeIn(5000); also doesn’t fade in although the items become immediately visible in IE. Go figure that behavior out. Thanks to a tweet from red_square and a link he provided here is a grid that explains what works and doesn’t in IE (and most last gen browsers) regarding opacity: http://www.quirksmode.org/js/opacity.html It appears from this link that table and row elements can’t be made opaque, but td elements can. This means for the row selections I can force each of the td elements to be selected and then pulse all of those. Once you have the rows it’s easy to explicitly select all the columns in those rows with .find(“td”). Aha the following actually works: var sel = $("#gdEntries>tbody>tr") .not(":first-child") // no header .not(":last-child") // no footer .filter(":even") .addClass("gridalternate"); // *** Demonstrate simple plugin sel.find("td").pulse(2000); A little unintuitive that, but it works. Stay away from <table> and <tr> Fades The moral of the story is – stay away from TR, TH and TABLE fades and opacity. If you have to do it on tables use the columns instead and if necessary use .find(“td”) on your row(s) selector to grab all the columns. I’ve been surprised by this uhm relevation, since I use fadeOut in almost every one of my applications for deletion of items and row deletions from grids are not uncommon especially in older apps. But it turns out that fadeOut actually works in terms of behavior: It removes the item when the timeout’s done and because the fade is relatively short lived and I don’t extensively test IE code any more I just never noticed that the fade wasn’t happening. Note – this behavior or rather lack thereof appears to be specific to table table,tr,th elements. I see no problems with other elements like <div> and <li> items. Chalk this one up to another of IE’s shortcomings. Incidentally I’m not the only one who has failed to address this in my simplistic plug-in: The jquery-ui pulsate effect also fails on the table rows in the same way. sel.effect("pulsate", { times: 3 }, 2000); and it also works with the same workaround. If you’re already using jquery-ui definitely use this version of the plugin which provides a few more options… Bottom line: be careful with table based fade operations and remember that if you do need to fade – fade on columns.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Contributing to emerging Cloud standards

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; 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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Contributed by Tony Di Cenzo, Director for Standards Strategy and Architecture, and Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Architect, for Oracle's Systems Management and Storage Products Groups . As one would expect of an industry leader, Oracle's participation in industry standards bodies is extensive. We participate in dozens of organizations that produce open standards which apply to our products, and our commitment to the success of these organizations is manifest in several way - we support them financially through our memberships; our senior engineers are active participants, often serving in leadership positions on boards, technical working groups and committees; and when it makes good business sense we contribute our intellectual property. We believe supporting the development of open standards is fundamental to Oracle meeting customer demands for product choice, seamless interoperability, and lowering the cost of ownership. Nowhere is this truer than in the area of cloud standards, and for the most recent release of our flagship management product, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (EM Cloud Control 12c). There is a fundamental rule that standards follow architecture. This was true of distributed computing, it was true of service-oriented architecture (SOA), and it's true of cloud. If you are familiar with Enterprise Manager it is likely to be no surprise that EM Cloud Control 12c is a source of technology that can be considered for adoption within cloud management standards. The reason, quite simply, is that the Oracle integrated stack architecture aligns with the cloud architecture models being adopted by the industry, and EM Cloud Control 12c has been developed to manage this architecture. EM Cloud Control 12c has facilities for managing the various underlying capabilities of the integrated stack in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS clouds, and enables essential characteristics such as on-demand self-service provisioning, centralized policy-based resource management, integrated chargeback, and capacity planning, and complete visibility of the physical and virtual environment from applications to disk. Our most recent contribution in support of cloud management standards to come out of the EM Cloud Control 12c work was the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API. Oracle contributed the Elemental Resource Model API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in 2011 where it was assigned to DMTF's Cloud Management Working Group (CMWG). The CMWG is considering the Oracle specification and those of several other vendors in their effort to produce a best practices specification for managing IaaS clouds. DMTF's Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface specification, called CIMI for short, is currently out for public review and expected to be released by DMTF later this year. We are proud to be playing an important role in the development of what is expected to become a major cloud standard. You can find more information on DMTF CIMI at http://dmtf.org/standards/cloud. You can find the work-in-progress release of CIMI at http://dmtf.org/content/cimi-work-progress-specifications-now-available-public-comment . The Oracle Cloud API specification is available on the Oracle Technology Network. You can find more information about the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN), including a webcast featuring the API engineering manager Jack Yu (see TechCast Live: Inside the Oracle Cloud Resource Model API). If you have not seen this video we recommend you take the time to view it. Simply hover your cursor over the webcast title and control+click to follow the embedded link. If you have a question about the Oracle Cloud API or want to learn more about Oracle's participation in cloud management standards efforts drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. The Enterprise Manager Standards Blogs are written by Tony Di Cenzo, Director for Standards Strategy and Architecture, and Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Architect, for Oracle's Systems Management and Storage Products Groups. They can be reached at Tony.DiCenzo at Oracle.com and Mark.Carlson at Oracle.com respectively. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• doubleTwist is an iTunes Alternative that Supports Several Devices

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are a lot of iTunes users out there, but unfortunately you can’t use it with all of your portable devices. Today we take a look at doubleTwist, which allows you to sync your media with a multitude of portable devices and easily share it as well. Note: You can run doubleTwist on Windows or Mac, and here we take a look at the Windows version. Install & Setup doubleTwist Download and install doubleTwist using the defaults in the wizard… Installation takes several moments and you’ll see the progress while it finishes up. After installation is complete, sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you do have an account you can login right away. Enter in your username, email address, and password then click Sign Up.   You’ll get an confirmation email and need to activate the account before you can sign in. Once you’re all signed up, launch doubleTwist and you’ll be ready to start using it. doubleTwist Music The default music store is Amazon MP3 store which might appeal to those of you who are tired of the iTunes music store. A lot of times the music is cheaper and available at higher bit rates. You can start searching for music in the Amazon Music Store and previewing songs. To purchase anything though you will need to sign into your Amazon account.   Under Playlists it allows you to import your playlists from iTunes and Windows Media Player, which is a handy feature if you don’t want to set them up again. Of course you can play your songs through the music player on your desktop. Devices One of the coolest things about doubleTwist is that it supports a lot of different portable media devices including iPod, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, PSP, Smartphones, and much more. Unfortunately for Zune users…there isn’t any support for the Zune of Zune HD yet. Here we have a Creative Zen attached and can sync songs, pictures, and podcasts. An HTC-S620 Smartphone running Windows Mobile… Even a simple USB drive will be recognized and you can transfer your media to it as well.   Podcasts Finding your favorite audio and video podcasts is easy with the search feature. You can easily manage and subscribe to podcasts in the subscriptions section.   You can watch the video podcasts directly in doubleTwist. Sharing Media Also you can share digital media with your friends or add it to Flickr and YouTube. You can send any pictures, videos, or music in your library to other people by dragging it over. You can email users individually… Or access contacts from your Gmail and Yahoo accounts. There is a limit to how much you can send of video podcasts… only the first 10 minutes. The person you send it to will get a link in their email that points to your My Feed page on the doubleTwist site.   There they can access the media you sent…in this example it’s a video podcast but you can share any media. Other Features Under My Profile you can change your avatar and personal information.   In Preferences you can choose where media is stored, its startup actions, podcast subscriptions, and manage device syncing. Conclusion It’s still in beta stage so expect some bugs, but overall doubleTwist is a solid media player that is easy to use with a clean interface. It’s simple and doesn’t try to do too much so is fairly easy on system resources. The main annoyance is it tries to catalog all of your media out of the box. Which may be alright for some users with smaller media collections, but very irritating to advanced users with large collections. Also there is currently no support for the Zune, but according to their forums, it’s on the way. At the time of this writing it’s in public beta and can be downloaded for XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit), and Mac OSX. If you’re looking for an iTunes alternative that works with several different portable devices, you might want to give DoubleTwist a try. Download DoubleTwist Public Beta See If Your Media Device is Supported by doubleTwist Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips MusicBee is a Fast and Powerful Music ManagerAvoid the Apple QuickTime Bloat with QT LiteBeginner Geek: Set Default Programs in Windows 7 and VistaBeginner Geeks: OpenOffice is a Free Cross Platform Alternative to MS OfficeManage Devices the Easy Way with Device Stage in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• JavaOne Afterglow by Simon Ritter

