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  • Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - June 14-16, 2010

    - by SanjeevAgarwal
    Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - June 14-16, 2010 Web Development ASP.Net MVC 2 Auto Complete Textbox With Custom View Model Attribute & EditorTemplate - Sean McAlinden Localization with ASP.NET MVC ModelMetadata - Kazi Manzur Rashid Securing Dynamic Data 4 (Replay) - Steve Adding Client-Side Script to an MVC Conditional Validator - Simon Ince jQuery: Storing and retrieving data related to elements - Rebecca Murphey Web Design 48 Examples of Excellent Layout in Web Design...(read more)

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  • Oracle SOA Security for OUAF Web Services

    - by Anthony Shorten
    With the ability to use Oracle SOA Suite 11g with the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products, an additional consideration needs to be configured to ensure correct integration. That additional consideration is security. By default, SOA Suite propagates any credentials from the calling application through to the interfacing applications. In most cases, this behavior is not appropriate as the calling application may use different credential stores and also some interfaces are “disconnected” from a calling application (for example, a file based load using the File Adapter). These situations require that the Web Service calls to the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products have their own valid credentials. To do this the credentials must be attached at design time or at run time to provide the necessary credentials for the call. There are a number of techniques that can be used to do this: At design time, when integrating a Web Service from an Oracle Utilities Application Framework based product you can attach the security policy “oracle/wss_username_token_client_policy” in the composite.xml view. In this view select the Web Service you want to attach the policy to and right click to display the context menu and select “Configure WS Policies” and select the above policy from the list. If you are using SSL then you can use “oracle/wss_username_token_over_ssl_client_policy” instead. At design time, you can also specify the credential key (csf-key) associated with the above policy by selecting the policy and clicking “Edit Config Override Properties”. You name the key appropriately. Everytime the SOA components are deployed the credential configuration is also sent. You can also do this after deployment, or what I call at “runtime”, by specifying the policy and credential key in the Fusion Middleware Control. Refer to the Fusion Middleware Control documentation on how to do this. To complete the configuration you need to add a map and the key specified earlier to the credential store in the Oracle WebLogic instance used for Oracle SOA Suite. From Fusion Middleware Control, you do this by selecting the domain the SOA Suite is installed in a select “Credentials” from the context menu. You now need to add the credentials by adding the map “oracle.wsm.security” (the name is IMPORTANT) and creating a key with the necessary valid credentials. The example below added a key called “mdm.key”. The name I used is for example only. You can name the key anything you like as long as it corresponds to the key you specified in the design time component. Note: I used SYSUSER as an example credentials in the example, in real life you would use another credential as SYSUSER is not appropriate for production use. This key can be reused for other Oracle Utilities Application Framework Web Service integrations or you can use other keys for individual Web Service calls. Once the key is created and the SOA Suite components deployed the transactions should be able to be called as necessary. If you need to change the password for the credentials it can be done using the Fusion Middleware Control functionality.

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  • How Fusion Middleware Built the Fusion User Experience

    See how you can leverage the entire Fusion Middleware stack to create a compelling user experience, just like Oracle's Applications User Experience team did during the design of Fusion Applications. Learn about key Fusion Middleware components that comprise Oracle's new end-to-end user experience platform in Fusion Applications. Hear about the role of components such as Application Development Framework (ADF), WebCenter, Metadata Services (MDS), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and design patterns.

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  • Expression Blend 4 available and training resources

    As you may know Expression Blend 4 has shipped! It is still part of Expression Studio, which now comes in 2 flavors: Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Expression Blend SketchFlow Expression Web + SuperPreview Expression Encoder Expression Design Expression Studio 4 Web Professional Expression Web + SuperPreview Expression Encoder Expression Design So the version you want for Silverlight is Expression Studio 4 Ultimate (because you cant...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Silverlight Cream for April 18, 2010 -- #840

