Search Results

Search found 12844 results on 514 pages for 'manual testing'.

Page 281/514 | < Previous Page | 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288  | Next Page >

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013Popular ReleasesMastersign.Expressions: Mastersign.Expressions v0.4.2: added support for if(<cond>, <true-part>, <false-part>) fixed multithreading issue with rand() improved demo applicationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.6 Rel0: v2.3.6 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible Important : During update this install with overwrite the menu.xml setting, if you have changed this then make a backup before you upgrade and reapply your changes after the upgrade. Please view the following documentation if you are installing and configuring this module for the first time System Requirements Skill requirements Downloads and documents Step by step guide to a working store Please ask all questions in the Discussions tab. Document.Editor: 2013.26: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.26: New Insert Chart Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWsus Package Publisher: Release V1.2.1307.01: Fix an issue in the UI, approvals are not shown correctly in the 'Report' tabDirectX Tool Kit: July 2013: July 1, 2013 VS 2013 Preview projects added and updates for DirectXMath 3.05 vectorcall Added use of sRGB WIC metadata for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF SaveToWIC functions updated with new optional setCustomProps parameter and error check with optional targetFormatCore Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: new_root.zip: Verison 1.0JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.1.736: Improved strinfigy performance New serializing feature New anonymous type support in constructorsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...New ProjectsALM Rangers DevOps Tooling and Guidance: Practical tooling and guidance that will enable teams to realize a faster deployment based on continuous feedback.Core Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: Free core Server 2012 powershell scripts and batch files that replace the non-existent hyper-v manager, vmconnect and mstsc.Enhanced Deployment Service (EDS): EDS is a web service based utility designed to extend the deployment capabilities of administrators with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.ExtendedDialogBox: Libreria DialogBoxJazdy: This project is here only because we wanted to take advantage of a public git server.Mon Examen: This web interface is meant to make examinationsneet: summaryOrchard Multi-Choice Voting: A multiple choice voting Orchard module.Particle Swarm Optimization Solving Quadratic Assignment Problem: This project is submitted for the solving of QAP using PSO algorithms with addition of some modification Porjects: 23123123PPL Power Pack: PPL Power PackProperty Builder: Visual Studio tool for speeding up process of coding class properties getters and setters.RedRuler for Redline: I tried some on-screen rulers, none of them help me measure the UI element quickly based on the Redline. So I decided to created this handy RedRuler tool. Royale Living: Mahindra Royale Community PortalSearch and booking Hotel or Tours: Ð? án nghiên c?u c?a sinh viên tdt theo mô hình mvc 4SystemBuilder.Show: This tool is a helper after you create your project in visual studio to create the respective objects and interface. TalentDesk: new ptojectTcmplex: The Training Center teaches many different kind of course such as English, French, Computer hardware and computer softwareTFS Reporting Guide: Provides guidance and samples to enable TFS users to generate reports based on WIT data.Umbraco AdaptiveImages: Adaptive Images Package for UmbracoVirtualNet - A ILcode interpreter/emulator written in C++/Assembly: VirtualNet is a interpreter/emulator for running .net code in native without having to install the .Net FrameWorkVisual Blocks: Visual Blocks ????IDE ????? ??????? ????? ????/?? Visual Studio and Cloud Based Mobile Device Testing: Practical guidance enabling field to remove blockers to adoption and to use and extend the Perfecto Mobile Cloud Device testing within the context of VS.Windows 8 Time Picker for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone implementation of the Time Picker control found in the Windows 8.1 Alarms app.???? - SmallBasic?: ?????????

  Read the article

• Design for complex ATG applications

  - by Glen Borkowski

  Overview Needless to say, some ATG applications are more complex than others.  Some ATG applications support a single site, single language, single catalog, single currency, have a single development staff, single business team, and a relatively simple business model.  The real complex applications have to support multiple sites, multiple languages, multiple catalogs, multiple currencies, a couple different development teams, multiple business teams, and a highly complex business model (and processes to go along with it).  While it's still important to implement a proper design for simple applications, it's absolutely critical to do this for the complex applications.  Why?  It's all about time and money.  If you are unable to manage your complex applications in an efficient manner, the cost of managing it will increase dramatically as will the time to get things done (time to market).  On the positive side, your competition is most likely in the same situation, so you just need to be more efficient than they are. This article is intended to discuss a number of key areas to think about when designing complex applications on ATG.  Some of this can get fairly technical, so it may help to get some background first.  You can get enough of the required background information from this post.  After reading that, come back here and follow along. Application Design Of all the various types of ATG applications out there, the most complex tend to be the ones in the telecommunications industry - especially the ones which operate in multiple countries.  To get started, let's assume that we are talking about an application like that.  One that has these properties: Operates in multiple countries - must support multiple sites, catalogs, languages, and currencies The organization is fairly loosely-coupled - single brand, but different businesses across different countries There is some common functionality across all sites in all countries There is some common functionality across different sites within the same country Sites within a single country may have some unique functionality - relative to other sites in the same country Complex product catalog (mostly in terms of bundles, eligibility, and compatibility) At this point, I'll assume you have read through the required reading and have a decent understanding of how ATG modules work... Code / configuration - assemble into modules When it comes to defining your modules for a complex application, there are a number of goals: Divide functionality between the modules in a way that maps to your business Group common functionality 'further down in the stack of modules' Provide a good balance between shared resources and autonomy for countries / sites Now I'll describe a high level approach to how you could accomplish those goals...  Let's start from the bottom and work our way up.  At the very bottom, you have the modules that ship with ATG - the 'out of the box' stuff.  You want to make sure that you are leveraging all the modules that make sense in order to get the most value from ATG as possible - and less stuff you'll have to write yourself.  On top of the ATG modules, you should create what we'll refer to as the Corporate Foundation Module described as follows: Sits directly on top of ATG modules Used by all applications across all countries and sites - this is the foundation for everyone Contains everything that is common across all countries / all sites Once established and settled, will change less frequently than other 'higher' modules Encapsulates as many enterprise-wide integrations as possible Will provide means of code sharing therefore less development / testing - faster time to market Contains a 'reference' web application (described below) The next layer up could be multiple modules for each country (you could replace this with region if that makes more sense).  We'll define those modules as follows: Sits on top of the corporate foundation module Contains what is unique to all sites in a given country Responsible for managing any resource bundles for this country (to handle multiple languages) Overrides / replaces corporate integration points with any country-specific ones Finally, we will define what should be a fairly 'thin' (in terms of functionality) set of modules for each site as follows: Sits on top of the country it resides in module Contains what is unique for a given site within a given country Will mostly contain configuration, but could also define some unique functionality as well Contains one or more web applications The graphic below should help to indicate how these modules fit together: Web applications As described in the previous section, there are many opportunities for sharing (minimizing costs) as it relates to the code and configuration aspects of ATG modules.  Web applications are also contained within ATG modules, however, sharing web applications can be a bit more difficult because this is what the end customer actually sees, and since each site may have some degree of unique look & feel, sharing becomes more challenging.  One approach that can help is to define a 'reference' web application at the corporate foundation layer to act as a solid starting point for each site.  Here's a description of the 'reference' web application: Contains minimal / sample reference styling as this will mostly be addressed at the site level web app Focus on functionality - ensure that core functionality is revealed via this web application Each individual site can use this as a starting point There may be multiple types of web apps (i.e. B2C, B2B, etc) There are some techniques to share web application assets - i.e. multiple web applications, defined in the web.xml, and it's worth investigating, but is out of scope here. Reference infrastructure In this complex environment, it is assumed that there is not a single infrastructure for all countries and all sites.  It's more likely that different countries (or regions) could have their own solution for infrastructure.  In this case, it will be advantageous to define a reference infrastructure which contains all the hardware and software that make up the core environment.  Specifications and diagrams should be created to outline what this reference infrastructure looks like, as well as it's baseline cost and the incremental cost to scale up with volume.  Having some consistency in terms of infrastructure will save time and money as new countries / sites come online.  Here are some properties of the reference infrastructure: Standardized approach to setup of hardware Type and number of servers Defines application server, operating system, database, etc... - including vendor and specific versions Consistent naming conventions Provides a consistent base of terminology and understanding across environments Defines which ATG services run on which servers Production Staging BCC / Preview Each site can change as required to meet scale requirements Governance / organization It should be no surprise that the complex application we're talking about is backed by an equally complex organization.  One of the more challenging aspects of efficiently managing a series of complex applications is to ensure the proper level of governance and organization.  Here are some ideas and goals to work towards: Establish a committee to make enterprise-wide decisions that affect all sites Representation should be evenly distributed Should have a clear communication procedure Focus on high level business goals Evaluation of feature / function gaps and how that relates to ATG release schedule / roadmap Determine when to upgrade & ensure value will be realized Determine how to manage various levels of modules Who is responsible for maintaining corporate / country / site layers Determine a procedure for controlling what goes in the corporate foundation module Standardize on source code control, database, hardware, OS versions, J2EE app servers, development procedures, etc only use tested / proven versions - this is something that should be centralized so that every country / site does not have to worry about compatibility between versions Create a innovation team Quickly develop new features, perform proof of concepts All teams can benefit from their findings Summary At this point, it should be clear why the topics above (design, governance, organization, etc) are critical to being able to efficiently manage a complex application.  To summarize, it's all about competitive advantage...  You will need to reduce costs and improve time to market with the goal of providing a better experience for your end customers.  You can reduce cost by reducing development time, time allocated to testing (don't have to test the corporate foundation module over and over again - do it once), and optimizing operations.  With an efficient design, you can improve your time to market and your business will be more flexible  and agile.  Over time, you'll find that you're becoming more focused on offering functionality that is new to the market (creativity) and this will be rewarded - you're now a leader. In addition to the above, you'll realize soft benefits as well.  Your staff will be operating in a culture based on sharing.  You'll want to reward efforts to improve and enhance the foundation as this will benefit everyone.  This culture will inspire innovation, which can only lend itself to your competitive advantage.

