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• Meet Matthijs, Dutch Inside Sales Representative for Oracle Direct

  - by Maria Sandu

  Today we would like to share some information around the Dutch Core Technology team in Malaga. Matthijs is one of the team members who decided to relocate from the Netherlands to Malaga to join Oracle Direct two years ago. Matthijs: “For the past two years I have been working as an Oracle Direct Core Technology Inside Sales representative for Named Accounts in the Netherlands, based in Malaga, Spain. In my case, working for the Dutch OD Core Technology team means that I am responsible for the Account Management of Larger companies in the Travel & Transportation and the Manufacturing, Retail & Distribution sector. I work together with the Oracle Field Account Managers and our Field Sales Management in the Netherlands where I am often the main point of contact for customers. This means that I deal with their requests and I manage their various issues, provide solutions and suggestions based on the Oracle Core Technology portfolio. I work on interesting projects with end-customers, making financial proposals and building business cases. It is a very interesting sales environment and for the last two years I improved my skills substantially. This month I will finish my Inside Sales career in Malaga to move to a position within Field Sales in the Netherlands. Oracle Direct has proven to be a great stepping stone for my career. Boost your personal development One of the reasons for joining Oracle was to boost my personal & career development. You can choose from various different trainings to follow all over Europe which enable you to reach both your personal and professional goals. Furthermore, you can decide your own career path and plan the steps necessary to achieve your goal. Many people aim to grow into Field Sales in their native countries, Business Development or Sales Management, but there are many possibilities once you decide to join Oracle. Overall, working at Oracle means working for an international company and one of the worldwide leaders in Enterprise Hardware & Software. Here you get all the tools necessary to develop yourself personally & professionally. Another great advantage of working for Oracle Direct is working from our office in Malaga, Southern Spain where we have over 400 employees from many countries across EMEA. It is a truly international environment! Working and living in Spain gives you an excellent opportunity to learn Spanish and of course enjoy the Spanish lifestyle, cuisine, beaches and much, much more!” Interview day Utrecht If you are inspired by the story of Matthijs and would like to explore the opportunity to join the Technology Sales team for the Dutch market in Malaga, let us know! We will organise an Interview day in the Oracle office in Utrecht on the 18th and 19th of September. We currently have multiple openings in the Core Technology team that focus on selling our Database portfolio in the Dutch market. We are looking for native Dutch speakers with a Bachelors degree, 2-5 years sales experience (ideally in IT) who are willing to relocate to Malaga for at least 2 years! For more information please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

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• Representing Mauritius in the 2013 Bench Games

  Only by chance I came across an interesting option for professionals and enthusiasts in IT, and quite honestly I can't even remember where I caught attention of Brainbench and their 2013 Bench Games event. But having access to 600+ free exams in a friendly international intellectual competition doesn't happen to be available every day. So, it was actually a no-brainer to sign up and browse through the various categories. Most interestingly, Brainbench is not only IT-related. They offer a vast variety of fields in their Test Center, like Languages and Communication, Office Skills, Management, Aptitude, etc., and it can be a little bit messy about how things are organised. Anyway, while browsing through their test offers I added a couple of exams to 'My Plan' which I would give a shot afterwards. Self-assessments Actually, I took the tests based on two major aspects: 'Fun Factor' and 'How good would I be in general'... Usually, you have to pay for any kind of exams and given this unique chance by Brainbench to simply train this kind of tests was already worth the time. Frankly speaking, the tests are very close to the ones you would be asked to do at Prometric or Pearson Vue, ie. Microsoft exams, etc. Go through a set of multiple choice questions in a given time frame. Most of the tests I did during the Bench Games were based on 40 questions, each with a maximum of 3 minutes to answer. Ergo, one test in maximum 2 hours - that sounds feasible, doesn't it? The Measure of Achievement While the 2013 Bench Games are considered a worldwide friendly competition of knowledge I was really eager to get other Mauritians attracted. Using various social media networks and community activities it all looked quite well at the beginning. Mauritius was listed on rank #19 of Most Certified Citizens and rank #10 of Most Master Level Certified Nation - not bad, not bad... Until... the next update of the Bench Games Leaderboard. The downwards trend seemed to be unstoppable and I couldn't understand why my results didn't show up on the Individual Leader Board. First of all, I passed exams that were not even listed and second, I had better results on some exams listed. After some further information from the organiser it turned out that my test transcript wasn't available to the public. Only then results are considered and counted in the competition. During that time, I actually managed to hold 3 test results on the Individuals... Other participants were merciless, eh, more successful than me, produced better test results than I did. But still I managed to stay on the final score board: An 'exotic' combination of exam, test result, country and person itself Representing Mauritius and the Visual FoxPro community in that fun event. And although I mainly develop in Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP2 and C# using .NET Framework from 2.0 to 4.5 since a couple of years I still managed to pass on Master Level. Hm, actually my Microsoft Certified Programmer (MCP) exams are dated back in June 2004 - more than 9 years ago... Look who got lucky... As described above I did a couple of exams as time allowed and without any preparations, but still I received the following mail notification: "Thank you for recently participating in our Bench Games event.  We wanted to inform you that you obtained a top score on our test(s) during this event, and as a result, will receive a free annual Brainbench subscription.  Your annual subscription will give you access to all our tests just like Bench Games, but for an entire year plus additional benefits!" -- Leader Board Notification from Brainbench Even fun activities get rewarded sometimes. Thanks to @Brainbench_com for the free annual subscription based on my passed 2013 Bench Games Master Level exam. It would be interesting to know about the total figures, especially to see how many citizens of Mauritius took part in this year's Bench Games. Anyway, I'm looking forward to be able to participate in other challenges like this in the future.

