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• Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on  When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects and for an explanation of branching see Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams. Update 17th May 2010 – We are currently trialling running a single Sprint branch to improve our history. Whenever I setup a new Team Project I implement the basic version control structure. I put “readme.txt” files in the folder structure explaining the different levels, and a solution file called “[Client].[Product].sln” located at “$/[Client]/[Product]/DEV/Main” within version control. Developers should add any projects you need to create to that solution in the format “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly]” and they will automatically be picked up and built automatically when you setup Automated Builds using Team Foundation Build. All test projects need to be done using MSTest to get proper IDE and Team Foundation Build integration out-of-the-box and be named for the assembly that it is testing with a naming convention of “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly].Tests” Here is a description of the folder layout; this content should be replicated in readme files under version control in the relevant locations so that even developers new to the project can see how to do it. Figure: The Team Project level - at this level there should be a folder for each the products that you are building if you are using Areas correctly in TFS 2010. You should try very hard to avoided spaces as these things always end up in a URL eventually e.g. "Code Auditor" should be "CodeAuditor". Figure: Product Level - At this level there should be only 3 folders (DEV, RELESE and SAFE) all of which should be in capitals. These folders represent the three stages of your application production line. Each of them may contain multiple branches but this format leaves all of your branches at the same level. Figure: The DEV folder is where all of the Development branches reside. The DEV folder will contain the "Main" branch and all feature branches is they are being used. The DEV designation specifies that all code in every branch under this folder has not been released or made ready for release. And feature branches MUST merge (Forward Integrate) from Main and stabilise prior to merging (Reverse Integration) back down into Main and being decommissioned. Figure: In the Feature branching scenario only merges are allowed onto Main, no development can be done there. Once we have a mature product it is important that new features being developed in parallel are kept separate. This would most likely be used if we had more than one Scrum team working on a single product. Figure: when we are ready to do a release of our software we will create a release branch that is then stabilised prior to deployment. This protects the serviceability of of our released code allowing developers to fix bugs and re-release an existing version. Figure: All bugs found on a release are fixed on the release.  All bugs found in a release are fixed on the release and a new deployment is created. After the deployment is created the bug fixes are then merged (Reverse Integration) into the Main branch. We do this so that we separate out our development from our production ready code.  Figure: SAFE or RTM is a read only record of what you actually released. Labels are not immutable so are useless in this circumstance.  When we have completed stabilisation of the release branch and we are ready to deploy to production we create a read-only copy of the code for reference. In some cases this could be a regulatory concern, but in most cases it protects the company building the product from legal entanglements based on what you did or did not release. Figure: This allows us to reference any particular version of our application that was ever shipped.   In addition I am an advocate of having a single solution with all the Project folders directly under the “Trunk”/”Main” folder and using the full name for the project folders.. Figure: The ideal solution If you must have multiple solutions, because you need to use more than one version of Visual Studio, name the solutions “[Client].[Product][VSVersion].sln” and have it reside in the same folder as the other solution. This makes it easier for Automated build and improves the discoverability of your code and its dependencies. Send me your feedback!   Technorati Tags: VS ALM,VSTS Developing,VS 2010,VS 2008,TFS 2010,TFS 2008,TFBS

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• Custom Configuration Section Handlers

  Most .NET developers who need to store something in configuration tend to use appSettings for this purpose, in my experience.  More recently, the framework itself has helped things by adding the <connectionStrings /> section so at least these are in their own section and not adding to the appSettings clutter that pollutes most apps.  I recommend avoiding appSettings for several reasons.  In addition to those listed there, I would add that strong typing and validation are additional reasons to go the custom configuration section route. For my ASP.NET Tips and Tricks talk, I use the following example, which is a simple DemoSettings class that includes two fields.  The first is an integer representing how many attendees there are present for the talk, and the second is the title of the talk.  The setup in web.config is as follows: <configSections> <section name="DemoSettings" type="ASPNETTipsAndTricks.Code.DemoSettings" /> </configSections>   <DemoSettings sessionAttendees="100" title="ASP.NET Tips and Tricks DevConnections Spring 2010" /> Referencing the values in code is strongly typed and straightforward.  Here I have a page that exposes two properties which internally get their values from the configuration section handler: public partial class CustomConfig1 : System.Web.UI.Page { public string SessionTitle { get { return DemoSettings.Settings.Title; } } public int SessionAttendees { get { return DemoSettings.Settings.SessionAttendees; } } } Note that the settings are only read from the config file once after that they are cached so there is no need to be concerned about excessive file access. Now weve seen how to set it up on the config file and how to refer to the settings in code.  All that remains is to see the file itself: public class DemoSettings : ConfigurationSection { private static DemoSettings settings = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("DemoSettings") as DemoSettings; public static DemoSettings Settings{ get { return settings;} }   [ConfigurationProperty("sessionAttendees" , DefaultValue = 200 , IsRequired = false)] [IntegerValidator(MinValue = 1 , MaxValue = 10000)] public int SessionAttendees { get { return (int)this["sessionAttendees"]; } set { this["sessionAttendees"] = value; } }   [ConfigurationProperty("title" , IsRequired = true)] [StringValidator(InvalidCharacters = "~!@#$%^&*()[]{}/;\"|\\")] public string Title { get { return (string)this["title"]; } set { this["title"] = value; }   } } The class is pretty straightforward, but there are some important components to note.  First, it must inherit from System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection.  Next, as a convention I like to have a static settings member that is responsible for pulling out the section when the class is first referenced, and further to expose this collection via a static readonly property, Settings.  Note that the types of both of these are the type of my class, DemoSettings. The properties of the class, SessionAttendees and Title, should map to the attributes of the config element in the XML file.  The [ConfigurationProperty] attribute allows you to map the attribute name to the property name (thus using both XML standard naming conventions and C# naming conventions).  In addition, you can specify a default value to use if nothing is specified in the config file, and whether or not the setting must be provided (IsRequired).  If it is required, then it doesnt make sense to include a default value. Beyond defaults and required, you can specify more advanced validation rules for the configuration values using additional C# attributes, such as [IntegerValidator] and [StringValidator].  Using these, you can declaratively specify that your configuration values be in a given range, or omit certain forbidden characters, for instance.  Of course you can write your own custom validation attributes, and there are others specified in System.Configuration. Individual sections can also be loaded from separate files, using syntax like this: <DemoSettings configSource="demosettings.config" /> Summary Using a custom configuration section handler is not hard.  If your application or component requires configuration, I recommend creating a custom configuration handler dedicated to your app or component.  Doing so will reduce the clutter in appSettings, will provide you with strong typing and validation, and will make it much easier for other developers or system administrators to locate and understand the various configuration values that are necessary for a given application. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• UppercuT v1.0 and 1.1&ndash;Linux (Mono), Multi-targeting, SemVer, Nitriq and Obfuscation, oh my!