  - by JuergenKress

  Last week was the eighteenth JavaOne conference and I thought it would be a good idea to write up my thoughts about how things went. Firstly thanks to Yoshio Terada for the photos, I didn't bother bringing a camera with me so it's good to have some pictures to add to the words. Things kicked off full-throttle on Sunday.  We had the Java Champions and JUG leaders breakfast, which was a great way to meet up with a lot of familiar faces and start talking all things Java.  At midday the show really started with the Strategy and Technical Keynotes.  This was always going to be tougher job than some years because there was no big shiny ball to reveal to the audience.  With the Java EE 7 spec being finalised a few months ago and Java SE 8, Java ME 8 and JDK8 not due until the start of next year there was not going to be any big announcement.  I thought both keynotes worked really well each focusing on the things most important to Java developers: Strategy One of the things that is becoming more and more prominent in many companies marketing is the Internet of Things (IoT).  We've moved from the conventional desktop/laptop environment to much more mobile connected computing with smart phones and tablets.  The next wave of the internet is not just billions of people connected, but 10s or 100s of billions of devices connected to the network, all generating data and providing much more precise control of almost any process you can imagine.  This ties into the ideas of Big Data and Cloud Computing, but implementation is certainly not without its challenges.  As Peter Utzschneider explained it's about three Vs: Volume, Velocity and Value.  All these devices will create huge volumes of data at very high speed; to avoid being overloaded these devices will need some sort of processing capabilities that can filter the useful data from the redundant.  The raw data then needs to be turned into useful information that has value.  To make this happen will require applications on devices, at gateways and on the back-end servers, all very tightly integrated.  This is where Java plays a pivotal role, write once, run everywhere becomes essential, having nine million developers fluent in the language makes it the defacto lingua franca of IoT.  There will be lots more information on how this will become a reality, so watch this space. Technical How do we make the IoT a reality, technically?  Using the game of chess Mark Reinhold, with the help of people like John Ceccarelli, Jasper Potts and Richard Bair, showed what you could do.  Using Java EE on the back end, Java SE and JavaFX on the desktop and Java ME Embedded and JavaFX on devices they showed a complete end-to-end demo. This was really impressive, using 3D features from JavaFX 8 (that's included with JDK8) to make a 3D animated Duke chess board.  Jasper also unveiled the "DukePad" a home made tablet using a Raspberry Pi, touch screen and accelerometer. Although the Raspberry Pi doesn't have earth shattering CPU performance (about the same level as a mid 1990s Pentium), it does have really quite good GPU performance so the GUI works really well.  The plans are all open sourced and available here.  One small, but very significant announcement was that Java SE will now be included with the NOOB and Raspbian Linux distros provided by the Raspberry Pi foundation (these can be found here).  No more hassle having to download and install the JDK after you've flashed your SD card OS image.  The finale was the Raspberry Pi powered chess playing robot.  Really very, very cool.  I talked to Jasper about this and he told me each of the chess pieces had been 3D printed and then he had to use acetone to give them a glossy finish (not sure what his wife thought of him spending hours in the kitchen in a gas mask!)  The way the robot arm worked was very impressive as it did not have any positioning data (like a potentiometer connected to each motor), but relied purely on carefully calibrated timings to get the arm to the right place.  Having done things like this myself in the past I know how easy it is to find a small error gets magnified into very big mistakes. Here's some pictures from the keynote: The "Dukepad" architecture Nice clear perspex case so you can see the innards. The very nice 3D chess set.  Maya's obviously a great tool. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Simon Ritter,Java One,OOW,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Gene Hunt Says:

  - by BizTalk Visionary

  "She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot"   "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course" "You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate" "Let's go play slappyface" "your surrounded by armed barstewards" “Right, get out and find this murdering scum right now!” [pause] “Scratch that, we start 9am sharp tomorrow, it's beer-o-clock.” "So then Cartwright, you're such a good Detective.... Go and Detect me a packet of Garibaldies" "You're not the one who is going to have to knit himself a new arsehole after 25 years of aggressive male love in prison" “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “They reckon you've got concussion - but personally, I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom playing king of the jungle.” “You great... soft... sissy... girlie... nancy... french... bender... Man-United supporting POOF!!” “Drugs eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.” “He's Dead! It's quite serious!” “Fanny in the flat...Nice Work” “SoopaDoopa” “Tits in a Jumper!” “Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!” “It's 1973, almost dinnertime. I'm 'avin 'oops!” “Trust the Gene Genie!” “I wanna hump Britt Ekland...What're we gonna do...!” “Was that 'E' and you don't know the rest?! or you going 'Eeee, I Dunno'” “Good Girl! Prostate probe and no jelly. “ “Give over, it's nothing like Spain!” “I'll come over your houses and stamp on all your toys!” “The Wizard will sort it out. It's cos of the wonderful things he does” “Cartwright can jump up and down on his knackers!” “It's not a windup love, he really thinks like this!” “Women! You can't say two words to them” “I was thinking, maybe, a Berni Inn!” “If I wanted a bollocking for drinking too much...!” “Shhhh...hear that...that's the sound of this case being closed! “Chicken!? In a basket!?” “Seems a large quantity of cocaine...” “You probably thought he kept his cock in his keks!” “The tail-end of Rays demotion speech!” “Stephen Warren is gay!?” “You're a smart boy, use your initiative!” “Don't be such a Jessie!” “I find the idea of a bird brushing her teeth...!” “Never been tempted to the Magic talcum powder?” “Make sure she's got nice tits!” “You're more likely to find an ostrich with a plum up it's arse!” “Drink this lot under the table and have a pint on the way home!” “Never be a female Prime Minister!” “Pub? Pub! pub!.....Pub!” “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys!” “The number for the special clinic is on the notice board!” “If me uncle had tits, would he be me auntie!” “Got your vicars in a twist!” “We Done?!” “Your mates got balls...If they were any bigger he'd need a wheelbarrow!” “The Ending - from 'I want to go home' to the end music.”