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: CrocusGirl, Giorgetti Alessandro(-2-), smartyP, Pete Brown, David Poll, David Anson, and Bill Reiss. Shoutouts: Yasser Makram has a post up discussing Human Centered ALM with Telerik TeamPulse and Team Foundation Server. I saw this demo'd at DevConnnections and it definitely deserves a look. Shawn Wildermuth posted his materials from DevConnections all on one post: Back from DevConnections with SourceCode Shawn Wildermuth also posted an Updated RIA Services + MVVM Example Laurent Bugnion announced a Small change in MVVM Light Toolkit templates for Blend 4 RC Laurent Bugnion also announced Crowdsourcing MVVM Light Toolkit support The Expression Blend and Design Blog announced Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate Available! Dan Wahlin posted Slides and Code from my Silverlight MVVM Talk at DevConnections From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone 7 Design Notes – Part#1: Metro Resources CrocusGirl has blogged about WP7 and the Metro design concept. She has a bunch of resources up and information about Metro and the design methodology. Stay tuned for Part 2. Silverlight, M-V-VM ... and IoC - part 1 Giorgetti Alessandro has part 1 of a multi-parter up on IoC and MVVM for LOB apps in Silverlight ... a pretty quick into to MVVM. Silverlight, M-V-VM … and IoC – part 2 Giorgetti Alessandro also posted part 2 of his series, and this one digs deeper into the code and discusses what goes into the view and the model. Using the Facebook Developer Toolkit With Windows Phone 7 smartyP has a post addressing using the Facebook Developer toolkit with WP7... it took some hacking, and he explains it, and provides it for download. Silverlight and WPF Tip: Fitting items in a ListBox Having trouble fitting items into a Listbox in Silverlight or WPF without getting horizontal scrollbars? Pete Brown has a solution for you in 4 steps. Making printing easier in Silverlight 4 David Poll has a great detailed post up about printing in SL4, taking it to building a higher-level API that allows printing of collections... all demos and source included. Detailed information about the Silverlight Toolkit's new stacked series support David Anson details the improvements to Data Visualization in the Toolkit release from last week. Space Rocks game step 9: the asteroid sprite Bill Reiss has his latest game episode up and this time he's putting asteroid sprites in play. No placement, movement, or collisions yet, but it's a beginning. And, he's updated all his code to Silverlight 4. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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  • What are must have tools for web development?

    - by Amir Rezaei
    Which are must have tools for web development under windows? It can include tools such as design, coding etc. Update: Please post only one and the best tool in your opinion for each type of tools. For instance post only the name of the best design tool and not a list of them. Update: By tools I don't necessary mean small softwares. I didn't find this question, hope no one has already asked it.

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  • Correct term for PSD to HTML to CMS

    - by John Magnolia
    Hi, I have heard a lot of different terms to describe the process of turning a website design into a editable CMS. Currently I take the design and "slice" this up into HTML and CSS then I "plug" this into a CMS. I would class this as frontend development depending on the level of customisation required for the CMS. The reason I ask is I am currently writing up my CV and have become stuck on the correct term for this. Kind Regards

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • search with mobile : does Google just look in the mobile-optimized websites?

    - by Alireza Fallah
    When someone searches a keyword by mobile, does Google search in desktop version of all websites and find the proper result and then prioritize them according to the responsiveness or mobile-optimizing stuff etc OR it just search in the mobile version of the mobile-optimized websites ? I want to create a website with a responsive design, I was wondering that if I should care about SEO in mobile version of the website, or just try to optimize the desktop version for search engines and just care about the design of the mobile version ?

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  • Hire Web Professionals To Get The Desired Results

    If you are looking for quality web design services, web development services, open source customization, Internet marketing and Ecommerce solutions, look no further than the World Wide Web. You will ... [Author: Asif Ahmed - Web Design and Development - April 06, 2010]

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  • iPhone SDK vs. Windows Phone 7 Series SDK Challenge, Part 2: MoveMe