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on Linux using Mono! This is thanks mostly to Svein Ackenhausen for the patches and working with me on getting it all working while not breaking the windows builds!  This means you can use mono on Windows or Linux. Notice the shell files to execute with Linux that come as part of UC now. Multi-Targeting Perhaps one of the hardest things to do that requires an automated build is multi-targeting. At v1 this is early, and possibly prone to some issues, but available.  We believe in making everything stupid simple, so it’s as simple as adding a comma to the microsoft.framework property. i.e. “net-3.5, net-4.0” to suddenly produce both framework builds. When you build, this is what you get (if you meet each framework’s requirements): At this time you have to let UC override the build location (as it does by default) or this will not work.  Semantic Versioning By now many of you have been using UppercuT for awhile and have watched how we have done versioning. Many of you who use git already know we put the revision hash in the informational/product version as the last octet. At v1, UppercuT has adopted the semantic versioning scheme. What does that mean? This is a short read, but a good one: http://SemVer.org SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is really using versioning what it was meant for. You have three octets. Major.Minor.Patch as in 1.1.0.  UC will use three different versioning concepts, one for the assembly version, one for the file version, and one for the product version. All versions - The first three octects of the version are owned by SemVer. Major.Minor.Patch i.e.: 1.1.0 Assembly Version - The assembly version would much closer follow SemVer. Last digit is always 0. Major.Minor.Patch.0 i.e: 1.1.0.0 File Version - The file version occupies the build number as the last digit. Major.Minor.Patch.Build i.e.: 1.1.0.2650 Product/Informational Version - The last octect of your product/informational version is the source control revision/hash. Major.Minor.Patch.RevisionOrHash i.e. (TFS/SVN): 1.1.0.235 i.e. (Git/HG): 1.1.0.a45ace4346adef0 SemVer is not on by default, the passive versioning scheme is still in effect. Notice that version.use_semanticversioning has been added to the UppercuT.config file (and version.patch in support of the third octet): Gems Support Gems support was added at v1. This will probably be deprecated as some point once there is an announced sunset for Nu v1. Application gems may keep it around since there is no alternative for that yet though (CoApp would be a possible replacement). Nitriq Support Nitriq is a code analysis tool like NDepend. It’s built by Mr. Jon von Gillern. It uses LINQ query language, so you can use a familiar idiom when analyzing your code base. It’s a pretty awesome tool that has a free version for those looking to do code analysis! To use Nitriq with UC, you are going to need the console edition.  To take advantage of Nitriq, you just need to update the location of Nitriq in the config: Then add the nitriq project files at the root of your source. Please refer to the Nitriq documentation on how these are created. UppercuT v1.1 Obfuscation One thing I started looking into was an easy way to obfuscate my code. I came across EazFuscator, which is both free and awesome. Plus the GUI for it is super simple to use. How do you make obfuscation even easier? Make it a convention and a configurable property in the UC config file! And the code gets obfuscated! Closing Definitely get out and look at the new release. It contains lots of chocolaty (sp?) goodness. And remember, the upgrade path is almost as simple as drag and drop!

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• How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

  - by alexrussell

  Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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• Namespaces are obsolete

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  To those of us who have been around for a while, namespaces have been part of the landscape. One could even say that they have been defining the large-scale features of the landscape in question. However, something happened fairly recently that I think makes this venerable structure obsolete. Before I explain this development and why it’s a superior concept to namespaces, let me recapitulate what namespaces are and why they’ve been so good to us over the years… Namespaces are used for a few different things: Scope: a namespace delimits the portion of code where a name (for a class, sub-namespace, etc.) has the specified meaning. Namespaces are usually the highest-level scoping structures in a software package. Collision prevention: name collisions are a universal problem. Some systems, such as jQuery, wave it away, but the problem remains. Namespaces provide a reasonable approach to global uniqueness (and in some implementations such as XML, enforce it). In .NET, there are ways to relocate a namespace to avoid those rare collision cases. Hierarchy: programmers like neat little boxes, and especially boxes within boxes within boxes. For some reason. Regular human beings on the other hand, tend to think linearly, which is why the Windows explorer for example has tried in a few different ways to flatten the file system hierarchy for the user. 1 is clearly useful because we need to protect our code from bleeding effects from the rest of the application (and vice versa). A language with only global constructs may be what some of us started programming on, but it’s not desirable in any way today. 2 may not be always reasonably worth the trouble (jQuery is doing fine with its global plug-in namespace), but we still need it in many cases. One should note however that globally unique names are not the only possible implementation. In fact, they are a rather extreme solution. What we really care about is collision prevention within our application. What happens outside is irrelevant. 3 is, more than anything, an aesthetical choice. A common convention has been to encode the whole pedigree of the code into the namespace. Come to think about it, we never think we need to import “Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent” and that would be very hard to remember. What we want to do is bring nHibernate into our app. And this is precisely what you’ll do with modern package managers and module loaders. I want to take the specific example of RequireJS, which is commonly used with Node. Here is how you import a module with RequireJS: var http = require("http"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is of course importing a HTTP stack module into the code. There is no noise here. Let’s break this down. Scope (1) is provided by the one scoping mechanism in JavaScript: the closure surrounding the module’s code. Whatever scoping mechanism is provided by the language would be fine here. Collision prevention (2) is very elegantly handled. Whereas relocating is an afterthought, and an exceptional measure with namespaces, it is here on the frontline. You always relocate, using an extremely familiar pattern: variable assignment. We are very much used to managing our local variable names and any possible collision will get solved very easily by picking a different name. Wait a minute, I hear some of you say. This is only taking care of collisions on the client-side, on the left of that assignment. What if I have two libraries with the name “http”? Well, You can better qualify the path to the module, which is what the require parameter really is. As for hierarchical organization, you don’t really want that, do you? RequireJS’ module pattern does elegantly cover the bases that namespaces used to cover, but it also promotes additional good practices. First, it promotes usage of self-contained, single responsibility units of code through the closure-based, stricter scoping mechanism. Namespaces are somewhat more porous, as using/import statements can be used bi-directionally, which leads us to my second point… Sane dependency graphs are easier to achieve and sustain with such a structure. With namespaces, it is easy to construct dependency cycles (that’s bad, mmkay?). With this pattern, the equivalent would be to build mega-components, which are an easier problem to spot than a decay into inter-dependent namespaces, for which you need specialized tools. I really like this pattern very much, and I would like to see more environments implement it. One could argue that dependency injection has some commonalities with this for example. What do you think? This is the half-baked result of some morning shower reflections, and I’d love to read your thoughts about it. What am I missing?

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• JavaDay Taipei 2014 Trip Report