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Top Object and Batch Execution Statistics Reports

  - by Pinal Dave

  The month of June till mid of July has been the fever of sports. First, it was Wimbledon Tennis and then the Soccer fever was all over. There is a huge number of fan followers and it is great to see the level at which people sometimes worship these sports. Being an Indian, I cannot forget to mention the India tour of England later part of July. Following these sports and as the events unfold to the finals, there are a number of ways the statisticians can slice and dice the numbers. Cue from soccer I can surely say there is a team performance against another team and then there is individual member fairs against a particular opponent. Such statistics give us a fair idea to how a team in the past or in the recent past has fared against each other, head-to-head stats during World cup and during other neutral venue games. All these statistics are just pointers. In reality, they don’t reflect the calibre of the current team because the individuals who performed in each of these games are totally different (Typical example being the Brazil Vs Germany semi-final match in FIFA 2014). So at times these numbers are misleading. It is worth investigating and get the next level information. Similar to these statistics, SQL Server Management studio is also equipped with a number of reports like a) Object Execution Statistics report and b) Batch Execution Statistics reports. As discussed in the example, the team scorecard is like the Batch Execution statistics and individual stats is like Object Level statistics. The analogy can be taken only this far, trust me there is no correlation between SQL Server functioning and playing sports – It is like I think about diet all the time except while I am eating. Performance – Batch Execution Statistics Let us view the first report which can be invoked from Server Node -> Reports -> Standard Reports -> Performance – Batch Execution Statistics. Most of the values that are displayed in this report come from the DMVs sys.dm_exec_query_stats and sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle). This report contains 3 distinctive sections as outline below.   Section 1: This is a graphical bar graph representation of Average CPU Time, Average Logical reads and Average Logical Writes for individual batches. The Batch numbers are indicative and the details of individual batch is available in section 3 (detailed below). Section 2: This represents a Pie chart of all the batches by Total CPU Time (%) and Total Logical IO (%) by batches. This graphical representation tells us which batch consumed the highest CPU and IO since the server started, provided plan is available in the cache. Section 3: This is the section where we can find the SQL statements associated with each of the batch Numbers. This also gives us the details of Average CPU / Average Logical Reads and Average Logical Writes in the system for the given batch with object details. Expanding the rows, I will also get the # Executions and # Plans Generated for each of the queries. Performance – Object Execution Statistics The second report worth a look is Object Execution statistics. This is a similar report as the previous but turned on its head by SQL Server Objects. The report has 3 areas to look as above. Section 1 gives the Average CPU, Average IO bar charts for specific objects. The section 2 is a graphical representation of Total CPU by objects and Total Logical IO by objects. The final section details the various objects in detail with the Avg. CPU, IO and other details which are self-explanatory. At a high-level both the reports are based on queries on two DMVs (sys.dm_exec_query_stats and sys.dm_exec_sql_text) and it builds values based on calculations using columns in them: SELECT * FROM    sys.dm_exec_query_stats s1 CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) AS s2 WHERE   s2.objectid IS NOT NULL AND DB_NAME(s2.dbid) IS NOT NULL ORDER BY  s1.sql_handle; This is one of the simplest form of reports and in future blogs we will look at more complex reports. I truly hope that these reports can give DBAs and developers a hint about what is the possible performance tuning area. As a closing point I must emphasize that all above reports pick up data from the plan cache. If a particular query has consumed a lot of resources earlier, but plan is not available in the cache, none of the above reports would show that bad query. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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• XNA Notes 005

  - by George Clingerman

  Another week and another crazy amount of activity going on in the XNA community. I’m fairly certain I missed over half of it. In fact, if I am missing things, make sure to email me and I’ll try and make sure I catch it next week! ([email protected]). Also, if you’ve got any advice, things you like/don’t like about the way these XNA Notes are going let me know. I always appreciate feedback (currently spammers are leaving me the nicest comments so you guys have work to do!) Without further ado, here’s this week’s notes! Time Critical XNA News The XNA Team Blob reminds us that February 7th is the last day to submit XNA 3.1 games to peer review! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/31/7-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx XNA MVPS Chris Williams kicks off the marketing campaign for our book http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/01/28/143680.aspx Catalin Zima posts the comparison cheat sheet for why Angry Birds is different than Chickens Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/comparison-cheat-sheet-for-chickens-cant-fly-and-angry-birds/ Jim Perry congratulates the developers selected by Game Developer Magazine for Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://machxgames.com/blog/?p=24 @NemoKrad posts his XNAKUUG talks for all to enjoy http://twitter.com/NemoKrad/statuses/33142362502864896 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/02/03/xblig-uk-2011-january-amp-february-talk.aspx George  (that’s me!) preps for his XNA talk coming up on the 8th http://twitter.com/clingermangw/statuses/32669550554124288 http://www.portlandsilverlight.net/Meetings/Details/15 XNA Developers FireFly posts the last tutorial in his XNA Tower Defense tutorial series http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/26442/451460.aspx#451460 http://xnatd.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorial-14-polishing-game.html @fredericmy posts the main difference when porting a game from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox 360 http://fairyengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/main-differences-when-porting-game-from.html @ElementCy creates a pretty rad video of a MineCraft type terrain created using XNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waw1f7wnl9I Andrew Russel gets the first XNA badge on gamedev.stackexchange http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/32322877004972032 http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags And his funding for ExEn has passed $7000 only $3000 to go http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/33042412804771840 Subodh Pushpak blogs about his Windows Phone 7 XNA talk http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2011/02/01/windows-phone-7-silverlight--xna-development-talk.aspx Slyprid releases the latest version of Transmute and needs more people to test http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/32452488418299904 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ SpynDoctorGames celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Your Doodles Are Bugged! Congrats! http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/32511689068908544 Noogy (creator of Dust the Elysian Tail) prepares his conversion to XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/NoogyTweet/statuses/32522008449253376 @philippedasilva posts about the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0 Input management system http://twitter.com/philippedasilva/statuses/32763393957957632 http://indiefreaks.com/2011/02/02/behind-smart-input-system-feature/ Mommy’s Best Games debates what to do about High Scores with their new update http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/02/high-score-shake-up.html @BinaryTweedDeej want to know if there’s anything the community needs to make XNA games for the PC. Give him some feedback! http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/status/32895453863354368 @mikebmcl promises to write us all a book (I can’t wait to read it!) http://twitter.com/mikebmcl/statuses/33206499102687233 @werezompire is going to live, LIVE, thanks to all the generosity and support from the community! http://twitter.com/werezompire/statuses/32840147644977153 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG) Making money in Xbox 360 indie game development. Is it possible? http://www.bitmob.com/articles/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible @AlejandroDaJ posts some thoughts abut the bitmob article http://twitter.com/AlejandroDaJ/statuses/31068552165330944 http://www.apathyworks.com/blog/view.php?id=00215 Kobun gets my respect as an XBLIG champion. I’m not sure who Kobun is, but if you’ve every read through the comment sections any time Kotaku writes about XBLIGs you’ll see a lot of confusion, disinformation in there. Kobun has been waging a secret war battling that lack of knowledge and he does it well. Also he’s running a pretty kick ass site for Xbox LIVE Indie Game reviews http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/ @radiangames releases his last Xbox LIVE Indie Game...for now http://bit.ly/gMK6lE Playing Avaglide with the Kinect controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqAYbHww53o http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/30/kinect-hacks-take-to-the-skies-with-avaglide/ Luke Schneider of Radiangames interviewed in Edge magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/features/radiangames-venture Digital Quarters posts thoughts on why XBLIG’s online requirement kills certain genres http://digitalquarters.blogspot.com/2011/02/thoughts-why-xbligs-online-requirement.html Mommy’s Best Games shares the news that several XBLIGs were featured in the March 2011 issue of Famitsu 360 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/33455/451487.aspx#451487 NaviFairy continues with his Indie-Game-A-Day http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_epic_dungeon.html http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_break_limit_r.html and more every day...that’s kind of the point! Keep your eye on this series! VVGTV continues with it’s awesome reviews/promotions for XBLIGs http://vvgtv.com/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/03/iredia-atrams-secret-xblig-review-2/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/02/poopocalypse-coming-soon-to-xblig/ ….and even more, you get the point. Magicka is an Indie Game doing really well on Steam AND it’s made using XNA http://www.magickagame.com/ http://twitter.com/Magickagame/statuses/32712762580799488 GameMarx reviews Antipole http://www.gamemarx.com/reviews/73/antipole-is-vvvvvvery-good.aspx Armless Octopus review Alpha Squad http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/28/xbox-indie-review-alpha-squad/ An interesting article about Kodu that Jim Perry found http://twitter.com/MachXGames/statuses/32848044105924608 http://www.develop-online.net/news/36915/10-year-old-Jordan-makes-games-The-UK-needs-more-like-her XNA Game Development Sgt. Conker posts about the Natur beta, a new book and whether you can make money with XBLIG http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/a-new-book-on-the-block-and-a-new-natur-beta/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible/ Tips for setting up SVN http://bit.ly/fKxgFh @bsimser found tons of royalty free music and soundfx for your XNA Games http://twitter.com/bsimser/statuses/31426632933711872 Post on the new features in the next Sunburn Editor http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/01/28/new-editor-features-prefabs-components-and-more.aspx @jasons_novaleaf posts source code for light pre-pass optimizations for #xna http://twitter.com/jasons_novaleaf/statuses/33348855403642880 http://jcoluna.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-optimization-round-one/ I’ve been learning about doing an A.I. for turn based games and this article was a great resource. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?print=1