    In this series, I will be taking sample applications from the iPhone SDK and implementing them on Windows Phone 7 Series.  My goal is to do as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can.  This series will be written to not only compare and contrast how easy or difficult it is to complete tasks on either platform, how many lines of code, etc., but Id also like it to be a way for iPhone developers to either get started on Windows Phone 7 Series development, or for developers in general to learn the platform. Heres my methodology: Run the iPhone SDK app in the iPhone Simulator to get a feel for what it does and how it works, without looking at the implementation Implement the equivalent functionality on Windows Phone 7 Series using Silverlight. Compare the two implementations based on complexity, functionality, lines of code, number of files, etc. Add some functionality to the Windows Phone 7 Series app that shows off a way to make the scenario more interesting or leverages an aspect of the platform, or uses a better design pattern to implement the functionality. You can download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP here, and the Expression Blend 4 Beta here. If youre seeing this series for the first time, check out Part 1: Hello World. A note on methodologyin the prior post there was some feedback about lines of code not being a very good metric for this exercise.  I dont really disagree, theres a lot more to this than lines of code but I believe that is a relevant metric, even if its not the ultimate one.  And theres no perfect answer here.  So I am going to continue to report the number of lines of code that I, as a developer would need to write in these apps as a data point, and Ill leave it up to the reader to determine how that fits in with overall complexity, etc.  The first example was so basic that I think it was difficult to talk about in real terms.  I think that as these apps get more complex, the subjective differences in concept count and will be more important.  MoveMe The MoveMe app is the main end-to-end app writing example in the iPhone SDK, called Creating an iPhone Application.  This application demonstrates a few concepts, including handling touch input, how to do animations, and how to do some basic transforms. The behavior of the application is pretty simple.  User touches the button: The button does a throb type animation where it scales up and then back down briefly. User drags the button: After a touch begins, moving the touch point will drag the button around with the touch. User lets go of the button: The button animates back to its original position, but does a few small bounces as it reaches its original point, which makes the app fun and gives it an extra bit of interactivity. Now, how would I write an app that meets this spec for Windows Phone 7 Series, and how hard would it be?  Lets find out!     Implementing the UI Okay, lets build the UI for this application.  In the HelloWorld example, we did all the UI design in Visual Studio and/or by hand in XAML.  In this example, were going to use the Expression Blend 4 Beta. You might be wondering when to use Visual Studio, when to use Blend, and when to do XAML by hand.  Different people will have different takes on this, but heres mine: XAML by hand simple UI that doesnt contain animations, gradients, etc., and or UI that I want to really optimize and craft when I know exactly what I want to do. Visual Studio Basic UI layout, property setting, data binding, etc. Blend Any serious design work needs to be done in Blend, including animations, handling states and transitions, styling and templating, editing resources. As in Part 1, go ahead and fire up Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (yes, soon it will take longer to say the name of our products than to start them up!), and create a new Windows Phone Application.  As in Part 1, clear out the XAML from the designer.  An easy way to do this is to just: Click on the design surface Hit Control+A Hit Delete Theres a little bit left over (the Grid.RowDefinitions element), just go ahead and delete that element so were starting with a clean state of only one outer Grid element. To use Blend, we need to save this project.  See, when you create a project with Visual Studio Express, it doesnt commit it to the disk (well, in a place where you can find it, at least) until you actually save the project.  This is handy if youre doing some fooling around, because it doesnt clutter your disk with WindowsPhoneApplication23-like directories.  But its also kind of dangerous, since when you close VS, if you dont save the projectits all gone.  Yes, this has bitten me since I was saving files and didnt remember that, so be careful to save the project/solution via Save All, at least once. So, save and note the location on disk.  Start Expression Blend 4 Beta, and chose File > Open Project/Solution, and load your project.  You should see just about the same thing you saw over in VS: a blank, black designer surface. Now, thinking about this application, we dont really need a button, even though it looks like one.  We never click it.  So were just going to create a visual and use that.  This is also true in the iPhone example above, where the visual is actually not a button either but a jpg image with a nice gradient and round edges.  Well do something simple here that looks pretty good. In Blend, look in the tool pane on the left for the icon that looks like the below (the highlighted one on the left), and hold it down to get the popout menu, and choose Border:    Okay, now draw out a box in the middle of the design surface of about 300x100.  The Properties Pane to the left should show the properties for this item. First, lets make it more visible by giving it a border brush.  Set the BorderBrush to white by clicking BorderBrush and dragging the color selector all the way to the upper right in the palette.  