  - by reza_rahman

  JavaDay Taipei 2014 was held at the Taipei International Convention Center on August 1st. Organized by Oracle University, it is one of the largest Java developer events in Taiwan. This was another successful year for JavaDay Taipei with a fully sold out venue packed with youthful, energetic developers (this was my second time at the event and I have already been invited to speak again next year!). In addition to Oracle speakers like me, Steve Chin and Naveen Asrani, the event also featured a bevy of local speakers including Taipei Java community leaders. Topics included Java SE, Java EE, JavaFX, cloud and Big Data. It was my pleasure and privilege to present one of the opening keynotes for the event. I presented my session on Java EE titled "JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond". I covered the changes in Java EE 7 as well as what's coming in Java EE 8. I demoed the Cargo Tracker Java EE BluePrints. I also briefly talked about Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 8. The slides for the keynote are below (click here to download and view the actual PDF): It appears your Web browser is not configured to display PDF files. No worries, just click here to download the PDF file. In the afternoon I did my JavaScript + Java EE 7 talk titled "Using JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients with Java EE 7". This talk is basically about aligning EE 7 with the emerging JavaScript ecosystem (specifically AngularJS). The talk was completely packed. The slide deck for the talk is here: JavaScript/HTML5 Rich Clients Using Java EE 7 from Reza Rahman The demo application code is posted on GitHub. The code should be a helpful resource if this development model is something that interests you. Do let me know if you need help with it but the instructions should be fairly self-explanatory. I am delivering this material at JavaOne 2014 as a two-hour tutorial. This should give me a little more bandwidth to dig a little deeper, especially on the JavaScript end. I finished off Java Day Taipei with my talk titled "Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE" (this was the last session of the conference). The talk covers an interesting gap that there is surprisingly little material on out there. The talk has three parts -- a birds-eye view of the NoSQL landscape, how to use NoSQL via a JPA centric facade using EclipseLink NoSQL, Hibernate OGM, DataNucleus, Kundera, Easy-Cassandra, etc and how to use NoSQL native APIs in Java EE via CDI. The slides for the talk are here: Using NoSQL with ~JPA, EclipseLink and Java EE from Reza Rahman The JPA based demo is available here, while the CDI based demo is available here. Both demos use MongoDB as the data store. Do let me know if you need help getting the demos up and running. After the event the Oracle University folks hosted a reception in the evening which was very well attended by organizers, speakers and local Java community leaders. I am extremely saddened by the fact that this otherwise excellent trip was scarred by terrible tragedy. After the conference I joined a few folks for a hike on the Maokong Mountain on Saturday. The group included friends in the Taiwanese Java community including Ian and Robbie Cheng. Without warning, fatal tragedy struck on a remote part of the trail. Despite best efforts by us, the excellent Taiwanese Emergency Rescue Team and World class Taiwanese physicians we were unable to save our friend Robbie Cheng's life. Robbie was just thirty-four years old and is survived by his younger brother, mother and father. Being the father of a young child myself, I can only imagine the deep sorrow that this senseless loss unleashes. Robbie was a key member of the Taiwanese Java community and a Java Evangelist at Sun at one point. Ironically the only picture I was able to take of the trail was mere moments before tragedy. I thought I should place him in that picture in profoundly respectful memoriam: Perhaps there is some solace in the fact that there is something inherently honorable in living a bright life, dying young and meeting one's end on a beautiful remote mountain trail few venture to behold let alone attempt to ascend in a long and tired lifetime. Perhaps I'd even say it's a fate I would not entirely regret facing if it were my own. With that thought in mind it seems appropriate to me to quote some lyrics from the song "Runes to My Memory" by legendary Swedish heavy metal band Amon Amarth idealizing a fallen Viking warrior cut down in his prime: "Here I lie on wet sand I will not make it home I clench my sword in my hand Say farewell to those I love When I am dead Lay me in a mound Place my weapons by my side For the journey to Hall up high When I am dead Lay me in a mound Raise a stone for all to see Runes carved to my memory" I submit my deepest condolences to Robbie's family and hope my next trip to Taiwan ends in a less somber note.

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• Speakers, Please Check Your Time

  - by AjarnMark

  Woodrow Wilson was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a 10 minute speech. He replied "Two weeks". He was then asked how long it would take for a 1 hour speech. "One week", he replied. 2 hour speech? "I'm ready right now," he replied.  Whether that is a true story or an urban legend, I don’t really know, but either way, it is a poignant reminder for all speakers, and particularly apropos this week leading up to the PASS Community Summit. (Cross-posted to the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter blog #PASSProfDev.) What’s the point of that story?  Simply this…if you have plenty of time to do your presentation, you don’t need to prepare much because it is easy to throw in more and more material to stretch out to your allotted time.  But if you are on a tight time constraint, then it will take significant preparation to distill your talk down to only the essential points. I have attended seven of the last eight North American Summit events, and every one of them has been fantastic.  The speakers are great, the material is timely and relevant, and the networking opportunities are awesome.  And every year, there is one little thing that just bugs me…speakers going over their allotted time.  Why does it bother me so?  Well, if you look at a typical schedule for a Summit, you’ll see that there are six or more sessions going on at the same time, and only 15 minutes to move from one to another.  If you’re trying to maximize your training dollar by attending something during every session time slot, and you don’t want to be the last guy trying to squeeze into the middle of the row, then those 15 minutes can be critical.  All the more so if you need to stop and use the bathroom or if you have to hike to the opposite end of the convention center.  It is really a bad position to find yourself having to choose between learning the last key points of Speaker A who is going over time, and getting over to Speaker B on time so you don’t miss her key opening remarks. And frankly, I think it is just rude.  Yes, the speakers are the function, after all they are bringing the content that the rest of us are paying to learn.  But it is also an honor to be given the opportunity to speak at a conference like this, and no one speaker is so important that the conference would be a disaster without him.  Speakers know when they submit their abstract, long before the conference, how much time they will have.  It has been the same pattern at the Summit for at least the last eight years.  Program Sessions are 75 minutes long.  Some speakers who have a good track record, and meet other qualifying criteria, are extended an invitation to present a Spotlight Session which is 90 minutes (a 20% increase).  So there really is no excuse.  It’s not like you were promised a 2-hour segment and then discovered when you got here that it was only 75 minutes.  In fact, it’s not like PASS advertised 90-minute sessions for everyone and then a select few were cut back to only 75.  As a speaker, you know well before you get here which type of session you are doing and how long it is, so as a professional, you should plan accordingly. Now you might think that this only happens to rookies, but I’ll tell you that some of the worst offenders are big-name veterans who draw huge attendance numbers for their sessions.  Some attendees blow this off as, “Hey, it’s so-and-so, and I’d stay here for hours and listen to him/her talk.”  To which I would reply, “Then they should have submitted for a pre- or post-conference day-long seminar instead, but don’t try to squeeze your day-long talk into a 90-minute session.”  Now I don’t really believe that these speakers are being malicious or just selfishly trying to extend their time in the spotlight.  I think that most of them are merely being undisciplined and did not trim their presentation sufficiently, or allowed themselves to get off-track (often in a generous attempt to help someone in the audience with a question or problem that really should have been noted for further discussion after the session). So here is my recommendation…my plea, even.  TRIM THE FAT!  Now.  Before it’s too late.  Before you even get on the airplane, take a long, hard look at your presentation and eliminate some of the points that you originally thought you had to make, but in reality are not truly crucial to your main topic.  Delete a few slides.  Test your demos and have them already scripted rather than typing them during your talk.  It is better to cut out too much and end up with plenty of time at the end for Questions & Answers.  And you can always keep some notes on the stuff that you cut out so that you could fill it back in at the end as bonus material if you really do end up with a whole bunch of time on your hands.  But I don’t think you will.  And if you do, that will look even better to the audience as it will look like you’re giving them something extra that not every audience gets.  And they will thank you for that.

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• What are some concise and comprehensive introductory guide to unit testing for a self-taught programmer [closed]