  Read the article

• Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

  - by Laurent Goldsztejn

  On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

  Read the article

• Commit Review Questions

  - by Wes McClure

  Note: in this article when I refer to a commit, I mean the commit you plan to share with the rest of the team, if you have local commits that you plan to amend/combine, I am referring to the final result. In time you will find these easier to do as you develop, however, all of these are valuable before checking in!  The pre commit review is a nice time to polish what might have been several hours of intense work, during which these things were the last things on your mind!  If you are concerned about losing your work in the process of responding to these questions, first do a check-in and amend it as you go (assuming you are using a tool such as git that supports this), rolling the result into one nice commit for everyone else.  Did you review your commit, change by change, with a diff utility? If not, this is a list of reasons why you might want to start! Did you test your changes? If the test is valuable to be automated, is it? If it’s a manual testing scenario, did you at least try the basics manually? Are the additions/changes formatted consistently with the rest of the project? Lots of automated tools can help here, don’t try to manually format the code, that’s a waste of time and as a human you will fail repeatedly. Are these consistent: tabs versus spaces, indentation, spacing, braces, line breaks, etc Resharper is a great example of a tool that can automate this for you (.net) Are naming conventions respected? Did you accidently use abbreviations, unless you have a good reason to use them? Does capitalization match the conventions in the project/language? Are files partitioned? Sometimes we add new code in existing files in a pinch, it’s a good idea to split these out if they don’t belong ie: are new classes defined in new files, if this is something your project values? Is there commented out code? If you are removing an existing feature, get rid of it, that is why we have VCS If it’s not done yet, then why are you checking it in? Perhaps a stash commit (git)? Did you leave debug or unnecessary changes? Do you understand all of the changes? http://geekswithblogs.net/wesm/archive/2012/04/11/programming-doesnrsquot-have-to-be-magic.aspx Are there spelling mistakes? Including your commit message! Is your commit message concise? Is there follow up work? Are there tasks you didn’t write down that you need to follow up with? Are readability or reorganization changes needed? This might be amended into the final commit, or it might be future work that needs added to the backlog. Are there other things your team values that you should review?

  Read the article

• Build Dependencies and Silverlight 4

  - by Kyle Burns

  At my current position, I’ve been doing quite a bit of Silverlight development and have also been working with TFS2010 build services to enable continuous integration.  One of the critical pieces of a successful continuous build setup (and also one of the benefits of having one) is that the build system should be able to “get latest” against the source repository and immediately build with no errors.  This can break down both in an automated build scenario and a “new guy” scenario when the solution has external dependencies that may not be present in the build environment. The method that I use to address the dependency issue is to store all of the binaries upon which my solution depends in a folder under the solution root called “Reference Items”.  I keep this folder as part of the solution and check all of the binaries into source control so when I get the latest version of the solution from source control all of the binaries are downloaded to my machine as well and gets me closer to the ideal where a new developer installs the development IDE, get latest and can immediately build and run unit tests before jumping into coding the feature of the day. This all sounds pretty good (and it is), but a little while back I ran into one of those little hiccups that requires a little manual intervention.  The issue that I ran into is that with Silverlight (at least version 4), the behavior of the “Add Reference” command when adding reference to a DLL that is present in the GAC is to omit the HintPath element that it includes with regular .Net projects, so even if the DLL is setting in the Reference Items folder and downloaded to the build machine it cannot be found at compile time and the build will fail. To work around this behavior, you need to be comfortable editing the XML project files generated by Visual Studio (in my case this is typically a .csproj file).  Simply open the project file in your favorite text editor, find the Reference element that refers to the component, and modify the XML to include the HintPath.  Here’s a before and after example of the component that ultimately led me to the investigation behind this post: Before: <Reference Include="Telerik.Windows.Controls, Version=2011.2.920.1040, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5803cfa389c90ce7, processorArchitecture=MSIL" /> After: <Reference Include="Telerik.Windows.Controls, Version=2011.2.920.1040, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=5803cfa389c90ce7, processorArchitecture=MSIL">       <HintPath>..\Reference Items\Telerik.Windows.Controls.dll</HintPath>     </Reference>

  Read the article

• 3D Ball Physics Theory: collision response on ground and against walls?