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• iOS 5 New Features vs Android

  - by kerry

  Browsing through the iOS 5 features list, I can’t help but notice a lot of it is catch up. Having owned both an iPhone and an Android for a considerable amount of time, I figured I would jot down my opinions. Notification Center – Completely ripped off from Android but looks good and is a much needed addition iMessage – This is very interesting as most people who would think it’s cool, probably really wouldn’t understand the significance.  Basically, Apple is adding an IM application to iOS.  Now iPhone / iPad users can sit around messaging each other how cool it is like Crackberry users circa 2003.  I guess the only real improvement over MMS is that you can easily setup groups, see when each other are typing, and don’t incur text messaging charges; at the expense of leaving your non-iOS buddies out (who wants to talk to those losers anyways?). Newstand – An app update and not an OS one (Apple typically doesn’t make distinctions).  It all seems like stuff my current Nook stuff will do.  Note: I did look to compare prices but it seems that information is not available without downloading iTunes.  lame. Reminders – TODO lists are ho hum, but the ability to have reminders when you arrive or leave a position is pretty cool. Twitter integration – The fact that the best Apple can come up with is ‘one at a timing’ online service integration is laughable at best. Camera – Can control it from the lock screen.  Now you’ll have tons of pocket lint photos in your iCloud to go along with the wicked shot of that cheetah that just unexpectedly ran by your apartment. Photos – Speaking of iCloud, all of your devices photos will be synced through it.  That’s cool I guess, not sure if Android will do the same. Safari – What?  You haven’t been reading rss feeds on your device this whole time?  Something tells me you aren’t about to start. PC Free – Finely Apple untethers the iPhone.  What took them so long? Game Center – This should be an interesting service.  Attention Apple fanboys immediately forget how they are blatantly copying Microsoft achievements (at least rename them). Wifi Sync – Just couldn’t cut the cord completely could they?  For what it’s worth, the Zune has been doing this for 5 years now. All in all a pretty big update.  Mostly iCloud.  Mostly keeping up the mobile status quo.  As an Android user, I can’t say there is anything I am envious of.

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• F# Objects &ndash; Integration with the other .Net Languages &ndash; Part 2

  - by MarkPearl

  So in part one of my posting I covered the real basics of object creation. Today I will hopefully dig a little deeper… My expert F# book brings up an interesting point – properties in F# are just syntactic sugar for method calls. This makes sense… for instance assume I had the following object with the property exposed called Firstname. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Firstname I could extend the Firstname property with the following code and everything would be hunky dory… type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.Firstname = Console.WriteLine("Side Effect") Firstname   All that this would do is each time I use the property Firstname, I would see the side effect printed to the screen saying “Side Effect”. Member methods have a very similar look & feel to properties, in fact the only difference really is that you declare that parameters are being passed in. type Person(Firstname : string, Lastname : string) = member v.FullName(middleName) = Firstname + " " + middleName + " " + Lastname   In the code above, FullName requires the parameter middleName, and if viewed from another project in C# would show as a method and not a property. Precomputation Optimizations Okay, so something that is obvious once you think of it but that poses an interesting side effect of mutable value holders is pre-computation of results. All it is, is a slight difference in code but can result in quite a huge saving in performance. Basically pre-computation means you would not need to compute a value every time a method is called – but could perform the computation at the creation of the object (I hope I have got it right). In a way I battle to differentiate this from lazy evaluation but I will show an example to explain the principle. Let me try and show an example to illustrate the principle… assume the following F# module namespace myNamespace open System module myMod = let Add val1 val2 = Console.WriteLine("Compute") val1 + val2 type MathPrecompute(val1 : int, val2 : int) = let precomputedsum = Add val1 val2 member v.Sum = precomputedsum type MathNormalCompute(val1 : int, val2 : int) = member v.Sum = Add val1 val2 Now assume you have a C# console app that makes use of the objects with code similar to the following… using System; using myNamespace; namespace CSharpTest { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Constructing Objects"); var myObj1 = new myMod.MathNormalCompute(10, 11); var myObj2 = new myMod.MathPrecompute(10, 11); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Normal Compute Sum..."); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj1.Sum); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Pre Compute Sum..."); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.WriteLine(myObj2.Sum); Console.ReadKey(); } } } The output when running the console application would be as follows…. You will notice with the normal compute object that the system would call the Add function every time the method was called. With the Precompute object it only called the compute method when the object was created. Subtle, but something that could lead to major performance benefits. So… this post has gone off in a slight tangent but still related to F# objects.

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• Java RegEx API "Look-behind group does not have an obvious maximum length near index ..."