  - by Superbest

  I don't have much formal training in programming and I have learned most things by looking up solutions on the internet to practical problems I have. There are some areas which I think would be valuable to learn, but which ended up both being difficult to learn and easy to avoid learning for a self-taught programmer. Unit testing is one of them. Specifically, I am interested in tests in and for C#/.NET applications using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools in Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2012, but I really want a good introduction to the principles so language and IDE shouldn't matter much. At this time I'm interested in relatively trivial tests for small or medium sized programs (development time of weeks or months and mostly just myself developing). I don't necessarily intend to do test-driven development (I am aware that some say unit testing alone is supposed to be for developing features in TDD, and not an assurance that there are no bugs in the software, but unit testing is often the only kind of testing for which I have resources). I have found this tutorial which I feel gave me a decent idea of what unit tests and TDD looks like, but in trying to apply these ideas to my own projects, I often get confused by questions I can't answer and don't know how to answer, such as: What parts of my application and what sorts of things aren't necessarily worth testing? How fine grained should my tests be? Should they test every method and property separately, or work with a larger scope? What is a good naming convention for test methods? (since apparently the name of the method is the only way I will be able to tell from a glance at the test results table what works in my program and what doesn't) Is it bad to have many asserts in one test method? Since apparently VS2012 reports only that "an Assert.IsTrue failed within method MyTestMethod", and if MyTestMethod has 10 Assert.IsTrue statements, it will be irritating to figure out why a test is failing. If a lot of the functionality deals with writing and reading data to/from the disk in a not-exactly trivial fashion, how do I test that? If I provide a bunch of files as input by placing them in the program's directory, do I have to copy those files to the test project's bin/Debug folder now? If my program works with a large body of data and execution takes minutes or more, should my tests have it do the whole use all of the real data, a subset of it, or simulated data? If latter, how do I decide on the subset or how to simulate? Closely related to the previous point, if a class is such that its main operation happens in a state that is arrived to by the program after some involved operations (say, a class makes calculations on data derived from a few thousands of lines of code analyzing some raw data) how do I test just that class without inevitably ending up testing that class and all the other code that brings it to that state along with it? In general, what kind of approach should I use for test initialization? (hopefully that is the correct term, I mean preparing classes for testing by filling them in with appropriate data) How do I deal with private members? Do I just suck it up and assume that "not public = shouldn't be tested"? I have seen people suggest using private accessors and reflection, but these feel like clumsy and unsuited for regular use. Are these even good ideas? Is there anything like design patterns concerning testing specifically? I guess the main themes in what I'd like to learn more about are, (1) what are the overarching principles that should be followed (or at least considered) in every testing effort and (2) what are popular rules of thumb for writing tests. For example, at one point I recall hearing from someone that if a method is longer than 200 lines, it should be refactored - not a universally correct rule, but it has been quite helpful since I'd otherwise happily put hundreds of lines in single methods and then wonder why my code is so hard to read. Similarly I've found ReSharpers suggestions on member naming style and other things to be quite helpful in keeping my codebases sane. I see many resources both online and in print that talk about testing in the context of large applications (years of work, 10s of people or more). However, because I've never worked on such large projects, this context is very unfamiliar to me and makes the material difficult to follow and relate to my real world problems. Speaking of software development in general, advice given with the assumptions of large projects isn't always straightforward to apply to my own, smaller endeavors. Summary So my question is: What are some resources to learn about unit testing, for a hobbyist, self-taught programmer without much formal training? Ideally, I'm looking for a short and simple "bible of unit testing" which I can commit to memory, and then apply systematically by repeatedly asking myself "is this test following the bible of testing closely enough?" and then amending discrepancies if it doesn't.

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• PHP SimpleXML recursive function to list children and attibutes

  - by Phill Pafford

  I need some help on the SimpleXML calls for a recursive function that lists the elements name and attributes. Making a XML config file system but each script will have it's own config file as well as a new naming convention. So what I need is an easy way to map out all the elements that have attributes, so like in example 1 I need a simple way to call all the processes but I don't know how to do this without hard coding the elements name is the function call. Is there a way to recursively call a function to match a child element name? I did see the xpath functionality but I don't see how to use this for attributes. Any ideas? Also does the XML in the examples look correct? can I structure my XML like this? Example 1: <application> <processes> <process id="123" name="run batch A" /> <process id="122" name="run batch B" /> <process id="129" name="run batch C" /> </processes> <connections> <databases> <database usr="test" pss="test" hst="test" dbn="test" /> </databases> <shells> <ssh usr="test" pss="test" hst="test-2" /> <ssh usr="test" pss="test" hst="test-1" /> </shells> </connections> </application> Example 2: <config> <queues> <queue id="1" name="test" /> <queue id="2" name="production" /> <queue id="3" name="error" /> </queues> </config> Pseudo code: // Would return matching process id getProcess($process_id) { return the process attributes as array that are in the XML } // Would return matching DBN (database name) getDatabase($database_name) { return the database attributes as array that are in the XML } // Would return matching SSH Host getSSHHost($ssh_host) { return the ssh attributes as array that are in the XML } // Would return matching SSH User getSSHUser($ssh_user) { return the ssh attributes as array that are in the XML } // Would return matching Queue getQueue($queue_id) { return the queue attributes as array that are in the XML } EDIT: Can I pass two parms? on the first method you have suggested @Gordon public function findProcessById($id, $name) { $attr = false; $el = $this->xml->xpath("//process[@id='$id']"); // How do I also filter by the name? if($el && count($el) === 1) { $attr = (array) $el[0]->attributes(); $attr = $attr['@attributes']; } return $attr; }

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• How can you add a UIGestureRecognizer to a UIBarButtonItem as in the common undo/redo UIPopoverContr

  - by SG

  Problem In my iPad app, I cannot attach a popover to a button bar item only after press-and-hold events. But this seems to be standard for undo/redo. How do other apps do this? Background I have an undo button (UIBarButtonSystemItemUndo) in the toolbar of my UIKit (iPad) app. When I press the undo button, it fires it's action which is undo:, and that executes correctly. However, the "standard UE convention" for undo/redo on iPad is that pressing undo executes an undo but pressing and holding the button reveals a popover controller where the user selected either "undo" or "redo" until the controller is dismissed. The normal way to attach a popover controller is with presentPopoverFromBarButtonItem:, and I can configure this easily enough. To get this to show only after press-and-hold we have to set a view to respond to "long press" gesture events as in this snippet: UILongPressGestureRecognizer *longPressOnUndoGesture = [[UILongPressGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(handleLongPressOnUndoGesture:)]; //Broken because there is no customView in a UIBarButtonSystemItemUndo item [self.undoButtonItem.customView addGestureRecognizer:longPressOnUndoGesture]; [longPressOnUndoGesture release]; With this, after a press-and-hold on the view the method handleLongPressOnUndoGesture: will get called, and within this method I will configure and display the popover for undo/redo. So far, so good. The problem with this is that there is no view to attach to. self.undoButtonItem is a UIButtonBarItem, not a view. Possible solutions 1) [The ideal] Attach the gesture recognizer to the button bar item. It is possible to attach a gesture recognizer to a view, but UIButtonBarItem is not a view. It does have a property for .customView, but that property is nil when the buttonbaritem is a standard system type (in this case it is). 2) Use another view. I could use the UIToolbar but that would require some weird hit-testing and be an all around hack, if even possible in the first place. There is no other alternative view to use that I can think of. 3) Use the customView property. Standard types like UIBarButtonSystemItemUndo have no customView (it is nil). Setting the customView will erase the standard contents which it needs to have. This would amount to re-implementing all the look and function of UIBarButtonSystemItemUndo, again if even possible to do. Question How can I attach a gesture recognizer to this "button"? More specifically, how can I implement the standard press-and-hold-to-show-redo-popover in an iPad app? Ideas? Thank you very much, especially if someone actually has this working in their app (I'm thinking of you, omni) and wants to share...

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• Rails - embedded polymorphic comment list + add comment form - example?

  - by odigity

  Hey, all. Working on my first Rails app. I've searched all around - read a bunch of tutorials, articles, and forum posts, watched some screencasts, and I've found a few examples that come close to what I'm trying to do (notably http://railscasts.com/episodes/154-polymorphic-association and ep 196 about nested model forms), but not exactly. I have two models (Podcast and BlogPost) that need to be commentable, and I have a Comment model that is polymorphically related to both. The railscasts above had a very similar example (ep 154), but Ryan used a full set of nested routes, so there were specific templates for adding and editing comments. What I want to do is show the list of comments right on the Podcast or BlogPost page, along with an Add Comment form at the bottom. I don't need a separate add template/route, and I don't need the ability to edit, only delete. This is a pretty common design on the web, but I can't find a Rails example specifically about this pattern. Here's my current understanding: I need routes for the create and delete actions, of course, but there are no templates associated with those. I'm also guessing that the right approach is to create a partial that can be included at the bottom of both the Podcast and BlogPost show template. The logical name for the partial seems to me to be something like _comments.html.haml. I know it's a common convention to have the object passed to the partial be named after the template, but calling the object 'comments' seems to not match my use case, since what I really need to pass is the commentable object (Podcast or BlogPost). So, I guess I'd use the locals option for the render partial call? (:commentable = @podcast). Inside the partial, I could call commentable.comments to get the comments collection, render that with a second partial (this time with the conventional use case, calling the partial _comment.html.haml), then create a form that submits to... what? REST-wise, it should be a POST to the collection, which would be /podcast|blogpost/:id/comments, and I think the helper for that is podcast_comments_path(podcast) if it were a podcast - not sure what to do though, since I'm using polymorphic comments. That would trigger the Comment.create action, which would then need to redirect back to the podcast|blogpost path /podcast|blogpost/:id. It's all a bit overwhelming, which is why I was really hoping to find a screencast or example that specifically implements this design.