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• Exitus Acta Probat: The Post-Processing Module

  - by Phil Factor

  Sometimes, one has to make certain ethical compromises to ensure the success of a corporate IT project. Exitus Acta Probat (literally 'the result validates the deeds' meaning that the ends justify the means)It was a while back, whilst working as a Technical Architect for a well-known international company, that I was given the task of designing the architecture of a rather specialized accounting system. We'd tried an off-the-shelf (OTS) Windows-based solution which crashed with dispiriting regularity, and didn't quite do what the business required. After a great deal of research and planning, we commissioned a Unux-based system that used X-terminals for the desktops of  the participating staff. X terminals are now obsolete, but were then hot stuff; stripped-down Unix workstations that provided client GUIs for networked applications long before the days of AJAX, Flash, Air and DHTML. I've never known a project go so smoothly: I'd been initially rather nervous about going the Unix route, believing then that  Unix programmers were excitable creatures who were prone to  indulge in role-play enactments of elves and wizards at the weekend, but the programmers I met from the company that did the work seemed to be rather donnish, earnest, people who quickly grasped our requirements and were faultlessly professional in their work.After thinking lofty thoughts for a while, there was considerable pummeling of keyboards by our suppliers, and a beautiful robust application was delivered to us ahead of dates.Soon, the department who had commissioned the work received shiny new X Terminals to replace their rather depressing lavatory-beige PCs. I modestly hung around as the application was commissioned and deployed to the department in order to receive the plaudits. They didn't come. Something was very wrong with the project. I couldn't put my finger on the problem, and the users weren't doing any more than desperately and futilely searching the application to find a fault with it.Many times in my life, I've come up against a predicament like this: The roll-out of an application goes wrong and you are hearing nothing that helps you to discern the cause but nit-*** noise. There is a limit to the emotional heat you can pack into a complaint about text being in the wrong font, or an input form being slightly cramped, but they tried their best. The answer is, of course, one that every IT executive should have tattooed prominently where they can read it in emergencies: In Vino Veritas (literally, 'in wine the truth', alcohol loosens the tongue. A roman proverb) It was time to slap the wallet and get the department down the pub with the tab in my name. It was an eye-watering investment, but hedged with an over-confident IT director who relished my discomfort. To cut a long story short, The real reason gushed out with the third round. We had deprived them of their PCs, which had been good for very little from the pure business perspective, but had provided them with many hours of happiness playing computer-based minesweeper and solitaire. There is no more agreeable way of passing away the interminable hours of wage-slavery than minesweeper or solitaire, and the employees had applauded the munificence of their employer who had provided them with the means to play it. I had, unthinkingly, deprived them of it.I held an emergency meeting with our suppliers the following day. I came over big with the notion that it was in their interests to provide a solution. They played it cool, probably knowing that it was my head on the block, not theirs. In the end, they came up with a compromise. they would temporarily descend from their lofty, cerebral stamping grounds  in order to write a server-based Minesweeper and Solitaire game for X Terminals, and install it in a concealed place within the system. We'd have to pay for it, though. I groaned. How could we do that? "Could we call it a 'post-processing module?" suggested their account executive.And so it came to pass. The application was a resounding success. Every now and then, the staff were able to indulge in some 'post-processing', with what turned out to be a very fine implementation of both minesweeper and solitaire. There were several refinements: A single click in a 'boss' button turned the games into what looked just like a financial spreadsheet.  They even threw in a multi-user version of Battleships. The extra payment for the post-processing module went through the change-control process without anyone untoward noticing, and peace once more descended. Only one thing niggles. Those games were good. Do they still survive, somewhere in a Linux library? If so, I'd like to claim a small part in their production.