  - by Foo Inc

  Hello, I'm on to some SQL where clause parsing and designed a working RegEx to find a column outside string literals using "Rad Software Regular Expression Desginer" which is using the .NET API. To make sure the designed RegEx works with Java too, I tested it by using the API of course (1.5 and 1.6). But guess what, it won't work. I got the message "Look-behind group does not have an obvious maximum length near index 28". The string that I'm trying to get parsed is Column_1='test''the''stuff''all''day''long' AND Column_2='000' AND TheVeryColumnIWantToFind = 'Column_1=''test''''the''''stuff''''all''''day''''long'' AND Column_2=''000'' AND TheVeryColumnIWantToFind = '' TheVeryColumnIWantToFind = '' AND (Column_3 is null or Column_3 = ''Not interesting'') AND ''1'' = ''1''' AND (Column_3 is null or Column_3 = 'Still not interesting') AND '1' = '1' As you may have guessed, I tried to create some kind of worst case to ensure the RegEx won't fail on more complicated SQL where clauses. The RegEx itself looks like this (?i:(?<!=\s*'(?:[^']|(?:''))*)((?<=\s*)TheVeryColumnIWantToFind(?=(?:\s+|=)))) I'm not sure if there is a more elegant RegEx (there'll most likely be one), but that's not important right now as it does the trick. To explain the RegEx in a few words: If it finds the column I'm after, it does a negative look-behind to figure out if the column name is used in a string literal. If so, it won't match. If not, it'll match. Back to the question. As I mentioned before, it won't work with Java. What will work and result in what I want? I found out, that Java does not seem to support unlimited look-behinds but still I couldn't get it to work. Isn't it right that a look-behind is always putting a limit up on itself from the search offset to the current search position? So it would result in something like "position - offset"?

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• Visual Studio 2010 Can no longer build .NET v3.5

  - by Adam Driscoll

  I have a 2010 project that is targeting .NET v3.5. Inexplicably I can no longer build v3.5 projects. The project doesn't have ANY references added. It won't even let me add a reference to System.Core as it is added by the 'build system'. warning CS1685: The predefined type 'System.Func' is defined in multiple assemblies in the global alias; using definition from 'c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\mscorlib.dll' IFilter.cs(82,49): error CS0433: The type 'System.Func' exists in both 'c:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Core.dll' and 'c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\mscorlib.dll' Looks like something is grabbing onto 4.0 but I'm not quite sure how to fix it. Any one else run into this? Coworker had this same issue. It took a reinstall of Windows to correct the problem I've opened a bug on this one: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/558245/warning-cs1685-when-compiling-a-v3-5-net-application-in-visual-studio-2010 If the compiler is set to verbose I see this: FrameworkPathOverride = C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319 which is defined as: Specifies the location of mscorlib.dll and microsoft.visualbasic.dll. This parameter is equivalent to the /sdkpath switch of the vbc.exe compiler. Some other interesting tidbits: I've created a new project all together and cannot build v3.5 at all. I can build 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 Client Profile, 4.0 and 4.0 Client Profile with no problem. VB.NET can build v3.5 but C# cannot. I've tried a reinstall of .NET 3.5, 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 with no success. Visual Studio debug logs shown nothing interesting and Safe Mode does not work. Trying to avoid a Windows reinstall...

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• TypeConverter prevents ApplyPropertyChanges in EntityFramework

  - by Felix

  I ran into an interesting problem (hopefully, interesting not just for me :) I am running Entity Framework 1 (.NET 3.5) and ASP.NET MVC 2. I have a Customer class that has many-to-one relationship with Country class (in other words, Country is a lookup table for customers - I described more in this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2404801/explicit-casting-doesnt-work-in-default-model-binding ) I got TypeConverter to work; so I am getting a perfect object into controller's Post method. Create works fine; however, in Edit I am getting the following error when I call ApplyPropertyChanges: The existing object in the ObjectContext is in the Added state. Changes can only be applied when the existing object is in an unchanged or modified state. The controller code is fairly trivial: public ActionResult Edit(Customer customerToEdit) { if (ModelState.IsValid) { Customer cust = (Customer)context.GetObjectByKey( new EntityKey("BAEntities.Customers", "CustomerID", customerToEdit.CustomerID)); context.ApplyPropertyChanges(cust.EntityKey.EntitySetName, customerToEdit); context.SaveChanges(); } return View(...); } If I remove country from the form, it works fine; and if I assign dropdown value to EntityReference "manually" - it works as well. TypeConverter code is also fairly simple, but I've never used TypeConverter before, so I may be missing something here: public override object ConvertFrom(ITypeDescriptorContext typeContext, CultureInfo culture, object value) { if (value is string) { int countryID = Int16.Parse((string)value); Country country = (Country)context.GetObjectByKey( new EntityKey("BAEntities.Countries", "CountryID", countryID)); return country; } return base.ConvertFrom(typeContext, culture, value); }

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• Delegates in .NET: how are they constructed ?