  - by David

  I'm really struggling to get a strong grasp on how I should be handling collision response in a game engine I'm building around a 3D ball physics concept. Think Monkey Ball as an example of the type of gameplay. I am currently using sphere-to-sphere broad phase, then AABB to OBB testing (the final test I am using right now is one that checks if one of the 8 OBB points crosses the planes of the object it is testing against). This seems to work pretty well, and I am getting back: Plane that object is colliding against (with a point on the plane, the plane's normal, and the exact point of intersection. I've tried what feels like dozens of different high-level strategies for handling these collisions, without any real success. I think my biggest problem is understanding how to handle collisions against walls in the x-y axes (left/right, front/back), which I want to have elasticity, and the ground (z-axis) where I want an elastic reaction if the ball drops down, but then for it to eventually normalize and be kept "on the ground" (not go into the ground, but also not continue bouncing). Without kluging something together, I'm positive there is a good way to handle this, my theories just aren't getting me all the way there. For physics modeling and movement, I am trying to use a Euler based setup with each object maintaining a position (and destination position prior to collision detection), a velocity (which is added onto the position to determine the destination position), and an acceleration (which I use to store any player input being put on the ball, as well as gravity in the z coord). Starting from when I detect a collision, what is a good way to approach the response to get the expected behavior in all cases? Thanks in advance to anyone taking the time to assist... I am grateful for any pointers, and happy to post any additional info or code if it is useful. UPDATE Based on Steve H's and eBusiness' responses below, I have adapted my collision response to what makes a lot more sense now. It was close to right before, but I didn't have all the right pieces together at the right time! I have one problem left to solve, and that is what is causing the floor collision to hit every frame. Here's the collision response code I have now for the ball, then I'll describe the last bit I'm still struggling to understand. // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... if (m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal) <= 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold // -- NOTE: this was an experimental idea I had to solve the "jitter" bug I'll describe below float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position + intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); The above snippet is run after a collision is detected on the ball (collider) with a collidee (floor in this case). With a dampening force of 1.8f, the ball's reflected "upward" velocity will eventually be overcome by gravity, so the ball will essentially be stuck on the floor. THIS is the problem I have now... the collision code is running every frame (since the ball's z-velocity is constantly pushing it a collision with the floor below it). The ball is not technically stuck, I can move it around still, but the movement is really goofy because the velocity and position keep getting affected adversely by the above snippet. I was experimenting with an idea to clamp the z-velocity to zero if it was "close to zero", but this didn't do what I think... probably because the very next frame the ball gets a new gravity acceleration applied to its velocity regardless (which I think is good, right?). Collisions with walls are as they used to be and work very well. It's just this last bit of "stickiness" to deal with. The camera is constantly jittering up and down by extremely small fractions too when the ball is "at rest". I'll keep playing with it... I like puzzles like this, especially when I think I'm close. Any final ideas on what I could be doing wrong here? UPDATE 2 Good news - I discovered I should be subtracting the intersection.diff from the m_position (position prior to collision). The intersection.diff is my calculation of the difference in the vector of position to destPosition from the intersection point to the position. In this case, adding it was causing my ball to always go "up" just a little bit, causing the jitter. By subtracting it, and moving that clamper for the velocity.z when close to zero to being above the dot product (and changing the test from <= 0 to < 0), I now have the following: // Clamp z-velocity to zero if we are within a certain threshold float diff = 0.2f - abs(m_velocity.z); if (diff > 0.0f && diff <= 0.2f) { m_velocity.z = 0.0f; } // if we are moving in the direction of the plane (against the normal)... float dotprod = m_velocity.dot(intersection.plane.normal); if (dotprod < 0.0f) { float dampeningForce = 1.8f; // eventually create this value based on mass and acceleration? // Calculate the projection velocity PVRTVec3 actingVelocity = m_velocity.project(intersection.plane.normal); m_velocity -= actingVelocity * dampeningForce; } // Take this object to its new destination position based on... // -- our pre-collision position + vector to the collision point + our new velocity after collision * time // -- remaining after the collision to finish the movement m_destPosition = m_position - intersection.diff + (m_velocity * intersection.tRemaining * GAMESTATE->dt); UpdateWorldMatrix(m_destWorldMatrix, m_destOBB, m_destPosition, false); This is MUCH better. No jitter, and the ball now "rests" at the floor, while still bouncing off the floor and walls. The ONLY thing left is that the ball is now virtually "stuck". He can move but at a much slower rate, likely because the else of my dot product test is only letting the ball move at a rate multiplied against the tRemaining... I think this is a better solution than I had previously, but still somehow not the right idea. BTW, I'm trying to journal my progress through this problem for anyone else with a similar situation - hopefully it will serve as some help, as many similar posts have for me over the years.

  Read the article

• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

  Read the article

• JSP Precompilation for ADF Applications

  - by Duncan Mills

  A question that comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to build automation, is how to best pre-compile the .jspx and .jsff files in an ADF application. Thus ensuring that the app is ready to run as soon as it's installed into WebLogic. In the normal run of things, the first poor soul to hit a page pays the price and has to wait a little whilst the JSP is compiled into a servlet. Everyone else subsequently gets a free lunch. So it's a reasonable thing to want to do... Let Me List the Ways So forth to Google (other search engines are available)... which lead me to a fairly old article on WLDJ - Removing Performance Bottlenecks Through JSP Precompilation. Technololgy wise, it's somewhat out of date, but the one good point that it made is that it's really not very useful to try and use the precompile option in the weblogic.xml file. That's a really good observation - particularly if you're trying to integrate a pre-compile step into a Hudson Continuous Integration process. That same article mentioned an alternative approach for programmatic pre-compilation using weblogic.jspc. This seemed like a much more useful approach for a CI environment. However, weblogic.jspc is now obsoleted by weblogic.appc so we'll use that instead.  Thanks to Steve for the pointer there. And So To APPC APPC has documentation - always a great place to start, and supports usage both from Ant via the wlappc task and from the command line using the weblogic.appc command. In my testing I took the latter approach. Usage, as the documentation will show you, is superficially pretty simple.  The nice thing here, is that you can pass an existing EAR file (generated of course using OJDeploy) and that EAR will be updated in place with the freshly compiled servlet classes created from the JSPs. Appc takes care of all the unpacking, compiling and re-packing of the EAR for you. Neat.  So we're done right...? Not quite. The Devil is in the Detail  OK so I'm being overly dramatic but it's not all plain sailing, so here's a short guide to using weblogic.appc to compile a simple ADF application without pain.  Information You'll Need The following is based on the assumption that you have a stand-alone WLS install with the Application Development  Runtime installed and a suitable ADF enabled domain created. This could of course all be run off of a JDeveloper install as well 1. Your Weblogic home directory. Everything you need is relative to this so make a note.  In my case it's c:\builds\wls_ps4. 2. Next deploy your EAR as normal and have a peek inside it using your favourite zip management tool. First of all look at the weblogic-application.xml inside the EAR /META-INF directory. Have a look for any library references. Something like this: <library-ref>    <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref>   Make a note of the library ref (adf.oracle.domain in this case) , you'll need that in a second. 3. Next open the nested WAR file within the EAR and then have a peek inside the weblogic.xml file in the /WEB-INF directory. Again  make a note of the library references. 4. Now start the WebLogic as per normal and run the WebLogic console app (e.g. http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure navigator, select Deployments. 5. For each of the libraries you noted down drill into the library definition and make a note of the .war, .ear or .jar that defines the library. For example, in my case adf.oracle.domain maps to "C:\ builds\ WLS_PS4\ oracle_common\ modules\ oracle. adf. model_11. 1. 1\ adf. oracle. domain. ear". Note the extra spaces that are salted throughout this string as it is displayed in the console - just to make it annoying, you'll have to strip these out. 6. Finally you'll need the location of the adfsharebean.jar. We need to pass this on the classpath for APPC so that the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listener can be found. In a more complex app of your own you may need additional classpath entries as well.  Now we're ready to go, and it's a simple matter of applying the information we have gathered into the relevant command line arguments for the utility A Simple CMD File to Run APPC  Here's the stub .cmd file I'm using on Windows to run this. @echo offREM Stub weblogic.appc Runner setlocal set WLS_HOME=C:\builds\WLS_PS4 set ADF_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\oracle_common\modulesset COMMON_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\common\deployable-libraries set ADF_WEBAPP=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.view_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.webapp.war set ADF_DOMAIN=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.ear set JSTL=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jstl-1.2.war set JSF=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jsf-1.2.war set ADF_SHARE=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.share_11.1.1\adfsharembean.jar REM Set up the WebLogic Environment so appc can be found call %WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd CLS REM Now compile away!java weblogic.appc -verbose -library %ADF_WEBAPP%,%ADF_DOMAIN%,%JSTL%,%JSF% -classpath %ADF_SHARE% %1 endlocal Running the above on a target ADF .ear  file will zip through and create all of the relevant compiled classes inside your nested .war file in the \WEB-INF\classes\jsp_servlet\ directory (but don't take my word for it, run it and take a look!) And So... In the immortal words of  the Pet Shop Boys, Was It Worth It? Well, here's where you'll have to do your own testing. In  my case here, with a simple ADF application, pre-compilation shaved an non-scientific "3 Elephants" off of the initial page load time for the first access of each page. That's a pretty significant payback for such a simple step to add into your CI process, so why not give it a go.