Then, down a bit farther, make the BorderThickness 4 all the way around, and the CornerRadius set to 6. In the Layout section, do the following to Width, Height, Horizontal and Vertical Alignment, and Margin (all 4 margin values): Youll see the outline now is in the middle of the design surface.  Now lets give it a background color.  Above BorderBrush select Background, and click the third tab over: Gradient Brush.  Youll see a gradient slider at the bottom, and if you click the markers, you can edit the gradient stops individually (or add more).  In this case, you can select something you like, but wheres what I chose: Left stop: #BFACCFE2 (I just picked a spot on the palette and set opacity to 75%, no magic here, feel free to fiddle these or just enter these numbers into the hex area and be done with it) Right stop: #FF3E738F Okay, looks pretty good.  Finally set the name of the element in the Name field at the top of the Properties pane to welcome. Now lets add some text.  Just hit T and itll select the TextBlock tool automatically: Now draw out some are inside our welcome visual and type Welcome!, then click on the design surface (to exit text entry mode) and hit V to go back into selection mode (or the top item in the tool pane that looks like a mouse pointer).  Click on the text again to select it in the tool pane.  Just like the border, we want to center this.  So set HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment to Center, and clear the Margins: Thats it for the UI.  Heres how it looks, on the design surface: Not bad!  Okay, now the fun part Adding Animations Using Blend to build animations is a lot of fun, and its easy.  In XAML, I can not only declare elements and visuals, but also I can declare animations that will affect those visuals.  These are called Storyboards. To recap, well be doing two animations: The throb animation when the element is touched The center animation when the element is released after being dragged. The throb animation is just a scale transform, so well do that first.  In the Objects and Timeline Pane (left side, bottom half), click the little + icon to add a new Storyboard called touchStoryboard: The timeline view will appear.  In there, click a bit to the right of 0 to create a keyframe at .2 seconds: Now, click on our welcome element (the Border, not the TextBlock in it), and scroll to the bottom of the Properties Pane.  Open up Transform, click the third tab ("Scale), and set X and Y to 1.2: This all of this says that, at .2 seconds, I want the X and Y size of this element to scale to 1.2. In fact you can see this happen.  Push the Play arrow in the timeline view, and youll see the animation run! Lets make two tweaks.  First, we want the animation to automatically reverse so it scales up then back down nicely. Click in the dropdown that says touchStoryboard in Objects and Timeline, then in the Properties pane check Auto Reverse: Now run it again, and youll see it go both ways. Lets even make it nicer by adding an easing function. First, click on the Render Transform item in the Objects tree, then, in the Property Pane, youll see a bunch of easing functions to choose from.  Feel free to play with this, then seeing how each runs.  I chose Circle In, but some other ones are fun.  Try them out!  Elastic In is kind of fun, but well stick with Circle In.  Thats it for that animation. Now, we also want an animation to move the Border back to its original position when the user ends the touch gesture.  This is exactly the same process as above, but just targeting a different transform property. Create a new animation called releaseStoryboard Select a timeline point at 1.2 seconds. Click on the welcome Border element again Scroll to the Transforms panel at the bottom of the Properties Pane Choose the first tab (Translate), which may already be selected Set both X and Y values to 0.0 (we do this just to make the values stick, because the value is already 0 and we need Blend to know we want to save that value) Click on RenderTransform in the Objects tree In the properties pane, choose Bounce Out Set Bounces to 6, and Bounciness to 4 (feel free to play with these as well) Okay, were done. Note, if you want to test this Storyboard, you have to do something a little tricky because the final value is the same as the initial value, so playing it does nothing.  If you want to play with it, do the following: Next to the selection dropdown, hit the little "x (Close Storyboard) Go to the Translate Transform value for welcome Set X,Y to 50, 200, respectively (or whatever) Select releaseStoryboard again from the dropdown Hit play, see it run Go into the object tree and select RenderTransform to change the easing function. When youre done, hit the Close Storyboard x again and set the values in Transform/Translate back to 0 Wiring Up the Animations Okay, now go back to Visual Studio.  Youll get a prompt due to the modification of MainPage.xaml.  Hit Yes. In the designer, click on the welcome Border element.  In the Property Browser, hit the Events button, then double click each of ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta, ManipulationCompleted.  Youll need to flip back to the designer from code, after each double click. Its code time.  Here we go. Here, three event handlers have been created for us: welcome_ManipulationStarted: This will execute when a manipulation begins.  Think of it as MouseDown. welcome_ManipulationDelta: This executes each time a manipulation changes.  Think MouseMove. welcome_ManipulationCompleted: This will  execute when the manipulation ends. Think MouseUp. Now, in ManipuliationStarted, we want to kick off the throb animation that we called touchAnimation.  Thats easy: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationStarted(object sender, ManipulationStartedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: touchStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Likewise, when the manipulation completes, we want to re-center the welcome visual with our bounce animation: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationCompleted(object sender, ManipulationCompletedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: releaseStoryboard.Begin(); 4: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note there is actually a way to kick off these animations from Blend directly via something called Triggers, but I think its clearer to show whats going on like this.  