  - by Saulius

  While inspecting delegates in C# and .NET in general, I noticed some interesting facts: Creating a delegate in C# creates a class derived from MulticastDelegate with a constructor: .method public hidebysig specialname rtspecialname instance void .ctor(object 'object', native int 'method') runtime managed { } Meaning that it expects the instance and a pointer to the method. Yet the syntax of constructing a delegate in C# suggests that it has a constructor new MyDelegate(int () target) where I can recognise int () as a function instance (int *target() would be a function pointer in C++). So obviously the C# compiler picks out the correct method from the method group defined by the function name and constructs the delegate. So the first question would be, where does the C# compiler (or Visual Studio, to be precise) pick this constructor signature from ? I did not notice any special attributes or something that would make a distinction. Is this some sort of compiler/visualstudio magic ? If not, is the T (args) target construction valid in C# ? I did not manage to get anything with it to compile, e.g.: int () target = MyMethod; is invalid, so is doing anything with MyMetod, e.g. calling .ToString() on it (well this does make some sense, since that is technically a method group, but I imagine it should be possible to explicitly pick out a method by casting, e.g. (int())MyFunction. So is all of this purely compiler magic ? Looking at the construction through reflector reveals yet another syntax: Func CS$1$0000 = new Func(null, (IntPtr) Foo); This is consistent with the disassembled constructor signature, yet this does not compile! One final interesting note is that the classes Delegate and MulticastDelegate have yet another sets of constructors: .method family hidebysig specialname rtspecialname instance void .ctor(class System.Type target, string 'method') cil managed Where does the transition from an instance and method pointer to a type and a string method name occur ? Can this be explained by the runtime managed keywords in the custom delegate constructor signature, i.e. does the runtime do it's job here ?

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• How to have Android Service communicate with Activity

  - by Scott Saunders

  I'm writing my first Android application and trying to get my head around communication between services and activities. I have a Service that will run in the background and do some gps and time based logging. I will have an Activity that will be used to start and stop the Service. So first, I need to be able to figure out if the Service is running when the Activity is started. There are some other questions here about that, so I think I can figure that out (but feel free to offer advice). My real problem: if the Activity is running and the Service is started, I need a way for the Service to send messages to the Activity. Simple Strings and integers at this point - status messages mostly. The messages will not happen regularly, so I don't think polling the service is a good way to go if there is another way. I only want this communication when the Activity has been started by the user - I don't want to start the Activity from the Service. In other words, if you start the Activity and the Service is running, you will see some status messages in the Activity UI when something interesting happens. If you don't start the Activity, you will not see these messages (they're not that interesting). It seems like I should be able to determine if the Service is running, and if so, add the Activity as a listener. Then remove the Activity as a listener when the Activity pauses or stops. Is that actually possible? The only way I can figure out to do it is to have the Activity implement Parcelable and build an AIDL file so I can pass it through the Service's remote interface. That seems like overkill though, and I have no idea how the Activity should implement writeToParcel() / readFromParcel(). Is there an easier or better way? Thanks for any help.

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• The ViewData item that has the key 'MY KEY' is of type 'System.String' but must be of type 'IEnumerable<SelectListItem>'.

  - by JBibbs

  I am trying to populate a dropdown list from a database mapped with Linq 2 SQL, using ASP.NET MVC 2, and keep getting this error. I am so confused because I am declaring a variable with the type IEnumerable<SelectListItem> on the second line, but the error makes me think this is not the case. I feel like this should be very simple, but I am struggling. Any help is appreciated. Here are the interesting bits of my controller: public ActionResult Create() { var db = new DB(); IEnumerable<SelectListItem> basetypes = db.Basetypes.Select(b => new SelectListItem { Value = b.basetype, Text = b.basetype }); ViewData["basetype"] = basetypes; return View(); } And here are the interesting bits of my view: <div class="editor-label"> <%: Html.LabelFor(model => model.basetype) %> </div> <div class="editor-field"> <%: Html.DropDownList("basetype") %> <%: Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.basetype) %> </div> Here is the Post action when submitting the Form // POST: /Meals/Create [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(Meal meal) { if (ModelState.IsValid) { try { // TODO: Add insert logic here var db = new DB(); db.Meals.InsertOnSubmit(meal); db.SubmitChanges(); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } catch { return View(meal); } } else { return View(meal); } } Thanks.

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• Programmer Puzzle: Encoding a chess board state throughout a game

  - by Andrew Rollings

  Not strictly a question, more of a puzzle... Over the years, I've been involved in a few technical interviews of new employees. Other than asking the standard "do you know X technology" questions, I've also tried to get a feel for how they approach problems. Typically, I'd send them the question by email the day before the interview, and expect them to come up with a solution by the following day. Often the results would be quite interesting - wrong, but interesting - and the person would still get my recommendation if they could explain why they took a particular approach. So I thought I'd throw one of my questions out there for the Stack Overflow audience. Question: What is the most space-efficient way you can think of to encode the state of a chess game (or subset thereof)? That is, given a chess board with the pieces arranged legally, encode both this initial state and all subsequent legal moves taken by the players in the game. No code required for the answer, just a description of the algorithm you would use. EDIT: As one of the posters has pointed out, I didn't consider the time interval between moves. Feel free to account for that too as an optional extra :) EDIT2: Just for additional clarification... Remember, the encoder/decoder is rule-aware. The only things that really need to be stored are the player's choices - anything else can be assumed to be known by the encoder/decoder. EDIT3: It's going to be difficult to pick a winner here :) Lots of great answers!