  Read the article

• Spotlight on RIVA: CRM integration for Oracle CRM on Demand and Microsoft Exchange

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Introducing Riva from Omni - an Oracle ISV partner specializing in Enterprise Management and Integration Solutions Riva delivers advanced, server-side integration for Oracle CRM On Demand and Microsoft Exchange or even Novell GroupWise. Riva allows Oracle customers to go beyond the standard Outlook plug-in to deliver additional value for the end user as they interact between Outlook and CRM On Demand. Riva syncs CRM On Demand to ALL Exchange mail apps, not just Windows Outlook.  So, whether customers are using Outlook 2010, Outlook Web Access (web client), Outlook 2011 for Mac, Apple Mail, Outlook on Citrix  or a mobile device, Riva's got them covered. There are no plug-ins to be installed, configured, managed and maintained on users' desktops, laptops as Riva delivers Server-side synchronisation for CRMOD and Exchange. The automation of CRM and Outlook integration will remove the reliance upon users to synchronise between the two with Riva handling this process. Riva allows administrators to define sync policies and apply them to individuals or groups of users depending on their sync requirements. Administrators will be able to determine and manage the exposure of the most pertinent detail to be synchronised between Outlook and CRM On Demand. Custom and organic contact filtering for large deployments i.e. Based on ownership, groupings and contact frequency, filters can be applied on what contact records are shared with the users. Riva provides the capability to synchronise CRM and Outlook beyond Contacts, Calendar entries and Email. The synchronisation can be extended to cater for  opportunities, quotes and custom objects for example within the Outlook interface. Riva SmartConvert Folders can automate the creation of opportunities and associated contacts for example if they don't already exist. This can facilitate a reduction in manual detail entry through quick association whilst also benefiting user adoption. From a mobile perspective, Riva allows users to view and manage their CRM On Demand contacts, calendar, tasks, opportunities and cases from iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices.  Again, there are no mobile apps or additional plugins to install, configure or manage. We sync CRM On Demand to Exchange.  Because the mobile device is connected to an Exchange mailbox, the information automatically syncs down to the native address book, calendar and mail apps on the smartphone or tablet. Riva Datasheet for CRM On Demand Riva Brochure – Oracle CRM On Demand  Technical Knowledgebase & Riva Trial  http://kb.omni-ts.com/47/ Comparison to Outlook Plug-ins Riva Diagram – Riva Comparison with Outlook Plug-ins Contact: Wolfgang Berger - [email protected]

  Read the article

• Wordpress Installation (on IIS and SQL Server)

  - by Davide Mauri

  To proceed with the installation of Wordpress on SQL Server and IIS, first of all, you need to do the following steps Create a database on SQL Server that will be used by Wordpress Create login that can access to the just created database and put the user into ddladmin, db_datareader, db_datawriter roles Download and unpack Wordpress 3.3.2 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) zip file into a directory of your choice Download the wp-db-abstraction 1.1.4 (latest version as of 27 May 2012) plugin from wordpress.org website Now that the basic action has been done, you can start to setup and configure your Wordpress installation. Unpack and follow the instructions in the README.TXT file to install the Database Abstraction Layer. Mainly you have to: Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins.  This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory.  If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it. Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php Now you can create an application pool in IIS like the following one Create a website, using the above Application Pool, that points to the folder where you unpacked Wordpress files. Be sure to give the “Write” permission to the IIS account, as pointed out in this (old, but still quite valid) installation manual: http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#iis Now you’re ready to go. Point your browser to the configured website and the Wordpress installation screen will be there for you. When you’re requested to enter information to connect to MySQL database, simply skip that page, leaving the default values. If you have installed the Database Abstraction Layer, another database installation screen will appear after the one used by MySQL, and here you can enter the configuration information needed to connect to SQL Server. After having finished the installation steps, you should be able to access and navigate your wordpress site.  A final touch, and it’s done: just add the needed rewrite rules http://wordpress.visitmix.com/development/installing-wordpress-on-sql-server#urlrewrite and that’s it! Well. Not really. Unfortunately the current (as of 27 May 2012) version of the Database Abstraction Layer (1.1.4) has some bugs. Luckily they can be quickly fixed: Backslash Fix http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-db-abstraction-fix-problems-with-backslash-usage Select Top 0 Fix Make the change to the file “.\wp-content\mu-plugins\wp-db-abstraction\translations\sqlsrv\translations.php” suggested by “debettap”   http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3485384&group_id=315685&atid=1328061 And now you have a 100% working Wordpress installation on SQL Server! Since I also wanted to take advantage of SQL Server Full Text Search, I’ve created a very simple wordpress plugin to setup full-text search and to use it as website search engine: http://wpfts.codeplex.com/ Enjoy!

  Read the article

• Oracle's Integrated Systems Management and Support Experience

  - by Scott McNeil

  With its recent launch, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g introduced a new approach to integrated systems management and support. What this means is taking both areas of IT management and vendor support and combining them into one integrated comprehensive and centralized platform. Traditional Ways Under the traditional method, IT operational teams would often focus on running their systems using management tools that weren’t connected to their vendor’s support systems. If you needed support with a product, administrators would often contact the vendor by phone or visit the vendor website for support and then log a service request in order to fix the issues. This method was also very time consuming, as administrators would have to collect their software configurations, operating systems and hardware settings, then manually enter them into an online form or recite them to a support analyst on the phone. For the vendor, they had to analyze all the configuration data to recreate the problem in order to solve it. This approach was very manual, uncoordinated and error-prone where duplication between the customer and vendor frequently occurred. A Better Support Experience By removing the boundaries between support, IT management tools and the customer’s IT infrastructure, Oracle paved the way for a better support experience. This was achieved through integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and My Oracle Support. Administrators can not only manage their IT infrastructure and applications through Oracle Enterprise Manager’s centralized console but can also receive proactive alerts and patch recommendations right within the console they use day-in-day-out. Having one single source of information saves time and potentially prevents unforeseen problems down the road. All for One, and One for All The first step for you is to allow Oracle Enterprise Manager to upload configuration data into Oracle’s secure configuration repository, where it can be analyzed for potential issues or conflicts for all customers. A fix to a problem encountered by one customer may actually be relevant to many more. The integration between My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager allows all customers who may be impacted by the problem to receive a notification about the fix. Once the alert appears in Oracle Enterprise Manager’s console, the administrator can take his/her time to do further investigations using automated workflows provided in Oracle Enterprise Manager to analyze potential conflicts. Finally, administrators can schedule a time to test and automatically apply the fix to all the systems that need it. In the end, this helps customers maintain their service levels without compromise and avoid experiencing unplanned downtime that may result from potential issues or conflicts. This new paradigm of integrated systems management and support helps customers keep their systems secure, compliant, and up-to-date, while eliminating the traditional silos between IT management and vendor support. Oracle’s next generation platform also works hand-in-hand to provide higher quality of service to business users while at the same time making life for administrators less complicated. For more information on Oracle’s integrated systems management and support experience, be sure to visit our Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Resource Center for the latest customer videos, webcast, and white papers.