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• How to avoid using duplicate savepoint names in nested transactions in nested stored procs?

  - by Gary McGill

  I have a pattern that I almost always follow, where if I need to wrap up an operation in a transaction, I do this: BEGIN TRANSACTION SAVE TRANSACTION TX -- Stuff IF @error <> 0 ROLLBACK TRANSACTION TX COMMIT TRANSACTION That's served me well enough in the past, but after years of using this pattern (and copy-pasting the above code), I've suddenly discovered a flaw which comes as a complete shock. Quite often, I'll have a stored procedure calling other stored procedures, all of which use this same pattern. What I've discovered (to my cost) is that because I'm using the same savepoint name everywhere, I can get into a situation where my outer transaction is partially committed - precisely the opposite of the atomicity that I'm trying to achieve. I've put together an example that exhibits the problem. This is a single batch (no nested stored procs), and so it looks a little odd in that you probably wouldn't use the same savepoint name twice in the same batch, but my real-world scenario would be too confusing to post. CREATE TABLE Test (test INTEGER NOT NULL) BEGIN TRAN SAVE TRAN TX BEGIN TRAN SAVE TRAN TX INSERT INTO Test(test) VALUES (1) COMMIT TRAN TX BEGIN TRAN SAVE TRAN TX INSERT INTO Test(test) VALUES (2) COMMIT TRAN TX DELETE FROM Test ROLLBACK TRAN TX COMMIT TRAN TX SELECT * FROM Test DROP TABLE Test When I execute this, it lists one record, with value "1". In other words, even though I rolled back my outer transaction, a record was added to the table. What's happening is that the ROLLBACK TRANSACTION TX at the outer level is rolling back as far as the last SAVE TRANSACTION TX at the inner level. Now that I write this all out, I can see the logic behind it: the server is looking back through the log file, treating it as a linear stream of transactions; it doesn't understand the nesting/hierarchy implied by either the nesting of the transactions (or, in my real-world scenario, by the calls to other stored procedures). So, clearly, I need to start using unique savepoint names instead of blindly using "TX" everywhere. But - and this is where I finally get to the point - is there a way to do this in a copy-pastable way so that I can still use the same code everywhere? Can I auto-generate the savepoint name on the fly somehow? Is there a convention or best-practice for doing this sort of thing? It's not exactly hard to come up with a unique name every time you start a transaction (could base it off the SP name, or somesuch), but I do worry that eventually there would be a conflict - and you wouldn't know about it because rather than causing an error it just silently destroys your data... :-(

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• mciSendString cannot save to directory path

  - by robUK

  Hello, VS C# 2008 SP1 I have a created a small application that records and plays audio. However, my application needs to save the wave file to the application data directory on the users computer. The mciSendString takes a C style string as a parameter and has to be in 8.3 format. However, my problem is I can't get it to save. And what is strange is sometime it does and sometimes it doesn't. Howver, most of the time is failes. However, if I save directly to the C drive it works first time everything. I have used 3 different methods that I have coded below. The error number that I get when it fails is 286."The file was not saved. Make sure your system has sufficient disk space or has an intact network connection" Many thanks for any suggestins, [DllImport("winmm.dll",CharSet=CharSet.Auto)] private static extern uint mciSendString([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] string command, StringBuilder returnValue, int returnLength, IntPtr winHandle); [DllImport("winmm.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)] private static extern int mciGetErrorString(uint errorCode, StringBuilder errorText, int errorTextSize); [DllImport("Kernel32.dll", CharSet=CharSet.Auto)] private static extern int GetShortPathName([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] string longPath, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)] StringBuilder shortPath, int length); // Stop recording private void StopRecording() { // Save recorded voice string shortPath = this.shortPathName(); string formatShortPath = string.Format("save recsound \"{0}\"", shortPath); uint result = 0; StringBuilder errorTest = new StringBuilder(256); // C:\DOCUME~1\Steve\APPLIC~1\Test.wav // Fails result = mciSendString(string.Format("{0}", formatShortPath), null, 0, IntPtr.Zero); mciGetErrorString(result, errorTest, errorTest.Length); // command line convention - fails result = mciSendString("save recsound \"C:\\DOCUME~1\\Steve\\APPLIC~1\\Test.wav\"", null, 0, IntPtr.Zero); mciGetErrorString(result, errorTest, errorTest.Length); // 8.3 short format - fails result = mciSendString(@"save recsound C:\DOCUME~1\Steve\APPLIC~1\Test.wav", null, 0, IntPtr.Zero); mciGetErrorString(result, errorTest, errorTest.Length); // Save to C drive works everytime. result = mciSendString(@"save recsound C:\Test.wav", null, 0, IntPtr.Zero); mciGetErrorString(result, errorTest, errorTest.Length); mciSendString("close recsound ", null, 0, IntPtr.Zero); } // Get the short path name so that the mciSendString can save the recorded wave file private string shortPathName() { string shortPath = string.Empty; long length = 0; StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder(256); // Get the length of the path length = GetShortPathName(this.saveRecordingPath, buffer, 256); shortPath = buffer.ToString(); return shortPath; }

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• How can this C and PHP programmer learn Ruby and Rails?

  - by Winston

  I came from a C, php and bash background, it was easy to learn because they all have the same C structure, which I can associate with what I already know. Then 2 years ago I learned Python and I learned it quite well, Python is easier for me to learn than Ruby. Then since last year, I was trying to learn Ruby, then Rails, and I admit, until now I still couldn't get it, the irony is that those are branded as easy to learn, but for a seasoned programmer like me, I just couldn't associate it with what I learned before, I have 2 books on both Ruby and Rails, and when I'm reading it nothing is absorbed into my mind, and I'm close to giving up... In ruby, I'm having a hard time grasping the concepts of blocks, and why there's @variables that can be accessed by other functions, and what does $variable and :variable do? And in Rails, why there's function like this_is_another_function_that_do_this, so thus ruby, is it just a naming convention or it's auto-generated with thisvariable _can_do_this_function. I'm still puzzled that where all those magic concepts and things came from? And now, 1 year of trying and absorbing, but still no progress... Edit: To summarize: How can I learn about blocks, and how can it be related to concepts from PHP/C? Variables, what does does it mean when a variable is prefixed with: @ $ : "Magic concepts", suchs as rails declarations of Records, what happens behind the scenes when I write has_one X OK so, bear with me with my confusion, at least I'm honest with myself, and it's over a year now since I first trying to learn ruby, and I'm not getting younger.. so I learned this in Bash/C/PHP solve_problem($problem) { if [ -e $problem == "trivial" ]; then write_solution(); else breakdown_problem_into_N_subproblems(\; define_relationship_between_subproblems; for i in $( command $each_subproblem ); do solve_problem $i done fi } write_solution(problem) { some_solution=$(command <parameters> "input" | command); command | command $some_solution > output_solved_problem_to_file } breakdown_problem_into_N_subproblems($problems) { for i in $problems; do command $i | command > i_can_output_a_file_right_away done } define_relationship_between_subproblems($problems) { if [ -e $problem == "relationship" ]; then relationship=$(command; command | command; command;) elsif [ -e $problem == "another_relationship" ]; relationship=$(command; command | command; command;) fi } In C/PHP is something like this solve_problem(problem) { if (problem == trivial) write_solution; else { breakdown_problem_into_N_subproblems; define_relationship_between_subproblems; for (each_subproblem) solve_problems(subproblem); } } And now, I just couldn't connect the dots with Ruby, |b|{ blocks }, using @variables, :variables, and variables_with_this_things..