A Trigger basically allows you to say When this event fires, trigger this Storyboard, so its the exact same logical process as above, but without the code. But how do we get the object to move?  Well, for that we really dont want an animation because we want it to respond immediately to user input. We do this by directly modifying the transform to match the offset for the manipulation, and then well let the animation bring it back to zero when the manipulation completes.  The manipulation events do a great job of keeping track of all the stuff that you usually had to do yourself when doing drags: where you started from, how far youve moved, etc. So we can easily modify the position as below: 1: private void welcome_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e) 2: { 3: CompositeTransform transform = (CompositeTransform)welcome.RenderTransform; 4:   5: transform.TranslateX = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.X; 6: transform.TranslateY = e.CumulativeManipulation.Translation.Y; 7: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Thats it! Go ahead and run the app in the emulator.  I suggest running without the debugger, its a little faster (CTRL+F5).  If youve got a machine that supports DirectX 10, youll see nice smooth GPU accelerated graphics, which also what it looks like on the phone, running at about 60 frames per second.  If your machine does not support DX10 (like the laptop Im writing this on!), it wont be quite a smooth so youll have to take my word for it! Comparing Against the iPhone This is an example where the flexibility and power of XAML meets the tooling of Visual Studio and Blend, and the whole experience really shines.  So, for several things that are declarative and 100% toolable with the Windows Phone 7 Series, this example does them with code on the iPhone.  In parens is the lines of code that I count to do these operations. PlacardView.m: 19 total LOC Creating the view that hosts the button-like image and the text Drawing the image that is the background of the button Drawing the Welcome text over the image (I think you could technically do this step and/or the prior one using Interface Builder) MoveMeView.m:  63 total LOC Constructing and running the scale (throb) animation (25) Constructing the path describing the animation back to center plus bounce effect (38) Beyond the code count, yy experience with doing this kind of thing in code is that its VERY time intensive.  When I was a developer back on Windows Forms, doing GDI+ drawing, we did this stuff a lot, and it took forever!  You write some code and even once you get it basically working, you see its not quite right, you go back, tweak the interval, or the math a bit, run it again, etc.  You can take a look at the iPhone code here to judge for yourself.  Scroll down to animatePlacardViewToCenter toward the bottom.  I dont think this code is terribly complicated, but its not what Id call simple and its not at all simple to get right. And then theres a few other lines of code running around for setting up the ViewController and the Views, about 15 lines between MoveMeAppDelegate, PlacardView, and MoveMeView, plus the assorted decls in the h files. Adding those up, I conservatively get something like 100 lines of code (19+63+15+decls) on iPhone that I have to write, by hand, to make this project work. The lines of code that I wrote in the examples above is 5 lines of code on Windows Phone 7 Series. In terms of incremental concept counts beyond the HelloWorld app, heres a shot at that: iPhone: Drawing Images Drawing Text Handling touch events Creating animations Scaling animations Building a path and animating along that Windows Phone 7 Series: Laying out UI in Blend Creating & testing basic animations in Blend Handling touch events Invoking animations from code This was actually the first example I tried converting, even before I did the HelloWorld, and I was pretty surprised.  Some of this is luck that this app happens to match up with the Windows Phone 7 Series platform just perfectly.  In terms of time, I wrote the above application, from scratch, in about 10 minutes.  I dont know how long it would take a very skilled iPhone developer to write MoveMe on that iPhone from scratch, but if I was to write it on Silverlight in the same way (e.g. all via code), I think it would likely take me at least an hour or two to get it all working right, maybe more if I ended up picking the wrong strategy or couldnt get the math right, etc. Making Some Tweaks Silverlight contains a feature called Projections to do a variety of 3D-like effects with a 2D surface. So lets play with that a bit. Go back to Blend and select the welcome Border in the object tree.  In its properties, scroll down to the bottom, open Transform, and see Projection at the bottom.  Set X,Y,Z to 90.  Youll see the element kind of disappear, replaced by a thin blue line. Now Create a new animation called startupStoryboard. Set its key time to .5 seconds in the timeline view Set the projection values above to 0 for X, Y, and Z. Save Go back to Visual Studio, and in the constructor, add the following bold code (lines 7-9 to the constructor: 1: public MainPage() 2: { 3: InitializeComponent(); 4:   5: SupportedOrientations = SupportedPageOrientation.Portrait; 6:   7: this.Loaded += (s, e) => 8: { 9: startupStoryboard.Begin(); 10: }; 11: } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If the code above looks funny, its using something called a lambda in C#, which is an inline anonymous method.  Its just a handy shorthand for creating a handler like the manipulation ones above. So with this youll get a nice 3D looking fly in effect when the app starts up.  Here it is, in flight: Pretty cool!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Tips for Novice Web Designers