  Read the article

• Cannot get Virtualbox to install properly on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by lopac1029

  I cannot get Virtualbox to install properly on my 12.04. I first went with a manual install for the .deb from the old builds section of the Virtualbox page. That .deb opened up the Software Center and installed. Then I got the error coming up of VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration is not available on your system. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot. which I can only assume was due to my Ubuntu version being 32-bit (System Details - Overview - OC type: 32-bit, right?) So I followed these instructions to remove the .deb manually, restarted my laptop, and then FOUND the actual Virtualbox install in the Software Center and installed from that (assuming it would give me the correct version I need for my system) So after all that (and then some), I'm still getting the same error when I connect to my new job's project in Virtualbox. Can anyone point me in the right direction of what to do here? This is the first time I've ever worked with Virtualbox, and no one at this company is using Ubuntu, so I'm on my own here. EDIT: Here is the direct info from running the 2 suggested commands Inspiron-1750-brick:~ $lscpu Architecture: i686 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 2 On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 2 Socket(s): 1 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel CPU family: 6 Model: 23 Stepping: 10 CPU MHz: 2100.000 BogoMIPS: 4189.45 L1d cache: 32K L1i cache: 32K L2 cache: 2048K Inspiron-1750-brick:~ $cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz stepping : 10 microcode : 0xa07 cpu MHz : 1200.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm bogomips : 4189.80 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz stepping : 10 microcode : 0xa07 cpu MHz : 1200.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm bogomips : 4189.45 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:

  Read the article

• Organizing Git repositories with common nested sub-modules

  - by André Caron

  I'm a big fan of Git sub-modules. I like to be able to track a dependency along with its version, so that you can roll-back to a previous version of your project and have the corresponding version of the dependency to build safely and cleanly. Moreover, it's easier to release our libraries as open source projects as the history for libraries is separate from that of the applications that depend on them (and which are not going to be open sourced). I'm setting up workflow for multiple projects at work, and I was wondering how it would be if we took this approach a bit of an extreme instead of having a single monolithic project. I quickly realized there is a potential can of worms in really using sub-modules. Supposing a pair of applications: studio and player, and dependent libraries core, graph and network, where dependencies are as follows: core is standalone graph depends on core (sub-module at ./libs/core) network depdends on core (sub-module at ./libs/core) studio depends on graph and network (sub-modules at ./libs/graph and ./libs/network) player depends on graph and network (sub-modules at ./libs/graph and ./libs/network) Suppose that we're using CMake and that each of these projects has unit tests and all the works. Each project (including studio and player) must be able to be compiled standalone to perform code metrics, unit testing, etc. The thing is, a recursive git submodule fetch, then you get the following directory structure: studio/ studio/libs/ (sub-module depth: 1) studio/libs/graph/ studio/libs/graph/libs/ (sub-module depth: 2) studio/libs/graph/libs/core/ studio/libs/network/ studio/libs/network/libs/ (sub-module depth: 2) studio/libs/network/libs/core/ Notice that core is cloned twice in the studio project. Aside from this wasting disk space, I have a build system problem because I'm building core twice and I potentially get two different versions of core. Question How do I organize sub-modules so that I get the versioned dependency and standalone build without getting multiple copies of common nested sub-modules? Possible solution If the the library dependency is somewhat of a suggestion (i.e. in a "known to work with version X" or "only version X is officially supported" fashion) and potential dependent applications or libraries are responsible for building with whatever version they like, then I could imagine the following scenario: Have the build system for graph and network tell them where to find core (e.g. via a compiler include path). Define two build targets, "standalone" and "dependency", where "standalone" is based on "dependency" and adds the include path to point to the local core sub-module. Introduce an extra dependency: studio on core. Then, studio builds core, sets the include path to its own copy of the core sub-module, then builds graph and network in "dependency" mode. The resulting folder structure looks like: studio/ studio/libs/ (sub-module depth: 1) studio/libs/core/ studio/libs/graph/ studio/libs/graph/libs/ (empty folder, sub-modules not fetched) studio/libs/network/ studio/libs/network/libs/ (empty folder, sub-modules not fetched) However, this requires some build system magic (I'm pretty confident this can be done with CMake) and a bit of manual work on the part of version updates (updating graph might also require updating core and network to get a compatible version of core in all projects). Any thoughts on this?

  Read the article

• Impossible to install Ubuntu 10.10 dual boot with Windows 7 on new Acer desktop computer

  - by Don Myers

  My brother has a brand new Acer Desktop with Windows 7. I have done many installs (40+) of Ubuntu starting with 8.10, and have never run into this. I've spent three hours trying to do a dual boot install of 10.10. When you get to the place where you normally would choose to install as a dual boot or overwrite the existing information on the hard drive, that block is just blank. Nothing. No choices even to do a manual partition setup. If you try to go on you get the message "No root file system is defined. Please correct this from the partitioning menu." but there is nothing in the partitioning menu. I tried a good 10.04 disc also. Same thing happens with it. I ran a gparted live cd, and it shows the hard drive as sda with 3 partitions on the original. sda1 is a small partition called PQService. sda2 is another small partition called System Reserved, and GParted says it is the boot partition. sda3 is the main partation with the operating system (Windows 7) and all of the empty space. There is a little unallocated space at the very beginning and very end of the hard drive. If I go to places in the Live CD, it shows a 640 gb hard disk called Acer, but it also shows a 640 gb hard disk called system reserved. They are the same disk. There is just one hard drive. If you click properties in the System Reserved 640 gb, it shows all information as unknown. I had to change the boot order in the bios in order to run the live cd. The hard drive instead of being listed as such is listed as Raid:Raid Ready. Something the way this computer is set up is preventing Ubuntu from being able to identify the hard drive partitions at all to do an install, even if you were not doing a dual boot and just wanted to overwrite Windows. Is this a bug that needs reported? This is a major problem for me and my brother, but also for Ubuntu if new users want to Ubuntu and find they cannot install it.

  Read the article

• how to convert avi (xvid) to mkv or mp4 (h264)

  - by bcsteeve

  Very noob when it comes to video. I'm trying to make sense of what I"m finding via Google... but its mostly Greek to me. I have a bunch of Avi files that won't play in my WD TV Play box. Mediainfo tells me they are xvid. Specs for the box show that should be fine... but digging through forums says its hit-and-miss. So I'd like to try converting them to h264 encoded MKV or mp4 files. I gather avconv is the tool, but reading the manual just has me really really confused. I tried the very basic example of: avconv -i file.avi -c copy file.mp4 it took less than 4 seconds. And it worked... sort of. It "played" in that something came up on the screen... but there was horrible artifacting and scenes would just sort of melt into each other. I want to preserve quality if possible. I'm not concerned about file size. I'm not terribly concerned with the time it takes either, provided I can do them in a batch. Can someone familiar with the process please give me a command with the options? Thank you for your help. I'm posting the mediainfo in case it helps: General Complete name : \\SERVER\Video\Public\test.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 189 MiB Duration : 11mn 18s Overall bit rate : 2 335 Kbps Writing application : Lavf52.32.0 Video ID : 0 Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5 Format settings, BVOP : 2 Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263) Muxing mode : Packed bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate : 2 129 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Compression mode : Lossy Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.206 Stream size : 172 MiB (91%) Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04) Audio ID : 1 Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 3 Mode : Joint stereo Mode extension : MS Stereo Codec ID : 55 Codec ID/Hint : MP3 Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 15.5 MiB (8%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)