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• Do you still limit line length in code?

  - by Noldorin

  This is a matter on which I would like to gauge the opinion of the community: Do you still limit the length of lines of code to a fixed maximum? This was certainly a convention of the past for many languages; one would typically cap the number of characters per line to a value such as 80 (and more recnetly 100 or 120 I believe). As far as I understand, the primary reasons for limiting line length are: Readability - You don't have to scroll over horizontally when you want to see the end of some lines. Printing - Admittedly (at least in my experience), most code that you are working on does not get printed out on paper, but by limiting the number of characters you can insure that formatting doesn't get messed up when printed. Past editors (?) - Not sure about this one, but I suspect that at some point in the distant past of programming, (at least some) text editors may have been based on a fixed-width buffer. I'm sure there are points that I am still missing out, so feel free to add to these... Now, when I tend to observe C or C# code nowadays, I often see a number of different styles, the main ones being: Line length capped to 80, 100, or even 120 characters. As far as I understand, 80 is the traditional length, but the longer ones of 100 and 120 have appeared because of the widespread use of high resolutions and widescreen monitors nowadays. No line length capping at all. This tends to be pretty horrible to read, and I don't see it too often, though it's certainly not too rare either. Inconsistent capping of line length. The length of some lines are limited to a fixed maximum (or even a maximum that changes depending on the file/location in code), while others (possibly comments) are not at all. My personal preference here (at least recently) has been to cap the line length to 100 in the Visual Studio editor. This means that in a decently sized window (on a non-widescreen monitor), the ends of lines are still fully visible. I can however see a few disadvantages in this, especially when you end up writing code that's indented 3 or 4 levels and then having to include a long string literal - though I often take this as a sign to refactor my code! In particular, I am curious what the C and C# coders (or anyone who uses Visual Studio for that matter) think about this point, though I would be interested in hearing anyone's thoughts on the subject. Edit Thanks for the all answers - I appreciate the variety of opinions here, all presenting sound reasons. Consensus does seem to be tipping in the direction of always (or almost always) limit the line length. Interestingly, it seems to be in various coding standards to limit the line length. Judging by some of the answers, both the Python and Google CPP guidelines set the limit at 80 chars. I haven't seen anything similar regarding C# or VB.NET, but I would be curious to see if there are ones anywhere.

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• Release Process Improvements

  - by wallismark

  The process of creating a new build and releasing it to production is a critical step in the SDLC but it is often left as an afterthought and varies greatly from one company to the next. I'm hoping people will share improvements they have made to this process in their organisation so we can all takes steps to 'reduce the pain'. So the question is, specify one painful/time consuming part of your release process and what did you do to improve it? My example: at a previous employer all developers made database changes on one common development database. Then when it came to release time, we used Redgate's SQL Compare to generate a huge script from the differences between the Dev and QA databases. This works reasonably well but the problems with this approach are:- ALL changes in the Dev database are included, some of which may still be 'works in progress'. Sometimes developers made conflicting changes (that were not noticed until the release was in production) It was a time consuming and manual process to create and validate the script (by validate I mean, try to weed out issues like problem 1 and 2). When there were problems with the script (eg the order in which things were run such as creating a record which relies on a foreign key record which is in the script but not yet run) it took time to 'tweak' it so it ran smoothly. It's not an ideal scenario for Continuous Integration. So the solution was:- Enforce a policy of all changes to the database must be scripted. A naming convention was important for ensuring the correct running order of the scripts. Create/Use a tool to run the scripts at release time. Developers had their own copy of the database do develop against (so there was no more 'stepping on each others toes') The next release after we started this process was much faster with fewer problems, indeed the only problems found were due to people 'breaking the rules', eg not creating a script. Once the issues with releasing to QA were fixed, when it came time to release to production it was very smooth. We applied a few other changes (like introducing CI) but this was the most significant, overall we reduced release time from around 3 hours down to a max of 10-15 minutes.

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• ASP.NET Client to Server communication

  - by Nelson

  Can you help me make sense of all the different ways to communicate from browser to client in ASP.NET? I have made this a community wiki so feel free to edit my post to improve it. Specifically, I'm trying to understand in which scenario to use each one by listing how each works. I'm a little fuzzy on UpdatePanel vs CallBack (with ViewState): I know UpdatePanel always returns HTML while CallBack can return JSON. Any other major differences? ...and CallBack (without ViewState) vs WebMethod. CallBack goes through most of the Page lifecycle, WebMethod doesn't. Any other major differences? IHttpHandler Custom handler for anything (page, image, etc.) Only does what you tell it to do (light server processing) Page is an implementation of IHttpHandler If you don't need what Page provides, create a custom IHttpHandler If you are using Page but overriding Render() and not generating HTML, you probably can do it with a custom IHttpHandler (e.g. writing binary data such as images) By default can use the .axd or .ashx file extensions -- both are functionally similar .ashx doesn't have any built-in endpoints, so it's preferred by convention Regular PostBack (System.Web.UI.Page : IHttpHandler) Inherits Page Full PostBack, including ViewState and HTML control values (heavy traffic) Full Page lifecycle (heavy server processing) No JavaScript required Webpage flickers/scrolls since everything is reloaded in browser Returns full page HTML (heavy traffic) UpdatePanel (Control) Control inside Page Full PostBack, including ViewState and HTML control values (heavy traffic) Full Page lifecycle (heavy server processing) Controls outside the UpdatePanel do Render(NullTextWriter) Must use ScriptManager If no client-side JavaScript, it can fall back to regular PostBack with no JavaScript (?) No flicker/scroll since it's an async call, unless it falls back to regular postback. Can be used with master pages and user controls Has built-in support for progress bar Returns HTML for controls inside UpdatePanel (medium traffic) Client CallBack (Page, System.Web.UI.ICallbackEventHandler) Inherits Page Most of Page lifecycle (heavy server processing) Takes only data you specify (light traffic) and optionally ViewState (?) (medium traffic) Client must support JavaScript and use ScriptManager No flicker/scroll since it's an async call Can be used with master pages and user controls Returns only data you specify in format you specify (e.g. JSON, XML...) (?) (light traffic) WebMethod Class implements System.Web.Service.WebService HttpContext available through this.Context Takes only data you specify (light traffic) Server only runs the called method (light server processing) Client must support JavaScript No flicker/scroll since it's an async call Can be used with master pages and user controls Returns only data you specify, typically JSON (light traffic) Can create instance of server control to render HTML and sent back as string, but events, paging in GridView, etc. won't work PageMethods Essentially a WebMethod contained in the Page class, so most of WebMethod's bullet's apply Method must be public static, therefore no Page instance accessible HttpContext available through HttpContext.Current Accessed directly by URL Page.aspx/MethodName (e.g. with XMLHttpRequest directly or with library such as jQuery) Setting ScriptManager property EnablePageMethods="True" generates a JavaScript proxy for each WebMethod Cannot be used directly in user controls with master pages and user controls Any others?