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• Trash Destination Adapter

  The Trash Destination and this article came from early experiences of using SSIS and community feedback at the time. When developing a package it is very useful to have a destination adapter that does nothing but consume rows with no setup requirement. You often want run a package part way through development, or just add a path so you can set a Data Viewer. There are stock tasks that can be used, but with the Trash Destination all columns are treated as selected automatically (usage type of read-only), so the pipeline knows they are required. It is also obvious that this is for development or diagnostic purposes, and is clearly not a part of the functional design of the package. It is also ideal for just playing around and exploring concepts in SSIS, and is often used in conjunction with the Data Generator Source. Using these two components it is easy to setup a test of an expression in the Derived Column Transformation for example. The Data Generator Source provides some dummy data, and the Trash Destination allows you to anchor the output path and set a Data Viewer to examine the results. It can also be used when performance tuning packages. It is a consistent and known quantity that has no external influences, so it is ideal as a destination when breaking the data flow into sections to isolate a bottleneck. The adapter is really simple to use and requires no setup. Simply drop it onto the pipeline designer and use it to terminate your data flow path. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally, for 2005/2008, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trash Destination transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Downloads The Trash Destination is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Trash Destination for SQL Server 2005 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2008 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.34 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.33 - SQL Server 2008 release. Includes support for upgrade of 2005 packages. RTM compatible, previously February 2008 CTP. (4 Mar 2008) Version 2.0.0.31 - SQL Server 2008 November 2007 CTP. (14 Feb 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.2.18 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.1.1 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 15 June CTP. Minor enhancements over v1.0.1.0. (11 Jun 2005) Version 1.0.1.0 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 14 April CTP. First Public Release. (30 May 2005) Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. The full error message is shown below for reference: TITLE: Microsoft Visual Studio ------------------------------ The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed. ------------------------------ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: The data flow object "Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination.Trash, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination, Version=1.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b8351fe7752642cc" is not installed correctly on this computer. (Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design) For 2005/2008, once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component? This is not necessary for SQL Server 2012 as the new SSIS toolbox automatically detects components. If you are still having issues then contact us, but please provide as much detail as possible about error, as well as which version of the the task you are using and details of the SSIS tools installed.

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• Check Your Spelling, Grammar, and Style in Firefox and Chrome

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you tired of making simple writing mistakes that get past your browser’s spell-check?  Here’s how you can get advanced grammar check and more in Firefox and Chrome with After the Deadline. Microsoft Word has spoiled us with grammar, syntax, and spell checking, but the default spell check in Firefox and Chrome still only does basic checks.  Even webapps like Google Docs don’t check more than basic spelling errors.  However, WordPress.com is an exception; it offers advanced spelling, grammar, and syntax checking with its After the Deadline proofing system.  This helps you keep from making embarrassing mistakes on your blog posts, and now, thanks to a couple free browser plugins, it can help you keep from making these mistakes in any website or webapp. After the Deadline in Google Chrome Add the After the Deadline extension (link below) to Chrome as usual. As soon as it’s installed, you’re ready to start improving your online writing.  To check spelling, grammar, and more, click the ABC button that you’ll now see at the bottom of most text boxes online. After a quick scan, grammar mistakes are highlighted in green, complex expressions and other syntax problems are highlighted in blue, and spelling mistakes are highlighted in red as would be expected.  Click on an underlined word to choose one of its recommended changes or ignore the suggestion. Or, if you want more explanation about what was wrong with that word or phrase, click Explain for more info. And, if you forget to run an After the Deadline scan before submitting a text entry, it will automatically check to make sure you still want to submit it.  Click Cancel to go back and check your writing first.   To change the After the Deadline settings, click its icon in the toolbar and select View Options.  Additionally, if you want to disable it on the site you’re on, you can click Disable on this site directly from the popup. From the settings page, you can choose extra things to check for such as double negatives and redundant phrases, as well as add sites and words to ignore. After the Deadline in Firefox Add the After the Deadline add-on to Firefox (link below) as normal. After the Deadline basically the same in Firefox as it does in Chrome.  Select the ABC icon in the lower right corner of textboxes to check them for problems, and After the Deadline will underline the problems as it did in Chrome.  To view a suggested change in Firefox, right-click on the underlined word and select the recommended change or ignore the suggestion. And, if you forget to check, you’ll see a friendly reminder asking if you’re sure you want to submit your text like it is. You can access the After the Deadline settings in Firefox from the menu bar.  Click Tools, then select AtD Preferences.  In Firefox, the settings are in a options dialog with three tabs, but it includes the same options as the Chrome settings page.  Here you can make After the Deadline as correction-happy as you like.   Conclusion The web has increasingly become an interactive place, and seldom does a day go by that we aren’t entering text in forms and comments that may stay online forever.  Even our insignificant tweets are being archived in the Library of Congress.  After the Deadline can help you make sure that your permanent internet record is as grammatically correct as possible.  Even though it doesn’t catch every problem, and even misses some spelling mistakes, it’s still a great help. Links Download the After the Deadline extension for Google Chrome Download the After the Deadline add-on for Firefox Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Disable Favicons in FirefoxStupid Geek Tricks: Duplicate a Tab with a Shortcut Key in Chrome or FirefoxHow to Disable the New Geolocation Feature in Google ChromeStupid Geek Tricks: Compare Your Browser’s Memory Usage with Google ChromeStop YouTube Videos from Automatically Playing in Chrome TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Easily Search Food Recipes With Recipe Chimp Tech Fanboys Field Guide Check these Awesome Chrome Add-ons iFixit Offers Gadget Repair Manuals Online Vista style sidebar for Windows 7 Create Nice Charts With These Web Based Tools

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• SQLAuthority News – #SQLPASS 2012 Seattle Update – Memorylane 2009, 2010, 2011

  - by pinaldave

  Today is the first day of the SQLPASS 2012 and I will be soon posting SQL Server 2012 experience over here. Today when I landed in Seattle, I got the nostalgia feeling. I used to stay in the USA. I stayed here for more than 7 years – I studied here and I worked in USA. I had lots of friends in Seattle when I used to stay in the USA. I always wanted to visit Seattle because it is THE place. I remember once I purchased a ticket to travel to Seattle through Priceline (well it was the cheapest option and I was a student) but could not fly because of an interesting issue. I used to be Teaching Assistant of an advanced course and the professor asked me to build a pop-quiz for the course. I unfortunately had to cancel the trip. Before I returned to India – I pretty much covered every city existed in my list to must visit, except one – Seattle. It was so interesting that I never made it to Seattle even though I wanted to visit, when I was in USA. After that one time I never got a chance to travel to Seattle. After a few years I also returned to India for good. Once on Television I saw “Sleepless in Seattle” movie playing and I immediately changed the channel as it reminded me that I never made it to Seattle before. However, destiny has its own way to handle decisions. After I returned to India – I visited Seattle total of 5 times and this is my 6th visit to Seattle in less than 3 years. I was here for 3 previous SQLPASS events – 2009, 2010, and 2011 as well two Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Summit in 2009 and 2010. During these five trips I tried to catch up with all of my all friends but I realize that time has its own way of doing things. Many moved out of Seattle and many were too busy revive the old friendship but there were few who always make a point to meet me when I travel to the city. During the course of my visits I have made few fantastic new friends – Rick Morelan (Joes 2 Pros) and Greg Lynch. Every time I meet them I feel that I know them for years. I think city of Seattle has played very important part in our relationship that I got these fantastic friends. SQLPASS is the event where I find all of my SQL Friends and I look for this event for an entire year. This year’s my goal is to meet as many as new friends I can meet. If you are going to be at SQLPASS – FIND ME. I want to have a photo with you. I want to remember each name as I believe this is very important part of our life – making new friends and sustaining new friendship. Here are few of the pointers where you can find me. All Keynotes – Blogger’s Table Exhibition Booth Joes 2 Pros Booth #117 – Do not forget to stop by at the booth – I might have goodies for you – limited editions. Book Signing Events – Check details in tomorrow’s blog or stop by Booth #117 Evening Parties 6th Nov – Welcome Reception Evening Parties 7th Nov - Exhibitor Reception – Do not miss Booth #117 Evening Parties 8th Nov - Community Appreciation Party Additionally at few other locations – Embarcadero Booth In Coffee shops in Convention Center If you are SQLPASS – make sure that I find an opportunity to meet you at the event. Reserve a little time and lets have a coffee together. I will be continuously tweeting about my where about on twitter so let us stay connected on twitter. Here is my experience of my earlier experience of attending SQLPASS. SQLAuthority News – Book Signing Event – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log SQLAuthority News – Meeting SQL Friends – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log SQLAuthority News – Story of Seattle – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log SQLAuthority News – SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience SQLAuthority News – Notes of Excellent Experience at SQL PASS 2009 Summit, Seattle Let us meet! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – #TechEdIn – TechEd India 2012 Memories and Photos