  Read the article

• 7 Good Reasons to Upgrade E-Business Suite to the cloud

  - by Lisa Schwartz

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} As promised here is blog Part 2: Why Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12 in the cloud? 7 Good Reasons to Upgrade to E-Business Suite 12 in the Cloud: 1)   Take advantage of new and improved features: from global sub-ledger accounting to mobile access for supply chain management to built-in extensions for information search and discovery. If you haven’t checked out the latest features yet, there are over 1000 EBS 12 enhancements. 2) Plan now to address any ongoing Oracle Support considerations and regulatory compliance requirements. EBS Release 11 support is ending soon. Based upon that information alone, you should have an EBS upgrade strategy and planning well underway. 3) Customizations got you worried? Expedite your next Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade – have Oracle identify all customizations, reduce un-needed customizations (EBS 12 has built-in many of your customizations) and during the upgrade keep all necessary customizations to run your business. 4) Migrating EBS to the cloud allows parallel migration and testing. Therefore no extra hardware purchases for the testing and upgrade. Business disruption is minimized. And, by moving to the cloud, this provides for smoother future upgrades that are based on your own timeline. 5) Oracle Experts will upgrade and run your EBS applications for you in the cloud. Free your IT resources to develop new services and work on projects that are critical to business innovation and competitiveness. Your IT resources will not be inundated with upgrade tasks!      6) Reallocate precious IT dollars to other projects, eliminate CapEx costs. 7) Oracle minimizes business risk by having enterprise class cloud services under stringent SLAs designed to run your business applications for you such as: a. Enterprise grade infrastructure b. World-class security and identity management c. Best practices in regulatory compliance: from classified federal gov’t standards, to healthcare HIPPA standards to meeting Financial Services requirements (PCI DSS) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 7 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Next Step: To help you upgrade and get to the cloud in the shortest period of  time, Oracle has a program called Oracle Upgrade Factory for Oracle E-Business Suite 12. It offers a unique approach, seamlessly bundling Managed Cloud Services and Oracle Consulting Services together for an entire Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade and migration to a managed private  cloud. Read the Oracle Upgrade Factory Solution Brief here. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

  Read the article

• NuGet JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  As most of us already know JustMock got  a free edition. The free edition is not a stripped down of the features of the full edition but I would rather say its a strip down of the type you can mock. Technically, free version runs on  proxy as full version runs on proxy + profiler. In full version, It switches to profiler when you are mocking final methods or sealed class or anything else that can not be done using inheritance. Like in full version you can mock non public methods , in free version you can still do it but it has to be virtual for protected or must be done through InternalsVisibleTo attribute for internal virtual methods (If you have access to the source and can apply the attribute). Now, you can get a copy of free edition from the product page. Install it and off you go. But it is also exposed to NuGet. Those of you are not familiar with NuGet (that will be odd). But still NuGet is the centralized package manager from Microsoft that cuts the workflow of manual inclusion of  libraries in your project. I think NuGet in future will limit the scope of  “.vsi” packages and installers because of its ease (except in some cases). Its similar to ruby gems. In ruby, virtually you can install any library in this way “gems  install <target_library>” and you are off to go. It will check the dependencies, install them or less prompt with the steps you need to do.   Now sticking to the post, to get started you first need to install NuGet package manager. Once you have completed the step pressing “Ctrl + W, Ctrl + Z” it will bring up an console like one below:   Once you are here, you just have to type “install-package justmock” Next, it will should print the confirmation when the installation is complete: Moving to visual studio solution explorer, you will now see:   Finally, NuGet is still in its early ages and steps that are shown here may not remain the same in coming releases, but feel free to enjoy what is out there right now. Regarding JustMock free edition, there is a nice post by Phil Japikse at Introducing JustMock Free Edition. I think its worth checking if not already.   Have fun and happy holidays!

  Read the article

• How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) "start on ..." and "stop on ..." stanzas

  - by Binarus

  Hi, I just can't understand how Upstart's rc job definition in Natty 11.04 works. To illustrate the problem, here is the definition (empty lines and comments are left out): start on runlevel [0123456] stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL] export RUNLEVEL export PREVLEVEL console output env INIT_VERBOSE task exec /etc/init.d/rc $RUNLEVEL Let's suppose we currently are in runlevel 2 and the rc job is stopped (that is exactly the situation after booting my box and logging in via SSH). Now, let's assume that the system switches to runlevel 3, for example due to a command like "telinit 3" given by root. What will happen to the rc job? Obviously, the rc job will be started since it is currently stopped and the event runlevel 3 is matching the start events. But from now on, things are unclear to me: According to the manual $RUNLEVEL evaluates to the new runlevel when the job is started (that means 3 in our example). Therefore, the next stanza "stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL]" translates to "stop on runlevel [!3]"; that means we have a first stanza which will trigger the job, but the second stanza will never stop the job and seems to be useless. Since I know that the Ubuntu / Upstart people won't do useless things, I must be heavily misunderstanding something. I would be grateful for any explanation. While trying to understand this, an additional question came to my mind. If I had contradicting start and stop triggers, for example start on foo stop on foo what would happen? I swear I never will do that, but I am nevertheless very interested in how Upstart handles that on the theoretical level. Thank you very much! Editing the question as a reaction on geekosaur's first answer: I can see the parallelism, but it is not that easy (at least, not to me). Let's assume the job aurrently is still running, and a new runlevel event comes in (of course, the new runlevel is different from the current one). Then, the following should happen: 1) The job is single instance. That means that "start on ..." won't be triggered since the job is currently running; $RUNLEVEL is not touched. 2) "stop on ..." will be triggered since the new runlevel is different from $RUNLEVEL, so the job will be aborted. 3) Now, the job is stopped and waiting. I can't see how it is restarted with the new runlevel. AFAIK, initctl emits events only once, so "start on ..." won't be triggered and the new runlevel won't be entered. I know that I still misunderstanding something, and I am grateful for explanations. Thank you very much!

  Read the article

• Oracle CRM For Public Sector, Commercial Business, Education

  - by michael.seback

  Chongqing Transport Commission Improves Management of Transport Projects The Chongqing Transport Commission is responsible for public passenger, road, and waterway transport in urban and rural areas of Chongqing. The commission administers the region's road and water industry; oversees the construction of transport infrastructure; and manages civil aviation, railroads, roads, waterways, ports, and wharves. "After studying the IT initiatives of other provincial transport commissions, we decided to use Siebel Public Sector to build our integrated transport service system. The Siebel software offers powerful functions that allow us to integrate information and improve the management of our road, rail, and waterway infrastructure projects." - Chen Xiaoming, Vice Director, Information Center, Chongqing Transport Commission. Read more here. Siemens Information Services Increases Productivity by 20% Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. provides back-office account processing services to Siemens' vendors. The company works with Siemens' healthcare, energy, and industry divisions in Europe, the United States, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. It approves financial services such as processing payroll, accounts data, purchase orders, invoices, and payments, and also creates service catalogs for customers and internal teams. "Oracle CRM ON Demand provides us with a complete view of each customer's data from the moment they log a request to the time we close it. This has eliminated manual requests, and improved the service we offer to our clients across the Asia-Pacific region." -Sunil Zutshi, General Manager, IT, Siemens Information Services Pvt, Ltd. Read more here. China Distance Education Holdings Improves Call Center Productivity by 24% China Distance Education Holdings Limited is a leading provider of online education. The organization offers 174 courses through 16 Web sites, including accounting, healthcare, law, and engineering. In 2010, 215,000 students were enrolled. "Online education is a fast growing sector in China. To maintain our competitiveness, we implemented Oracle Contact Center Anywhere to make it easier and faster for our call center staff to respond to student enquiries. As a result, their productivity increased by 24%." - Qin Songjiang, Chief Technology Officer, China Distance Education Holdings Limited. Read more here.