    To guarantee online success of your website, there are few basic methods to be followed in website design. Able to have positive impact on the targeted traffic is just half work done through proper w... [Author: Alan Smith - Web Design and Development - June 06, 2010]

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  • Catch AutoVue at the COE 2010 PLM Conference

    - by [email protected]
    It's a busy tradeshow season! The AutoVue team will be exhibiting at next week's COE 2010 PLM Conference and Technifair in Las Vegas, NV. This will be a unique opportunity to meet with AutoVue visualization experts and discuss how to leverage visualization throughout your engineering organization to capitalize on product and engineering information to improve business processes, such as design reviews, change management and design revisions. If you plan on attending, be sure to stop by Oracle's AutoVue booth (#508). Click here for more details about the show.

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  • SQL Down Under Podcast 50 - Guest Louis Davidson now online

    - by Greg Low
    Hi Folks,I've recorded an interview today with SQL Server MVP Louis Davidson. In it, Louis discusses some of his thoughts on database design and his latest book.You'll find the podcast here: http://www.sqldownunder.com/Resources/Podcast.aspxAnd you'll find his latest book (Pro SQL Server 2012 Relational Database Design and Implementation) here: http://www.amazon.com/Server-Relational-Database-Implementation-Professional/dp/1430236957/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1344997477&sr=8-2&keywords=louis+davidsonEnjoy!

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  • what's included in a typical computer architecture class? [closed]

    - by sq1020
    Does this description fit what's usually included in a computer architecture class? Computer Organization and Assembly Language An introduction to the hardware organization and assembly language of the Intel processor. Topics include memory hierarchy and design- CPU design- pipelining- addressing modes- subroutine linkage- polled input/output- interrupts- high level language interfacing and macros.

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  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a subdomain for each user account?

    - by Sathish Manohar
    I notice two types of design used in web applications, some with a particular subdomain for users contents, and some with same URL structure for all the accounts. Ex: unique.domain.com and another_unique.domain.com for subdomains for sites like blogspot, wordpress, basecamp etc. while in the other approach domain.com/action1 and domain.com/action2 the content is shown according to the user logged in, but the URL is same for every user. What are main differences between both of these kind of design?

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  • When is my View too smart?