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• Debugging site written mainly in JScript with AJAX code injection

  - by blumidoo

  Hello, I have a legacy code to maintain and while trying to understand the logic behind the code, I have run into lots of annoying issues. The application is written mainly in Java Script, with extensive usage of jQuery + different plugins, especially Accordion. It creates a wizard-like flow, where client code for the next step is downloaded in the background by injecting a result of a remote AJAX request. It also uses callbacks a lot and pretty complicated "by convention" programming style (lots of events handlers are created on the fly based on certain object names - e.g. current page name, current step name). Adding to that, the code is very messy and there is no obvious inner structure - the functions are scattered in the code, file names do not reflect the business role of the code, lots of functions and code snippets are most likely not used at all etc. PROBLEM: How to approach this code base, so that the inner flow of the code can be sort-of "reverse engineered" using a suite of smart debugging tools. Ideally, I would like to be able to attach to the running application and step through the code, breaking on each new function call. Also, it would be nice to be able to create a "diagram of calls" in the application (i.e. in order to run a particular page logic, this particular flow of function calls was executed in a particular order). Not to mention to be able to run a coverage analysis, identifying potentially orphaned code fragments. I would like to stress out once more, that it is impossible to understand the inner logic of the application just by looking at the code itself, unless you have LOTS of spare time and beer crates, which I unfortunately do not have :/ (shame...) An IDE of some sort that would aid in extending that code would be also great, but I am currently looking into possibility to use Visual Studio 2010 to do the job, as the site itself is a mix of Classic ASP and ASP.NET (I'd say - 70% Java Script with jQuery, 30% ASP). I have obviously tried FireBug, but I was unable to find a way to define a breakpoint or step into the code, which is "injected" into the client JS using AJAX calls (i.e. the application retrieves the code by invoking an URL and injects it to the client local code). Venkman debugger had similar issues. Any hints would be welcome. Feel free to ask additional questions.

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• a question about rails general practice with REST, json, and ajax

  - by Nik

  Hi all, I have this question concerning REST I think: I have read a few rest tutorials and the feeling I get from them is that each action in a restful controller tends to be lean and almost single purpose: "Index gives off a collection of a model show gives off one model edit/new a prep place for changing/create a model update/create changes and makes new model deletes removes one model" After reading all these tutorials, rest seems to be to be a means to create an interface for a model, much like active resource type of thing. the mantra seems to be "controller provides data and data only and is also pretty convention over configuration, so expect projects_path to return a bunch of projects" I can understand that, and I like the cleanliness. But here's when I run into some trouble in reality in applying these guidelines: say three models, Project with attrib title, User with attrib name, and Location with attrib address. Say in views/users/index.html.erb, I want to use Ajax to fetch and display a project in a div#project_display when the user clicks on a project element, I know that I can use views/projects/show.js.rjs like this: page.replace_html 'project_display' "#{@project.name}" where in the projects_controller.rb def show @project = Project.find(params[:id]) repsond_to do |format| format.js and other formats... end end I have no problem in doing that for a couple of years now. BUT doesn't that mean that my JS response for the project#show action is LOCkED to present data to div#project_display element and show only whatever I that rjs template says it should show? That's very limiting and doesn't sound very "interface" like. I have never used JSON before or much XML, so I thought, maybe the JS response should send back raw stuff, like JSON and somehow the page on which the ajax request was called has the instruction on what do to with these raw data. That sounds a lot more flexible, doesn't it? Because look back at that exmpale, what if in the views/locations/index.html.erb, I want to do the exact same thing except I want to put the response in div#project_goes_here and the response should be #{project.name} I know this is a trivial change but that's the point: the RJS only allows one template at a time. So I think the JSON route is the way to go, but how does the already loaded page, the one that the ajax call came from, know when or how to "look forward" to incoming data? I read that PrototypeJS has this template thing, I wouldn't mind using it with JSON, but if you can demonstrate this or other means for displaying received-from-ajax data, I am all attention. Thank You

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• In Ruby, how does coerce() actually work?

  - by Jian Lin

  It is said that when we have a class Point and knows how to perform point * 3 like the following: class Point def initialize(x,y) @x, @y = x, y end def *(c) Point.new(@x * c, @y * c) end end point = Point.new(1,2) p point p point * 3 Output: #<Point:0x336094 @x=1, @y=2> #<Point:0x335fa4 @x=3, @y=6> but then, 3 * point is not understood: Point can't be coerced into Fixnum (TypeError) So we need to further define an instance method coerce: class Point def coerce(something) [self, something] end end p 3 * point Output: #<Point:0x3c45a88 @x=3, @y=6> So it is said that 3 * point is the same as 3.*(point) that is, the instance method * takes an argument point and invoke on the object 3. Now, since this method * doesn't know how to multiply a point, so point.coerce(3) will be called, and get back an array: [point, 3] and then * is once again applied to it, is that true? point * 3 which is the same as point.*(3) and now, this is understood and we now have a new Point object, as performed by the instance method * of the Point class. The question is: 1) who invokes point.coerce(3) ? Is it Ruby automatically, or is it some code inside of * method of Fixnum by catching an exception? Or is it by case statement that when it doesn't know one of the known types, then call coerce? 2) Does coerce always need to return an array of 2 elements? Can it be no array? Or can it be an array of 3 elements? 3) And is the rule that, the original operator (or method) * will then be invoked on element 0, with the argument of element 1? (element 0 and element 1 are the two elements in that array returned by coerce) Who does it? Is it done by Ruby or is it done by code in Fixnum? If it is done by code in Fixnum, then it is a "convention" that everybody follows when doing a coerce? So could it be the code in * of Fixnum do something like this: if (something.typeof? ...) else if ... # other type else if ... # other type else # if it is not a type I know array = something.coerce(self) return array[0].*(array[1]) end

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• Few iPhone noob questions

  - by mshsayem

  Why should I declare local variables as 'static' inside a method? Like: static NSString *cellIdentifier = @"Cell"; Is it a performance advantage? (I know what 'static' does; in C context) What does this syntax mean?[someObj release], someObj = nil; Two statements? Why should I assign nil again? Is not 'release' enough? Should I do it for all objects I allocate/own? Or for just view objects? Why does everyone copy NSString, but retains other objects (in property declaration)? Yes, NSStrings can be changed, but other objects can be changed also, right? Then why 'copy' for just NSString, not for all? Is it just a defensive convention? Shouldn't I release constant NSString? Like here:NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell"; Why not? Does the compiler allocate/deallocate it for me? In some tutorial application I observed these (Built with IB): Properties(IBOutlet, with same ivar name): window, someLabel, someTextField, etc etc... In the dealloc method, although the window ivar was released, others were not. My question is: WHY? Shouldn't I release other ivars(labels, textField) as well? Why not? Say, I have 3 cascaded drop-down lists. I mean, based on what is selected on the first list, 2nd list is populated and based on what is selected on the second list, 3rd list is populated. What UI components can reflect this best? How is drop-down list presented in iPhone UI? Tableview with UIPicker? When should I update the 2nd, 3rd list? Or just three labels which have touch events? Can you give me some good example tutorials about Core-Data? (Not just simple data fetching and storing on 2/3 tables with 1/2 relationship) How can I know whether my app is leaking memory? Any tools?

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• How to define an extern, C struct returning function in C++ using MSVC?