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 was held in Bangalore last March 21 to 23, 2012. Just like every year, this event is bigger, grander and inspiring. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 Family Event Every single year, TechEd is a special affair for my entire family.  Four months before the start of TechEd, I usually start to build the mental image of the event. I start to think  about various things. For the most part, what excites me most is presenting a session and meeting friends. Seriously, I start thinking about presenting my session 4 months earlier than the event!  I work on my presentation day and night. I want to make sure that what I present is accurate and that I have experienced it firsthand. My wife and my daughter also contribute to my efforts. For us, TechEd is a family event, and the two of them feel equally responsible as well. They give up their family time so I can bring out the best content for the Community. Pinal, Shaivi and Nupur at TechEd India 2012 Guinea Pigs (My Experiment Victims) I do not rehearse my session, ever. However, I test my demo almost every single day till the last moment that I have to present it already. I sometimes go over the demo more than 2-3 times a day even though the event is more than a month away. I have two “guinea pigs”: 1) Nupur Dave and 2) Vinod Kumar. When I am at home, I present my demos to my wife Nupur. At times I feel that people often backup their demo, but in my case, I have backup demo presenters. In the office during lunch time, I present the demos to Vinod. I am sure he can walk my demos easily with eyes closed. Pinal and Vinod at TechEd India 2012 My Sessions I’ve been determined to present my sessions in a real and practical manner. I prefer to present the subject that I myself would be eager to attend to and sit through if I were an audience. Just keeping that principle in mind, I have created two sessions this year. SQL Server Misconception and Resolution Pinal and Vinod at TechEd India 2012 We believe all kinds of stuff – that the earth is flat, or that the forbidden fruit is apple, or that the big bang theory explains the origin of the universe, and so many other things. Just like these, we have plenty of misconceptions in SQL Server as well. I have had this dream of co-presenting a session with Vinod Kumar for the past 3 years. I have been asking him every year if we could present a session together, but we never got it to work out, until this year came. Fortunately, we got a chance to stand on the same stage and present a single subject.  I believe that Vinod Kumar and I have an excellent synergy when we are working together. We know each other’s strengths and weakness. We know when the other person will speak and when he will keep quiet. The reason behind this synergy is that we have worked on 2 Video Learning Courses (SQL Server Indexes and SQL Server Questions and Answers) and authored 1 book (SQL Server Questions and Answers) together. Crowd Outside Session Hall This session was inspired from the “Laurel and Hardy” show so we performed a role-playing of those famous characters. We had an excellent time at the stage and, for sure, the audience had a wonderful time, too. We had an extremely large audience for this session and had a great time interacting with them. Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 I wanted to approach this session at level 400 and I was very determined to do so. The biggest challenge I had was that this was a total of 60 minutes of session and the audience profile was very generic. I had to present at level 100 as well at 400. I worked hard to tune up these demos. I wanted to make sure that my messages would land perfectly to the minds of the attendees, and when they walk out of the session, they could use the knowledge I shared on their servers. After the session, I felt an extreme satisfaction as I received lots of positive feedback at the event. At one point, so many people rushed towards me that I was a bit scared that the stage might break and someone would get injured. Fortunately, nothing like that happened and I was able to shake hands with everybody. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 Crowd rushing to Pinal at TechEd India 2012 Networking This is one of the primary reasons many of us visit the annual TechEd event. I had a fantastic time meeting SQL Server enthusiasts. Well, it was a terrific time meeting old friends, user group members, MVPs and SQL Enthusiasts. I have taken many photographs with lots of people, but I have received a very few back. If you are reading this blog and have a photo of us at the event, would you please send it to me so I could keep it in my memory lane? SQL Track Speaker: Jacob and Pinal at TechEd India 2012 SQL Community: Pinal, Tejas, Nakul, Jacob, Balmukund, Manas, Sudeepta, Sahal at TechEd India 2012 Star Speakers: Amit and Balmukund at TechEd India 2012 TechED Rockstars: Nakul, Tejas and Pinal at TechEd India 2012 I guess TechEd is a mix of family affair and culture for me! Hamara TechEd (Our TechEd) Please tell me which photo you like the most! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• How to Force Graphics Options in PC Games with NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel Graphics