  Read the article

• BizTalk: Internals: the Partner Direct Ports and the Orchestration Chains

  - by Leonid Ganeline

  Partner Direct Port is one of the BizTalk hidden gems. It opens simple ways to the several messaging patterns. This article based on the Kevin Lam’s blog article. The article is pretty detailed but it still leaves several unclear pieces. So I have created a sample and will show how it works from different perspectives. Requirements We should create an orchestration chain where the messages should be routed from the first stage to the second stage. The messages should not be modified. All messages has the same message type. Common artifacts Source code can be downloaded here. It is interesting but all orchestrations use only one port type. It is possible because all ports are one-way ports and use only one operation. I have added a B orchestration. It helps to test the sample, showing all test messages in channel. The Receive shape Filter is empty. A Receive Port (R_Shema1Direct) is a plain Direct Port. As you can see, a subscription expression of this direct port has only one part, the MessageType for our test schema: A Filer is empty but, as you know, a link from the Receive shape to the Port creates this MessageType expression. I use only one Physical Receive File port to send a message to all processes. Each orchestration outputs a Trace.WriteLine(“<Orchestration Name>”). Forward Binding This sample has three orchestrations: A_1, A_21 and A_22. A_1 is a sender, A_21 and A_22 are receivers. Here is a subscription of the A_1 orchestration: It has two parts A MessageType. The same was for the B orchestration. A ReceivePortID. There was no such parameter for the B orchestration. It was created because I have bound the orchestration port with Physical Receive File port. This binding means the PortID parameter is added to the subscription. How to set up the ports? All ports involved in the message exchange should be the same port type. It forces us to use the same operation and the same message type for the bound ports. This step as absolutely contra-intuitive. We have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the sending orchestration, A_1. The first strange thing is it is not a partner orchestration we have to choose but an orchestration port. But the most strange thing is we have to choose exactly this orchestration and exactly this port.It is not a port from the partner, receive orchestrations, A_21 or A_22, but it is A_1 orchestration and S_SentFromA_1 port. Now we have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the received orchestrations, A_21 and A_22. Nothing strange is here except a parameter name. We choose the port of the sender, A_1 orchestration and S_SentFromA_1 port. As you can see the Partner Orchestration parameter for the sender and receiver orchestrations is the same. Testing I dropped a test file in a file folder. There we go: A dropped file was received by B and by A_1 A_1 sent a message forward. A message was received by B, A_21, A_22 Let’s look at a context of a message sent by A_1 on the second step: A MessageType part. It is quite expected. A PartnerService, a ParnerPort, an Operation. All those parameters were set up in the Partner Orchestration parameter on both bound ports.     Now let’s see a subscription of the A_21 and A_22 orchestrations. Now it makes sense. That’s why we have chosen such a strange value for the Partner Orchestration parameter of the sending orchestration. Inverse Binding This sample has three orchestrations: A_11, A_12 and A_2. A_11 and A_12 are senders, A_2 is receiver. How to set up the ports? All ports involved in the message exchange should be the same port type. It forces us to use the same operation and the same message type for the bound ports. This step as absolutely contra-intuitive. We have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for a receiving orchestration, A_2. The first strange thing is it is not a partner orchestration we have to choose but an orchestration port. But the most strange thing is we have to choose exactly this orchestration and exactly this port.It is not a port from the partner, sent orchestrations, A_11 or A_12, but it is A_2 orchestration and R_SentToA_2 port. Now we have to choose a Partner Orchestration parameter for the sending orchestrations, A_11 and A_12. Nothing strange is here except a parameter name. We choose the port of the sender, A_2 orchestration and R_SentToA_2 port. Testing I dropped a test file in a file folder. There we go: A dropped file was received by B, A_11 and by A_12 A_11 and A_12 sent two messages forward. The messages were received by B, A_2 Let’s see what was a context of a message sent by A_1 on the second step: A MessageType part. It is quite expected. A PartnerService, a ParnerPort, an Operation. All those parameters were set up in the Partner Orchestration parameter on both bound ports. Here is a subscription of the A_2 orchestration. Models I had a hard time trying to explain the Partner Direct Ports in simple terms. I have finished with this model: Forward Binding Receivers know a Sender. Sender doesn’t know Receivers. Publishers know a Subscriber. Subscriber doesn’t know Publishers. 1 –> 1 1 –> M Inverse Binding Senders know a Receiver. Receiver doesn’t know Senders. Subscribers know a Publisher. Publisher doesn’t know Subscribers. 1 –> 1 M –> 1 Notes   Orchestration chain It’s worth to note, the Partner Direct Port Binding creates a chain opened from one side and closed from another. The Forward Binding: A new Receiver can be added at run-time. The Sender can not be changed without design-time changes in Receivers. The Inverse Binding: A new Sender can be added at run-time. The Receiver can not be changed without design-time changes in Senders.

  Read the article

• Introducing Agile development after traditional project inception

  - by Riggy

  About a year and a half ago, I entered a workplace that claimed to do Agile development. What I learned was that this place has adopted several agile practices (such as daily standups, sprint plannings and sprint reviews) but none of the principles (just in time / just good enough mentality, exposing failure early, rich communication). I've now been tasked with making the team more agile and I've been assured that I have complete buy-in from the devs and the business team. As a pilot program, they've given me a project that just completed 15 months of requirements gathering, has a 110 page Analysis & Design document (to be considered as "written in stone"), and where I have no access to the end users (only to the committee made up of the users' managers who won't actually be using the product). I started small, giving them a list of expected deliverables for the first 5 sprints (leaving the future sprints undefined), a list of goals for the first sprint, and I dissected the A&D doc to get enough user stories to meet the first sprint's goals. Since then, they've asked why we don't have all the requirements for all the sprints, why I haven't started working on stuff for the third sprint (which they consider more important but is based off of the deliverables of the first 2 sprints) and are pressing for even more documentation that my entire IT team considers busy-work or un-related to us (such as writing the user manual up-front, documenting all the data fields from all the sprints up front, and more "up-front" work). This has been pretty rough for me as a new project manager, but there are improvements I have effectively implemented such as scrumban for story management, pair programming, and having the business give us customer acceptance tests up front (as part of the requirements documentation). So my questions are: What can I do to more effectively introduce change to a resistant business? Are there other practices that I can introduce on the IT side to help show the business the benefits of agile? The burden of documentation is strangling us - the business still sees it as a risk management strategy instead of as a risk. What can we do to alleviate their documentation concerns and demands (specifically the quantity of documentation and their need for all of it up front)? We are in a separate building from our business, about 3 blocks away and they refuse to have their people on the project co-habitate b/c that person "won't be able to work on their other projects while they're at our building." They expect us to always go over there and to bundle our questions so that we can ask them all at once and not waste that person's time with "constant interruptions." What can we do to get richer communication from them? Any additional advice would also be appreciated. Thanks!