  - by DK

  The following source file will not compile with the MSVC compiler (v15.00.30729.01): /* stest.c */ #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" { #endif struct Test; extern struct Test make_Test(int x); struct Test { int x; }; extern struct Test make_Test(int x) { struct Test r; r.x = x; return r; } #ifdef __cplusplus } #endif Compiling with cl /c /Tpstest.c produces the following error: stest.c(8) : error C2526: 'make_Test' : C linkage function cannot return C++ class 'Test' stest.c(6) : see declaration of 'Test' Compiling without /Tp (which tells cl to treat the file as C++) works fine. The file also compiles fine in DigitalMars C and GCC (from mingw) in both C and C++ modes. I also used -ansi -pedantic -Wall with GCC and it had no complaints. For reasons I will go into below, we need to compile this file as C++ for MSVC (not for the others), but with functions being compiled as C. In essence, we want a normal C compiler... except for about six lines. Is there a switch or attribute or something I can add that will allow this to work? The code in question (though not the above; that's just a reduced example) is being produced by a code generator. As part of this, we need to be able to generate floating point nans and infinities as constants (long story), meaning we have to compile with MSVC in C++ mode in order to actually do this. We only found one solution that works, and it only works in C++ mode. We're wrapping the code in extern "C" {...} because we want to control the mangling and calling convention so that we can interface with existing C code. ... also because I trust C++ compilers about as far as I could throw a smallish department store. I also tried wrapping just the reinterpret_cast line in extern "C++" {...}, but of course that doesn't work. Pity. There is a potential solution I found which requires reordering the declarations such that the full struct definition comes before the function foward decl., but this is very inconvenient due to the way the codegen is performed, so I'd really like to avoid having to go down that road if I can.

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• Calling cdecl Functions That Have Different Number of Arguments

  - by KlaxSmashing

  I have functions that I wish to call based on some input. Each function has different number of arguments. In other words, if (strcmp(str, "funcA") == 0) funcA(a, b, c); else if (strcmp(str, "funcB") == 0) funcB(d); else if (strcmp(str, "funcC") == 0) funcC(f, g); This is a bit bulky and hard to maintain. Ideally, these are variadic functions (e.g., printf-style) and can use varargs. But they are not. So exploiting the cdecl calling convention, I am stuffing the stack via a struct full of parameters. I'm wondering if there's a better way to do it. Note that this is strictly for in-house (e.g., simple tools, unit tests, etc.) and will not be used for any production code that might be subjected to malicious attacks. Example: #include <stdio.h> typedef struct __params { unsigned char* a; unsigned char* b; unsigned char* c; } params; int funcA(int a, int b) { printf("a = %d, b = %d\n", a, b); return a; } int funcB(int a, int b, const char* c) { printf("a = %d, b = %d, c = %s\n", a, b, c); return b; } int funcC(int* a) { printf("a = %d\n", *a); *a *= 2; return 0; } typedef int (*f)(params); int main(int argc, char**argv) { int val; int tmp; params myParams; f myFuncA = (f)funcA; f myFuncB = (f)funcB; f myFuncC = (f)funcC; myParams.a = (unsigned char*)100; myParams.b = (unsigned char*)200; val = myFuncA(myParams); printf("val = %d\n", val); myParams.c = (unsigned char*)"This is a test"; val = myFuncB(myParams); printf("val = %d\n", val); tmp = 300; myParams.a = (unsigned char*)&tmp; val = myFuncC(myParams); printf("a = %d, val = %d\n", tmp, val); return 0; } Output: gcc -o func func.c ./func a = 100, b = 200 val = 100 a = 100, b = 200, c = This is a test val = 200 a = 300 a = 600, val = 0

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• Combined sign in and registration page?

  - by Ryan

  This is somewhat against rails convention but I am trying to have one controller that manages both user session authentication and user registration. I am having troubles figuring out how to go about this. So far I am merging the User Controller and the Sessions Controller and having the 'new' method deliver both a new usersession and a new user instance. With the new routes in rails 3 though, I am having trouble figuring out how to generate forms for these items. Below is the code: user_controller.rb class UserController < ApplicationController def new @user_session = UserSession.new @user = User.new end def create_user @user = User.new(params[:user]) if @user.save flash[:notice] = "Account Successfully Registered" redirect_back_or_default signup_path else render :action => new end end def create_session @user_session = UserSession.new(params[:user_session]) if @user_session.save flash[:notice] = "Login successful!" redirect_back_or_default login_path else render :action => new end end end views/user/new.html.erb <div id="login_section"> <% form_for @user_session do |f| -%> <%= f.label :email_address, "Email Address" %> <%= f.text_field :email %> <%= f.label :password, "Password" %> <%= f.text_field :password %> <%= f.submit "Login", :disable_with => 'Logining...' %> <% end -%> </div> <div id="registration_section"> <% form_for @user do |f| -%> <%= f.label :email_address, "Email Address" %> <%= f.text_field :email %> <%= f.label :password, "Password" %> <%= f.text_field :password %> <%= f.label :password_confirmation, "Password Confirmation" %> <%= f.text_field :password_confirmation %> <%= f.submit "Register", :disable_with => 'Logining...' %> <% end -%> </div> I imagine I will need to use :url = something for those forms, but I am unsure how to specify. Within routes.rb I have yet to specify either Usersor UserSessions as resources (not convinced that this is the best way to do it... but I could be). I would like, however, the registration and login on the same page and have implemented this by doing the following: routes.rb match 'signup' => 'user#new' match 'login' => 'user#new' What's the best way to go about solving this?

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• Stepping into Ruby Meta-Programming: Generating proxy methods for multiple internal methods

  - by mstksg

  Hi all; I've multiply heard Ruby touted for its super spectacular meta-programming capabilities, and I was wondering if anyone could help me get started with this problem. I have a class that works as an "archive" of sorts, with internal methods that process and output data based on an input. However, the items in the archive in the class itself are represented and processed with integers, for performance purposes. The actual items outside of the archive are known by their string representation, which is simply number_representation.to_s(36). Because of this, I have hooked up each internal method with a "proxy method" that converts the input into the integer form that the archive recognizes, runs the internal method, and converts the output (either a single other item, or a collection of them) back into strings. The naming convention is this: internal methods are represented by _method_name; their corresponding proxy method is represented by method_name, with no leading underscore. For example: class Archive ## PROXY METHODS ## ## input: string representation of id's ## output: string representation of id's def do_something_with id result = _do_something_with id.to_i(36) return nil if result == nil return result.to_s(36) end def do_something_with_pair id_1,id_2 result = _do_something_with_pair id_1.to_i(36), id_2.to_i(36) return nil if result == nil return result.to_s(36) end def do_something_with_these ids result = _do_something_with_these ids.map { |n| n.to_i(36) } return nil if result == nil return result.to_s(36) end def get_many_from id result = _get_many_from id return nil if result == nil # no sparse arrays returned return result.map { |n| n.to_s(36) } end ## INTERNAL METHODS ## ## input: integer representation of id's ## output: integer representation of id's def _do_something_with id # does something with one integer-represented id, # returning an id represented as an integer end def do_something_with_pair id_1,id_2 # does something with two integer-represented id's, # returning an id represented as an integer end def _do_something_with_these ids # does something with multiple integer ids, # returning an id represented as an integer end def _get_many_from id # does something with one integer-represented id, # returns a collection of id's represented as integers end end There are a couple of reasons why I can't just convert them if id.class == String at the beginning of the internal methods: These internal methods are somewhat computationally-intensive recursive functions, and I don't want the overhead of checking multiple times at every step There is no way, without adding an extra parameter, to tell whether or not to re-convert at the end I want to think of this as an exercise in understanding ruby meta-programming Does anyone have any ideas? edit The solution I'd like would preferably be able to take an array of method names @@PROXY_METHODS = [:do_something_with, :do_something_with_pair, :do_something_with_these, :get_many_from] iterate through them, and in each iteration, put out the proxy method. I'm not sure what would be done with the arguments, but is there a way to test for arguments of a method? If not, then simple duck typing/analogous concept would do as well.

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