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• Make seems to think a prerequisite is an intermediate file, removes it

  - by James

  For starters, this exercise in GNU make was admittedly just that: an exercise rather than a practicality, since a simple bash script would have sufficed. However, it brought up interesting behavior I don't quite understand. I've written a seemingly simple Makefile to handle generation of SSL key/cert pairs as necessary for MySQL. My goal was for make <name> to result in <name>-key.pem, <name>-cert.pem, and any other necessary files (specifically, the CA pair if any of it is missing or needs updating, which leads into another interesting follow-up exercise of handling reverse deps to reissue any certs that had been signed by a missing/updated CA cert). After executing all rules as expected, make seems to be too aggressive at identifying intermediate files for removal; it removes a file I thought would be "safe" since it should have been generated as a prereq to the main rule I'm invoking. (Humbly translated, I likely have misinterpreted make's documented behavior to suit my expectation, but don't understand how. ;-) Edited (thanks, Chris!) Adding %-cert.pem to .PRECIOUS does, of course, prevent the deletion. (I had been using the wrong syntax.) Makefile: OPENSSL = /usr/bin/openssl # Corrected, thanks Chris! .PHONY: clean default: ca clean: rm -I *.pem %: %-key.pem %-cert.pem @# Placeholder (to make this implicit create a rule and not cancel one) Makefile: @# Prevent the catch-all from matching Makefile ca-cert.pem: ca-key.pem $(OPENSSL) req -new -x509 -nodes -days 1000 -key ca-key.pem $@ %-key.pem: $(OPENSSL) genrsa 2048 $@ %-cert.pem: %-csr.pem ca-cert.pem ca-key.pem $(OPENSSL) x509 -req -in $ $@ Output: $ make host1 /usr/bin/openssl genrsa 2048 ca-key.pem /usr/bin/openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -days 1000 -key ca-key.pem ca-cert.pem /usr/bin/openssl genrsa 2048 host1-key.pem /usr/bin/openssl req -new -days 1000 -nodes -key host1-key.pem host1-csr.pem /usr/bin/openssl x509 -req -in host1-csr.pem -days 1000 -CA ca-cert.pem -CAkey ca-key.pem -set_serial 01 host1-cert.pem rm host1-csr.pem host1-cert.pem This is driving me crazy, and I'll happily try any suggestions and post results. If I'm just totally noobing out on this one, feel free to jibe away. You can't possibly hurt my feelings. :)

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• SAP related testing

  - by mgj

  Dear all, One notion that has been prevalent mostly as rumours for many aspiring programmers is that the testing phase of the SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle) is not that challenging and interesting as one's job as a tester after a period of time becomes monotonous because a person does the same thing repeatedly over and over again. Thats why many have this complexion of looking for a developers job rather than that of testers. Don't testers have a space for themselves in software companies to grow..? Please feel free to express your views for or against this. How true is that, could you please give e.g.'s of instances( need not be practical, even theoretical would suffice) which actually contradict this statement wrt a tester's career specifically wrt the SAP domain. E.g.'s from other domains are also welcome. This question is not meant to hurt someone's feelings who is in the testing domain. Its just that for e.g. in my case I want to know what actually would be the challenge's a tester could also face in real life situations.Something that would make their job also interesting and fun-filled. I myself am pro-testing and also interested in pursuing testing as a profession in a sw co, just curious to know more about it so...:) Thanks..:)

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• Bored with CS. What can I study that will make an impact?

  - by Eric Martinez

  So I'm going to an average university, majoring in CS. I haven't learned a damn thing and am in my third year. I've come to be really bored with studying CS. Initially, I was kind of misinformed and thought majoring in CS would make me a good "product creator". I make my money combining programming and business/marketing. But I have always done programming for the love of the art. I find things like algorithms interesting and want to be able to use CS to solve real world problems. I like the idea of bioinformatics and other hybrid studies. I'm not good enough, yet I hope, to really make a significant effort in those areas but I aspire to be. What are some other fields, open problems, and otherwise cool stuff to apply CS knowledge to in the real world? I'm really looking for something that will motivate me and re-excite me to continue studying CS. Edit: Like someone mentioned below. I am very interesting in the idea of being able to use computer science to help answer fundamental questions of life and the universe. But I'm not sure what is possible or how to begin.

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• What makes merging in DVCS easy?

  - by afriza

  I read at Joel on Software: With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part. The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions. and at HgInit: When we have to merge, Subversion tries to look at both revisions—my modified code, and your modified code—and it tries to guess how to smash them together in one big unholy mess. It usually fails, producing pages and pages of “merge conflicts” that aren’t really conflicts, simply places where Subversion failed to figure out what we did. By contrast, while we were working separately in Mercurial, Mercurial was busy keeping a series of changesets. And so, when we want to merge our code together, Mercurial actually has a whole lot more information: it knows what each of us changed and can reapply those changes, rather than just looking at the final product and trying to guess how to put it together. By looking at the SVN's repository folder, I have the impression that Subversion is maintaining each revisions as changeset. And from what I know, Hg is using both changeset and snapshot while Git is purely using snapshot to store the data. If my assumption is correct, then there must be other ways that make merging in DVCS easy. What are those?

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• What's your most controversial programming opinion?

  - by Jon Skeet

  This is definitely subjective, but I'd like to try to avoid it becoming argumentative. I think it could be an interesting question if people treat it appropriately. The idea for this question came from the comment thread from my answer to the "What are five things you hate about your favorite language?" question. I contended that classes in C# should be sealed by default - I won't put my reasoning in the question, but I might write a fuller explanation as an answer to this question. I was surprised at the heat of the discussion in the comments (25 comments currently). So, what contentious opinions do you hold? I'd rather avoid the kind of thing which ends up being pretty religious with relatively little basis (e.g. brace placing) but examples might include things like "unit testing isn't actually terribly helpful" or "public fields are okay really". The important thing (to me, anyway) is that you've got reasons behind your opinions. Please present your opinion and reasoning - I would encourage people to vote for opinions which are well-argued and interesting, whether or not you happen to agree with them.