  Read the article

• Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

  - by Kyle Burns

  One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface".  This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class.  Why?  "It's more reusable" was one answer.  "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer.  And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard".  The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control".  Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force.  For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object.  If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality.  That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work?  A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog();   once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing.  This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work.  Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object.  Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog();   The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed.  This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces.  Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play.  There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons.  From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team.  I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components.  This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y".  It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it".  The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer.  This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T.  When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects.  Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface.  The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea.  As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection.  Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world.  This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers.  When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use.  During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class.  The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used.  The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation.  When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container.  Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary.  I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code.  I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

  Read the article

• Creating a Document Library with Content Type in code

  - by David Jacobus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/djacobus/archive/2013/10/15/154360.aspxIn the past, I have shown how to create a list content type and add the content type to a list in code.  As a Developer, many of the artifacts which we create are widgets which have a List or Document Library as the back end.   We need to be able to create our applications (Web Part, etc.) without having the user involved except to enter the list item data.  Today, I will show you how to do the same with a document library.    A summary of what we will do is as follows:   1.   Create an Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio 2.   Add a Code Folder in the solution and Drag and Drop Utilities and Extensions Libraries to the solution 3.   Create a new Feature and add and event receiver  all the code will be in the event receiver 4.   Add the fields which will extend the built-in Document content type 5.   If the Content Type does not exist, Create it 6.   If the Document Library does not exist, Create it with the new Content Type inherited from the Document Content Type 7.   Delete the Document Content Type from the Library (as we have a new one which inherited from it) 8.   Add the fields which we want to be visible from the fields added to the new Content Type   Here we go:   Create an Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio      Add a Code Folder in the solution and Drag and Drop Utilities and Extensions Libraries to the solution       The Utilities and Extensions Library will be part of this project which I will provide a download link at the end of this post.  Drag and drop them into your project.  If Dragged and Dropped from windows explorer you will need to show all files and then include them in your project.  Change the Namespace to agree with your project.   Create a new Feature and add and event receiver  all the code will be in the event receiver.  Here We added a new Feature called “CreateDocLib”  and then right click to add an Event Receiver All of our code will be in this Event Receiver.  For this Demo I will only be using the Feature Activated Event.      From this point on we will be looking at code!    We are adding two constants for use columGroup (How we want SharePoint to Group them, usually Company Name) and ctName(ContentType Name)  using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Permissions; using Microsoft.SharePoint; namespace CreateDocLib.Features.CreateDocLib { /// <summary> /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The GUID attached to this class may be used during packaging and should not be modified. /// </remarks> [Guid("56e6897c-97c4-41ac-bc5b-5cd2c04f2dd1")] public class CreateDocLibEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver { const string columnGroup = "DJ"; const string ctName = "DJDocLib"; } }     Here we are creating the Feature Activated event.   Adding the new fields (Site Columns) ,  Testing if the Content Type Exists, if not adding it.  Testing if the document Library exists, if not adding it.   #region DocLib public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb spWeb = properties.GetWeb() as SPWeb) { //add the fields addFields(spWeb); //add content type SPContentType testCT = spWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; // we will not create the content type if it exists if (testCT == null) { //the content type does not exist add it addContentType(spWeb, ctName); } if ((spWeb.Lists.TryGetList("MyDocuments") == null)) { //create the list if it dosen't to exist CreateDocLib(spWeb); } } } #endregion The addFields method uses the utilities library to add site columns to the site. We can add as many fields within this method as we like. Here we are adding one for demonstration purposes. Icon as a Url type.  public void addFields(SPWeb spWeb) { Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Icon", SPFieldType.URL, false, columnGroup); }The addContentType method add the new Content Type to the site Content Types. We have already checked to see that it does not exist. In addition, here is where we add the linkages from our site columns previously created to our new Content Type   private static void addContentType(SPWeb spWeb, string name) { SPContentType myContentType = new SPContentType(spWeb.ContentTypes["Document"], spWeb.ContentTypes, name) { Group = columnGroup }; spWeb.ContentTypes.Add(myContentType); addContentTypeLinkages(spWeb, myContentType); myContentType.Update(); } Here we are adding just one linkage as we only have one additional field in our Content Type public static void addContentTypeLinkages(SPWeb spWeb, SPContentType ct) { Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Icon", ct); } Next we add the logic to create our new Document Library, which we have already checked to see if it exists.  We create the document library and turn on content types.  Add the new content type and then delete the old “Document” content types.   private void CreateDocLib(SPWeb web) { using (var site = new SPSite(web.Url)) { var web1 = site.RootWeb; var listId = web1.Lists.Add("MyDocuments", string.Empty, SPListTemplateType.DocumentLibrary); var lib = web1.Lists[listId] as SPDocumentLibrary; lib.ContentTypesEnabled = true; var docType = web.ContentTypes[ctName]; lib.ContentTypes.Add(docType); lib.ContentTypes.Delete(lib.ContentTypes["Document"].Id); lib.Update(); AddLibrarySettings(web1, lib); } }  Finally, we set some document library settings on our new document library with the AddLibrarySettings method. We then ensure that the new site column is visible when viewed in the browser.  private void AddLibrarySettings(SPWeb web, SPDocumentLibrary lib) { lib.OnQuickLaunch = true; lib.ForceCheckout = true; lib.EnableVersioning = true; lib.MajorVersionLimit = 5; lib.EnableMinorVersions = true; lib.MajorWithMinorVersionsLimit = 5; lib.Update(); var view = lib.DefaultView; view.ViewFields.Add("Icon"); view.Update(); } Okay, what's cool here: In a few lines of code, we have created site columns, A content Type, a document library. As a developer, I use this functionality all the time. For instance, I could now just add a web part to this same solutionwhich uses this document Library. I love SharePoint! Here is the complete solution: Create Document Library Code

  Read the article

• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Upstart: How does rc job work / order of (contradicting) "start on ..." and "stop on ..." stanzas

  - by Binarus

  Hi, I just can't understand how Upstart's rc job definition in Natty 11.04 works. To illustrate the problem, here is the definition (empty lines and comments are left out): start on runlevel [0123456] stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL] export RUNLEVEL export PREVLEVEL console output env INIT_VERBOSE task exec /etc/init.d/rc $RUNLEVEL Let's suppose we currently are in runlevel 2 and the rc job is stopped (that is exactly the situation after booting my box and logging in via SSH). Now, let's assume that the system switches to runlevel 3, for example due to a command like "telinit 3" given by root. What will happen to the rc job? Obviously, the rc job will be started since it is currently stopped and the event runlevel 3 is matching the start events. But from now on, things are unclear to me: According to the manual $RUNLEVEL evaluates to the new runlevel when the job is started (that means 3 in our example). Therefore, the next stanza "stop on runlevel [!$RUNLEVEL]" translates to "stop on runlevel [!3]"; that means we have a first stanza which will trigger the job, but the second stanza will never stop the job and seems to be useless. Since I know that the Ubuntu / Upstart people won't do useless things, I must be heavily misunderstanding something. I would be grateful for any explanation. While trying to understand this, an additional question came to my mind. If I had contradicting start and stop triggers, for example start on foo stop on foo what would happen? I swear I never will do that, but I am nevertheless very interested in how Upstart handles that on the theoretical level. Thank you very much! Editing the question as a reaction on geekosaur's first answer: I can see the parallelism, but it is not that easy (at least, not to me). Let's assume the job aurrently is still running, and a new runlevel event comes in (of course, the new runlevel is different from the current one). Then, the following should happen: 1) The job is single instance. That means that "start on ..." won't be triggered since the job is currently running; $RUNLEVEL is not touched. 2) "stop on ..." will be triggered since the new runlevel is different from $RUNLEVEL, so the job will be aborted. 3) Now, the job is stopped and waiting. I can't see how it is restarted with the new runlevel. AFAIK, initctl emits events only once, so "start on ..." won't be triggered and the new runlevel won't be entered. I know that I still misunderstanding something, and I am grateful for explanations. Thank you very much!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288  | Next Page >