  - by Chris Hoffman

  PC games usually have built-in graphics options you can change. But you’re not limited to the options built into games — the graphics control panels bundled with graphics drivers allow you to tweak options from outside PC games. For example, these tools allow you to force-enabling antialiasing to make old games look better, even if they don’t normally support it. You can also reduce graphics quality to get more performance on slow hardware. If You Don’t See These Options If you don’t have the NVIDIA Control Panel, AMD Catalyst Control Center, or Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel installed, you may need to install the appropriate graphics driver package for your hardware from the hardware manufacturer’s website. The drivers provided via Windows Update don’t include additional software like the NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Catalyst Control Center. Drivers provided via Windows Update are also more out of date. If you’re playing PC games, you’ll want to have the latest graphics drivers installed on your system. NVIDIA Control Panel The NVIDIA Control Panel allows you to change these options if your computer has NVIDIA graphics hardware. To launch it, right-click your desktop background and select NVIDIA Control Panel. You can also find this tool by performing a Start menu (or Start screen) search for NVIDIA Control Panel or by right-clicking the NVIDIA icon in your system tray and selecting Open NVIDIA Control Panel. To quickly set a system-wide preference, you could use the Adjust image settings with preview option. For example, if you have old hardware that struggles to play the games you want to play, you may want to select “Use my preference emphasizing” and move the slider all the way to “Performance.” This trades graphics quality for an increased frame rate. By default, the “Use the advanced 3D image settings” option is selected. You can select Manage 3D settings and change advanced settings for all programs on your computer or just for specific games. NVIDIA keeps a database of the optimal settings for various games, but you’re free to tweak individual settings here. Just mouse-over an option for an explanation of what it does. If you have a laptop with NVIDIA Optimus technology — that is, both NVIDIA and Intel graphics — this is the same place you can choose which applications will use the NVIDIA hardware and which will use the Intel hardware. AMD Catalyst Control Center AMD’s Catalyst Control Center allows you to change these options on AMD graphics hardware. To open it, right-click your desktop background and select Catalyst Control Center. You can also right-click the Catalyst icon in your system tray and select Catalyst Control Center or perform a Start menu (or Start screen) search for Catalyst Control Center. Click the Gaming category at the left side of the Catalyst Control Center window and select 3D Application Settings to access the graphics settings you can change. The System Settings tab allows you to configure these options globally, for all games. Mouse over any option to see an explanation of what it does. You can also set per-application 3D settings and tweak your settings on a per-game basis. Click the Add option and browse to a game’s .exe file to change its options. Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel Intel integrated graphics is nowhere near as powerful as dedicated graphics hardware from NVIDIA and AMD, but it’s improving and comes included with most computers. Intel doesn’t provide anywhere near as many options in its graphics control panel, but you can still tweak some common settings. To open the Intel graphics control panel, locate the Intel graphics icon in your system tray, right-click it, and select Graphics Properties. You can also right-click the desktop and select Graphics Properties. Select either Basic Mode or Advanced Mode. When the Intel Graphics and Media Control Panel appears, select the 3D option. You’ll be able to set your Performance or Quality setting by moving the slider around or click the Custom Settings check box and customize your Anisotropic Filtering and Vertical Sync preference. Different Intel graphics hardware may have different options here. We also wouldn’t be surprised to see more advanced options appear in the future if Intel is serious about competing in the PC graphics market, as they say they are. These options are primarily useful to PC gamers, so don’t worry about them — or bother downloading updated graphics drivers — if you’re not a PC gamer and don’t use any intensive 3D applications on your computer. Image Credit: Dave Dugdale on Flickr     

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• 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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• TFS 2010 SDK: Integrating Twitter with TFS Programmatically

  - by Tarun Arora

  Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server 2010,TFS API,Integrate Twitter TFS,TFS Programming,ALM,TwitterSharp   Friends at ‘Twitter Sharp’ have created a wonderful .net API for twitter. With this blog post i will try to show you a basic TFS – Twitter integration scenario where i will retrieve the Team Project details programmatically and then publish these details on my twitter page. In future blogs i will be demonstrating how to create a windows service to capture the events raised by TFS and then publishing them in your social eco-system. Download Working Demo: Integrate Twitter - Tfs Programmatically   1. Setting up Twitter API Download Tweet Sharp from => https://github.com/danielcrenna/tweetsharp  Before you can start playing around with this, you will need to register an application on twitter. This is because Twitter uses the OAuth authentication protocol and will not issue an Access token unless your application is registered with them. Go to https://dev.twitter.com/ and register your application   Once you have registered your application, you will need ‘Customer Key’, ‘Customer Secret’, ‘Access Token’, ‘Access Token Secret’ 2. Connecting to Twitter using the Tweet Sharp API Create a new C# windows forms project and add reference to ‘Hammock.ClientProfile’, ‘Newtonsoft.Json’, ‘TweetSharp’ Add the following keys to the App.config (Note – The values for the keys below are in correct and if you try and connect using them then you will get an authorization failure error). Add a new class ‘TwitterProxy’ and use the following code to connect to the TwitterService (Read more about OAuthentication - http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth) using System;using System.Collections.Generic;using System.Linq;using System.Text;using System.Configuration;using TweetSharp; namespace WindowsFormsApplication2{ public class TwitterProxy { private static string _hero; private static string _consumerKey; private static string _consumerSecret; private static string _accessToken; private static string _accessTokenSecret;  public static TwitterService ConnectToTwitter() { _consumerKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ConsumerKey"]; _consumerSecret = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ConsumerSecret"]; _accessToken = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccessToken"]; _accessTokenSecret = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["AccessTokenSecret"];  return new TwitterService(_consumerKey, _consumerSecret, _accessToken, _accessTokenSecret); } }} Time to Tweet! _twitterService = Proxy.TwitterProxy.ConnectToTwitter(); _twitterService.SendTweet("Hello World"); SendTweet will return the TweetStatus, If you do not get a 200 OK status that means you have failed authentication, please revisit the Access tokens. --RESPONSE: https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json HTTP/1.1 200 OK X-Transaction: 1308476106-69292-41752 X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN X-Runtime: 0.03040 X-Transaction-Mask: a6183ffa5f44ef11425211f25 Pragma: no-cache X-Access-Level: read-write X-Revision: DEV X-MID: bd8aa0abeccb6efba38bc0a391a73fab98e983ea Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0 Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:35:06 GMT Expires: Tue, 31 Mar 1981 05:00:00 GMT Last-Modified: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:35:06 GMT Server: hi Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked   3. Integrate with TFS In my blog post Connect to TFS Programmatically i have in depth demonstrated how to connect to TFS using the TFS API. 1: // Update the AppConfig with the URI of the Team Foundation Server you want to connect to, Make sure you have View Team Project Collection Details permissions on the server 2: private static string _myUri = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["TfsUri"]; 3: private static TwitterService _twitterService = null; 4:   5: private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 6: { 7: lblNotes.Text = string.Empty; 8:   9: try 10: { 11: StringBuilder notes = new StringBuilder(); 12:   13: _twitterService = Proxy.TwitterProxy.ConnectToTwitter(); 14:   15: _twitterService.SendTweet("Hello World"); 16:   17: TfsConfigurationServer configurationServer = 18: TfsConfigurationServerFactory.GetConfigurationServer(new Uri(_myUri)); 19:   20: CatalogNode catalogNode = configurationServer.CatalogNode; 21:   22: ReadOnlyCollection<CatalogNode> tpcNodes = catalogNode.QueryChildren( 23: new Guid[] { CatalogResourceTypes.ProjectCollection }, 24: false, CatalogQueryOptions.None); 25:   26: // tpc = Team Project Collection 27: foreach (CatalogNode tpcNode in tpcNodes) 28: { 29: Guid tpcId = new Guid(tpcNode.Resource.Properties["InstanceId"]); 30: TfsTeamProjectCollection tpc = configurationServer.GetTeamProjectCollection(tpcId); 31:   32: notes.AppendFormat("{0} Team Project Collection : {1}{0}", Environment.NewLine, tpc.Name); 33: _twitterService.SendTweet(String.Format("http://Lunartech.codeplex.com - Connecting to Team Project Collection : {0} ", tpc.Name)); 34:   35: // Get catalog of tp = 'Team Projects' for the tpc = 'Team Project Collection' 36: var tpNodes = tpcNode.QueryChildren( 37: new Guid[] { CatalogResourceTypes.TeamProject }, 38: false, CatalogQueryOptions.None); 39:   40: foreach (var p in tpNodes) 41: { 42: notes.AppendFormat("{0} Team Project : {1} - {2}{0}", Environment.NewLine, p.Resource.DisplayName,  "This is an open source project hosted on codeplex"); 43: _twitterService.SendTweet(String.Format(" Connected to Team Project: '{0}' – '{1}' ", p.Resource.DisplayName, "This is an open source project hosted on codeplex")); 44: } 45: } 46: notes.AppendFormat("{0} Updates posted on Twitter : {1} {0}", Environment.NewLine, @"http://twitter.com/lunartech1"); 47: lblNotes.Text = notes.ToString(); 48: } 49: catch (Exception ex) 50: { 51: lblError.Text = " Message : " + ex.Message + (ex.InnerException != null ? " Inner Exception : " + ex.InnerException : string.Empty); 52: } 53: }   The extensions you can build integrating TFS and Twitter are incredible!   Share this post :