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• Is this a hole in dynamic binding in C# 4?

  - by Galilyou

  I've seen a very interesting post on Fabio Maulo's blog. Here's the code and the bug if you don't want to jump to the url. I defined a new generic class like so: public class TableStorageInitializer<TTableEntity> where TTableEntity : class, new() { public void Initialize() { InitializeInstance(new TTableEntity()); } public void InitializeInstance(dynamic entity) { entity.PartitionKey = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); entity.RowKey = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); } } Note that InitializeInstance accepts one parameter, which is of type dynamic. Now to test this class, I defined another class that is nested inside my main Program class like so: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { TableStorageInitializer<MyClass> x = new TableStorageInitializer<MyClass>(); x.Initialize(); } private class MyClass { public string PartitionKey { get; set; } public string RowKey { get; set; } public DateTime Timestamp { get; set; } } } Note: the inner class "MyClass" is declared private. Now if i run this code I get a "Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.RuntimeBinderException" on the line "entity.PartitionKey = Guide.NewGuid().ToString()". The interesting part, though is that the message of the exception says "Object doesn't contain a definition for PartitionKey". Also note that if you changed the modifier of the nested class to public, the code will execute with no problems. So what do you guys think is really happening under the hood? Please refer to any documentation -of course if this is documented anywhere- that you may find?

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• How does Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases work?

  - by ??iu

  How does something like Statistically Improbable Phrases work? According to amazon: Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements. For instance, for Joel's first book, the SIPs are: leaky abstractions, antialiased text, own dog food, bug count, daily builds, bug database, software schedules One interesting complication is that these are phrases of either 2 or 3 words. This makes things a little more interesting because these phrases can overlap with or contain each other.

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• anti-if campaign

  - by Andrew Siemer

  I recently ran against a very interesting site that expresses a very interesting idea - the anti-if campaign. You can see this here at www.antiifcampaign.com. I have to agree that complex nested IF statements are an absolute pain in the rear. I am currently on a project that up until very recently had some crazy nested IFs that scrolled to the right for quite a ways. We cured our issues in two ways - we used Windows Workflow Foundation to address routing (or workflow) concerns. And we are in the process of implementing all of our business rules utilizing ILOG Rules for .NET (recently purchased by IBM!!). This for the most part has cured our nested IF pains...but I find myself wondering how many people cure their pains in the manner that the good folks at the AntiIfCampaign suggest (see an example here) by creating numerous amounts of abstract classes to represent a given scenario that was originally covered by the nested IF. I wonder if another way to address the removal of this complexity might also be in using an IoC container such as StructureMap to move in and out of different bits of functionality. Either way... Question: Given a scenario where I have a nested complex IF or SWITCH statement that is used to evaluate a given type of thing (say evaluating an Enum) to determine how I want to handle the processing of that thing by enum type - what are some ways to do the same form of processing without using the IF or SWITCH hierarchical structure? public enum WidgetTypes { Type1, Type2, Type3, Type4 } ... WidgetTypes _myType = WidgetTypes.Type1; ... switch(_myType) { case WidgetTypes.Type1: //do something break; case WidgetTypes.Type2: //do something break; //etc... }

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• How do you use stl's functions like for_each?

  - by thomas-gies

  I started using stl containers because they came in very handy when I needed functionality of a list, set and map and had nothing else available in my programming environment. I did not care much about the ideas behind it. STL documentations were only interesting up to the point where it came to functions, etc. Then I skipped reading and just used the containers. But yesterday, still being relaxed from my holidays, I just gave it a try and wanted to go a bit more the stl way. So I used the transform function (can I have a little bit of applause for me, thank you). From an academic point of view it really looked interesting and it worked. But the thing that boroughs me is that if you intensify the use of those functions, you need 10ks of helper classes for mostly everything you want to do in your code. The hole logic of the program is sliced in tiny pieces. This slicing is not the result of god coding habits. It's just a technical need. Something, that makes my life probably harder not easier. And I learned the hard way, that you should always choose the simplest approach that solves the problem at hand. And I can't see what, for example, the for_each function is doing for me that justifies the use of a helper class over several simple lines of code that sit inside a normal loop so that everybody can see what is going on. I would like to know, what you are thinking about my concerns? Did you see it like I do when you started working this way and have changed your mind when you got used to it? Are there benefits that I overlooked? Or do you just ignore this stuff as I did (and will go an doing it, probably). Thanks. PS: I know that there is a real for_each loop in boost. But I ignore it here since it is just a convenient way for my usual loops with iterators I guess.