    - by Kyle Burns
    In this posting, I will discuss the motivation behind keeping View code as thin as possible when using patterns such as MVC, MVVM, and MVP.  Once the motivation is identified, I will examine some ways to determine whether a View contains logic that belongs in another part of the application.  While the concepts that I will discuss are applicable to most any pattern which favors a thin View, any concrete examples that I present will center on ASP.NET MVC. Design patterns that include a Model, a View, and other components such as a Controller, ViewModel, or Presenter are not new to application development.  These patterns have, in fact, been around since the early days of building applications with graphical interfaces.  The reason that these patterns emerged is simple – the code running closest to the user tends to be littered with logic and library calls that center around implementation details of showing and manipulating user interface widgets and when this type of code is interspersed with application domain logic it becomes difficult to understand and much more difficult to adequately test.  By removing domain logic from the View, we ensure that the View has a single responsibility of drawing the screen which, in turn, makes our application easier to understand and maintain. I was recently asked to take a look at an ASP.NET MVC View because the developer reviewing it thought that it possibly had too much going on in the view.  I looked at the .CSHTML file and the first thing that occurred to me was that it began with 40 lines of code declaring member variables and performing the necessary calculations to populate these variables, which were later either output directly to the page or used to control some conditional rendering action (such as adding a class name to an HTML element or not rendering another element at all).  This exhibited both of what I consider the primary heuristics (or code smells) indicating that the View is too smart: Member variables – in general, variables in View code are an indication that the Model to which the View is being bound is not sufficient for the needs of the View and that the View has had to augment that Model.  Notable exceptions to this guideline include variables used to hold information specifically related to rendering (such as a dynamically determined CSS class name or the depth within a recursive structure for indentation purposes) and variables which are used to facilitate looping through collections while binding. Arithmetic – as with member variables, the presence of arithmetic operators within View code are an indication that the Model servicing the View is insufficient for its needs.  For example, if the Model represents a line item in a sales order, it might seem perfectly natural to “normalize” the Model by storing the quantity and unit price in the Model and multiply these within the View to show the line total.  While this does seem natural, it introduces a business rule to the View code and makes it impossible to test that the rounding of the result meets the requirement of the business without executing the View.  Within View code, arithmetic should only be used for activities such as incrementing loop counters and calculating element widths. In addition to the two characteristics of a “Smart View” that I’ve discussed already, this View also exhibited another heuristic that commonly indicates to me the need to refactor a View and make it a bit less smart.  That characteristic is the existence of Boolean logic that either does not work directly with properties of the Model or works with too many properties of the Model.  Consider the following code and consider how logic that does not work directly with properties of the Model is just another form of the “member variable” heuristic covered earlier: @if(DateTime.Now.Hour < 12) {     <div>Good Morning!</div> } else {     <div>Greetings</div> } This code performs business logic to determine whether it is morning.  A possible refactoring would be to add an IsMorning property to the Model, but in this particular case there is enough similarity between the branches that the entire branching structure could be collapsed by adding a Greeting property to the Model and using it similarly to the following: <div>@Model.Greeting</div> Now let’s look at some complex logic around multiple Model properties: @if (ModelPageNumber + Model.NumbersToDisplay == Model.PageCount         || (Model.PageCount != Model.CurrentPage             && !Model.DisplayValues.Contains(Model.PageCount))) {     <div>There's more to see!</div> } In this scenario, not only is the View code difficult to read (you shouldn’t have to play “human compiler” to determine the purpose of the code), but it also complex enough to be at risk for logical errors that cannot be detected without executing the View.  Conditional logic that requires more than a single logical operator should be looked at more closely to determine whether the condition should be evaluated elsewhere and exposed as a single property of the Model.  Moving the logic above outside of the View and exposing a new Model property would simplify the View code to: @if(Model.HasMoreToSee) {     <div>There’s more to see!</div> } In this posting I have briefly discussed some of the more prominent heuristics that indicate a need to push code from the View into other pieces of the application.  You should now be able to recognize these symptoms when building or maintaining Views (or the Models that support them) in your applications.

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