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• Execute TSQL statement with ExecuteStoreQuery in entity framework 4.0

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  I was playing with entity framework in recent days and I was searching something that how we can execute TSQL statement in entity framework. And I have found one great way to do that with entity framework ‘ExecuteStoreQuery’ method. It’s executes a TSQL statement against data source given enity framework context and returns strongly typed result. You can find more information about ExcuteStoreQuery from following link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd487208.aspx So let’s examine how it works. So Let’s first create a table against which we are going to execute TSQL statement. So I have added a SQL Express database as following. Now once we are done with adding a database let’s add a table called Client like following. Here you can see above Client table is very simple. There are only two fields ClientId and ClientName where ClientId is primary key and ClientName is field where we are going to store client name. Now it’s time to add some data to the table. So I have added some test data like following. Now it’s time to add entity framework model class. So right click project->Add new item and select ADO.NET entity model as following. After clicking on add button a wizard will start it will ask whether we need to create model classes from database or not but we already have our client table ready so I have selected generate from database as following. Once you process further in wizard it will be presented a screen where we can select the our table like following. Now once you click finish it will create model classes with for us. Now we need a gridview control where we need to display those data. So in Default.aspx page I have added a grid control like following. <%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="EntityFramework._Default" %> <asp:Content ID="HeaderContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="HeadContent"> </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="BodyContent" runat="server" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent"> <h2> Welcome to ASP.NET! </h2> <p> To learn more about ASP.NET visit <a href="http://www.asp.net" title="ASP.NET Website">www.asp.net</a>. </p> <p> You can also find <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=152368&amp;clcid=0x409" title="MSDN ASP.NET Docs">documentation on ASP.NET at MSDN</a>. <asp:GridView ID="grdClient" runat="server"> </asp:GridView> </p> </asp:Content> Now once we are done with adding Gridview its time to write code for server side. So I have written following code in Page_load event of default.aspx page. protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!Page.IsPostBack) { using (var context = new EntityFramework.TestEntities()) { ObjectResult<Client> result = context.ExecuteStoreQuery<Client>("Select * from Client"); grdClient.DataSource = result; grdClient.DataBind(); } } } Here in the above code you can see that I have written create a object of our entity model and then with the help of the ExecuteStoreQuery method I have execute a simple select TSQL statement which will return a object result. I have bind that object result with gridview to display data. So now we are done with coding.So let’s run application in browser. Following is output as expected. That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more..Till then happy programming.

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• MySQL for Excel 1.1.0 GA has been released

  - by Javier Treviño

  The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.1.0 GA, one of our newest products contained in the MySQL Installer suite. You can download it from our official Downloads page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/. The 1.1.0 release of MySQL for Excel introduces the following features: Edit MySQL Data. Edit MySQL Data This may be the coolest feature so far; users will be able to edit the data in a MySQL table using MS Excel in a very friendly and intuitive way.  Edit Data supports inserting new rows, deleting existing rows and updating existing data as easy as playing with data in an Excel’s spreadsheet and pushing changes back to the server.  Also this version contains the following bug fixes: Enabled the following checkboxes in the Append Data's Advanced Options dialog and added code in the Append Data dialog to use the checkboxes as follows: Automatically store the column mapping for the given table     If checked the current mapping will be stored automatically after clicking the Append button if the append operation is successful and there is no mapping for the current connection.schema.table already; the new mapping is stored with a proposed name of Mapping. Reload stored column mapping for the selected table automatically     If checked the first Stored Mapping found where all column names in the source grid match all column names in the target grid is automatically selected and applied when the Append Data dialog is loaded. Fixed code in Append Data that applies a stored column mapping to skip target columns where the associated mapping is empty (saved as a -1). Enclosed the Add-In's startup code in a try-catch block in order to log any possible error thrown during startup; and added information messages to the log at the beginning of the Add-In's startup code and at the end of the shutdown code.  Also changed the wrapper method that calls the MySQLUtility to write messages to the log to make logging easier, thus changed the log call throughout all the code that contains a try-catch block. Added code to the main wix configuration file to check if a newer version is already installed and if so abort the installation Fixed code to refresh the Import Procedure Form's preview grid's data source to repaint its contents every time the Call button is pressed. Added code to re-pull connections after connections are migrated from Excel to Workbench. Fixed code so when the Append Data's Automatic Mapping is performed any subsequent change on a mapping resets the mapping to a Manual Mapping. Added code to the InfoDialog class to set the button text to "Show Details" or "Hide Details" depending on the status of the Details text container. Fixed a GUID in the main wix configuration file so now previous versions are uninstalled during a new installation. Added an option to the Export Data's Advanced Options dialog to remove columns with no data, by default the Export Dialog will only flag those columns as Excluded. Added code to display a warning and paint a column red if the column name in the Export Data dialog is not set, display a warning if the table name is not set, and stack warnings but not display them if a column is Excluded, warnings are displayed normally for columns if they are not Excluded anymore.  Added code to prevent the Append and Export of Data if more than 1 selection is made (selecting more than 1 area holding the Ctrl key while selecting Excel cells). Fixed problem that prevented MySQL for Excel from loading when Display settings in Windows 7 is set to Adjust to Best Performance (Oracle bug 14521405 - UNHANDLED EXCEPTION IS THROWN WHEN LOADING MYSQL FOR EXCEL). Fixed code that renames the auto-generated Primary Key column when the Table name changes since it was not detecting if a column with the same name already existed in the table. The column duplication was not actually happening, it looked that way because the automatically generated PK column was not detecting a column had that same name. Fixed code in Export Data dialog to always set an empty string instead of null to the MySQLDataColumn properties that stores MySQL data types (MySQLDataType, RowsFrom1stDataType and RowsFrom2ndDataType). Added code to display a warning and color red a column which Data Type has not been set by the user or has been manually cleared. Added code to output to the application log exception messages consistently in all places where exceptions are catched. A series of blog posts explaining the new Edit MySQL Data feature and the other existing features are coming in this blog. You can access the MySQL for Excel documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-for-excel.html You can also post questions on our MySQL for Excel forum found at http://forums.mysql.com/. You can also post questions on our MySQL for Excel forum found at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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