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• How difficult is it for an old-school programmer to pick up an FPGA kit and make something useful wi

  - by JUST MY correct OPINION

  I'm an old, old, old coder. (How old? I've used paper tape in anger.) I've programmed in a lot of languages and under a lot of paradigms (spaghetti, structured, object-oriented, functional and a smattering of logical). I'm getting bored. FPGAs look interesting to me. I have the crazy notion of resurrecting some of the ancient hardware I worked on in the days using FPGAs. I know this can be done because I've seen PDP-10 and PDP-11 implementations in FPGAs. I'd like to do the same for a few machines that are perhaps not as popular as those two, however. While I am an old, old coder, what I am not is an electronics or computer systems engineer. I'll be learning from scratch if I go down this path. My question, therefore, is two-fold: How difficult will it be for this old dinosaur to pick up and learn FPGAs to the point that interesting (not necessarily practical -- more from a hobbyist perspective) projects can be made? What should I start with learning-wise to go down this path? I know where to get FPGA kits, but I haven't found anything like "FPGAs for Complete Dinosaurs" yet anywhere out there.

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• What are the interets of synthetic methods?

  - by romaintaz

  Problem One friend suggested an interesting problem. Given the following code: public class OuterClass { private String message = "Hello World"; private class InnerClass { private String getMessage() { return message; } } } From an external class, how may I print the message variable content? Of course, changing the accessibility of methods or fields is not allowed. (the source here, but it is a french blog) Solution The code to solve this problem is the following: try { Method m = OuterClass.class.getDeclaredMethod("access$000", OuterClass.class); OuterClass outerClass = new OuterClass(); System.out.println(m.invoke(outerClass, outerClass)); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } Note that the access$000 method name is not really standard (even if this format is the one that is strongly recommanded), and some JVM will name this method access$0. Thus, a better solution is to check for synthetic methods: Method method = null; int i = 0; while ((method == null) && (i < OuterClass.class.getDeclaredMethods().length)) { if (OuterClass.class.getDeclaredMethods()[i].isSynthetic()) { method = OuterClass.class.getDeclaredMethods()[i]; } i++; } if (method != null) { try { System.out.println(method.invoke(null, new OuterClass())); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } So the interesting point in this problem is to highlight the use of synthetic methods. With these methods, I can access a private field as it was done in the solution. Of course, I need to use reflection, and I think that the use of this kind of thing can be quite dangerous... Question What is the interest - for me, as a developer - of a synthetic method? What can be a good situation where using the synthetic can be useful?

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• Choosing a Job based on languages?

  - by Alan

  How often is language the deciding factor for selecting a job? Many of us here are well versed in many languages, C++, Java, C#, and likely have many other languages under our belt for the right occassion (really any occasion is the right occasion for Python, AMIRITE?), so this isn't so much a question of choosing a job that is a good fit based on your skill set. Rather, if you are skilled with most languages, do you pick your favorite, or do you follow the money (given the tight economy). I'm considering coming out of retirement, and have started to look around and what's available. Over the years, I've moved towards C# and Python; many jobs in the area are looking for .NET developers, but there are plenty of them that do not. I cut my teef on C++, consider myself adept at the language, and know my way around a Java. But I find myself really digging what they're doing to C#, and I have always loved python. So when I see an interesting job req that is looking for C++ developers; it gives me 2nd thoughts. Not because I can't cut it, but because I don't know if I want to go back to C++. Even if the work will be interesting, how important is the language to you?

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• Actionscript flex sockets and telnet

  - by MAC

  I am trying to make a flex application where it gets data from a telnet connection and I am running into a weird problem. To give a brief introduction, i want to read data from a process that exposes it through a socket. So if in the shell i type telnet localhost 8651i receive the xml and then the connection is closed (I get the following Connection closed by foreign host.) Anyway i found a simple tutorial online for flex that essentially is a telnet client and one would expect it to work but everything follows Murphy's laws and nothing ever works! Now i have messages being printed in every event handler and all places that i can think off. When i connect to the socket nothing happens, no event handler is triggered even the connect or close handler and if i do the following the socket.connected returns false! I get no errors, try catch raises no exception. I am at a loss as to whats going wrong? socket.connect(serverURL, portNumber); msg(socket.connected.toString()); Is there something about telnet that i do not know and its causing this to not work. Whats more interesting is why none of the events get fired. Another interesting thing is that i have some python code that does the same thing and its able to get the xml back! The following is the python code that works! def getStats(host, port): sock = socket.socket() sock.connect((host, port)) res = sock.recv(1024*1024*1024, socket.MSG_WAITALL) sock.close() return statFunc(res) So i ask you whats going wrong!!!!!! Is there some inherent problem with how flex handles sockets?

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• ASP.Net MVC 2 Auto Complete Textbox With Custom View Model Attribute & EditorTemplate

  - by SeanMcAlinden

  In this post I’m going to show how to create a generic, ajax driven Auto Complete text box using the new MVC 2 Templates and the jQuery UI library. The template will be automatically displayed when a property is decorated with a custom attribute within the view model. The AutoComplete text box in action will look like the following:   The first thing to do is to do is visit my previous blog post to put the custom model metadata provider in place, this is necessary when using custom attributes on the view model. http://weblogs.asp.net/seanmcalinden/archive/2010/06/11/custom-asp-net-mvc-2-modelmetadataprovider-for-using-custom-view-model-attributes.aspx Once this is in place, make sure you visit the jQuery UI and download the latest stable release – in this example I’m using version 1.8.2. You can download it here. Add the jQuery scripts and css theme to your project and add references to them in your master page. Should look something like the following: Site.Master <head runat="server">     <title><asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="TitleContent" runat="server" /></title>     <link href="../../Content/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />     <link href="../../css/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.8.2.custom.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />     <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.2.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> Once this is place we can get started. Creating the AutoComplete Custom Attribute The auto complete attribute will derive from the abstract MetadataAttribute created in my previous post. It will look like the following: AutoCompleteAttribute using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Mvc2Templates.Attributes {     public class AutoCompleteAttribute : MetadataAttribute     {         public RouteValueDictionary RouteValueDictionary;         public AutoCompleteAttribute(string controller, string action, string parameterName)         {             this.RouteValueDictionary = new RouteValueDictionary();             this.RouteValueDictionary.Add("Controller", controller);             this.RouteValueDictionary.Add("Action", action);             this.RouteValueDictionary.Add(parameterName, string.Empty);         }         public override void Process(ModelMetadata modelMetaData)         {             modelMetaData.AdditionalValues.Add("AutoCompleteUrlData", this.RouteValueDictionary);             modelMetaData.TemplateHint = "AutoComplete";         }     } } As you can see, the constructor takes in strings for the controller, action and parameter name. The parameter name will be used for passing the search text within the auto complete text box. The constructor then creates a new RouteValueDictionary which we will use later to construct the url for getting the auto complete results via ajax. The main interesting method is the method override called Process. With the process method, the route value dictionary is added to the modelMetaData AdditionalValues collection. The TemplateHint is also set to AutoComplete, this means that when the view model is parsed for display, the MVC 2 framework will look for a view user control template called AutoComplete, if it finds one, it uses that template to display the property. The View Model To show you how the attribute will look, this is the view model I have used in my example which can be downloaded at the end of this post. View Model using System.ComponentModel; using Mvc2Templates.Attributes; namespace Mvc2Templates.Models {     public class TemplateDemoViewModel     {         [AutoComplete("Home", "AutoCompleteResult", "searchText")]         [DisplayName("European Country Search")]         public string SearchText { get; set; }     } } As you can see, the auto complete attribute is called with the controller name, action name and the name of the action parameter that the search text will be passed into. The AutoComplete Template Now all of this is in place, it’s time to create the AutoComplete template. Create a ViewUserControl called AutoComplete.ascx at the following location within your application – Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/AutoComplete.ascx Add the following code: AutoComplete.ascx <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> <%     var propertyName = ViewData.ModelMetadata.PropertyName;     var propertyValue = ViewData.ModelMetadata.Model;     var id = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();     RouteValueDictionary urlData =         (RouteValueDictionary)ViewData.ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues.Where(x => x.Key == "AutoCompleteUrlData").Single().Value;     var url = Mvc2Templates.Views.Shared.Helpers.RouteHelper.GetUrl(this.ViewContext.RequestContext, urlData); %> <input type="text" name="<%= propertyName %>" value="<%= propertyValue %>" id="<%= id %>" class="autoComplete" /> <script type="text/javascript">     $(function () {         $("#<%= id %>").autocomplete({             source: function (request, response) {                 $.ajax({                     url: "<%= url %>" + request.term,                     dataType: "json",                     success: function (data) {                         response(data);                     }                 });             },             minLength: 2         });     }); </script> There is a lot going on in here but when you break it down it’s quite simple. Firstly, the property name and property value are retrieved through the model meta data. These are required to ensure that the text box input has the correct name and data to allow for model binding. If you look at line 14 you can see them being used in the text box input creation. The interesting bit is on line 8 and 9, this is the code to retrieve the route value dictionary we added into the model metada via the custom attribute. Line 11 is used to create the url, in order to do this I created a quick helper class which looks like the code below titled RouteHelper. The last bit of script is the code to initialise the jQuery UI AutoComplete control with the correct url for calling back to our controller action. RouteHelper using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Mvc2Templates.Views.Shared.Helpers {     public static class RouteHelper     {         const string Controller = "Controller";         const string Action = "Action";         const string ReplaceFormatString = "REPLACE{0}";         public static string GetUrl(RequestContext requestContext, RouteValueDictionary routeValueDictionary)         {             RouteValueDictionary urlData = new RouteValueDictionary();             UrlHelper urlHelper = new UrlHelper(requestContext);                          int i = 0;             foreach(var item in routeValueDictionary)             {                 if (item.Value == string.Empty)                 {                     i++;                     urlData.Add(item.Key, string.Format(ReplaceFormatString, i.ToString()));                 }                 else                 {                     urlData.Add(item.Key, item.Value);                 }             }             var url = urlHelper.RouteUrl(urlData);             for (int index = 1; index <= i; index++)             {                 url = url.Replace(string.Format(ReplaceFormatString, index.ToString()), string.Empty);             }             return url;         }     } } See it in action All you need to do to see it in action is pass a view model from your controller with the new AutoComplete attribute attached and call the following within your view: <%= this.Html.EditorForModel() %> NOTE: The jQuery UI auto complete control expects a JSON string returned from your controller action method… as you can’t use the JsonResult to perform GET requests, use a normal action result, convert your data into json and return it as a string via a ContentResult. If you download the solution it will be very clear how to handle the controller and action for this demo. The full source code for this post can be downloaded here. It has been developed using MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010. As always, I hope this has been interesting/useful. Kind Regards, Sean McAlinden.

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