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• JavaScript Browser Hacks

  Recently during one of my client side scripting classes, I was trying to show my students some basic examples of JavaScript as an introduction to the language.  My first basic example was to show an alert box using JavaScript via the address bar. The student’s reaction to my browser hack example really caught me off guard in a good way. After programming with a language for close to 10 years you start to lose the "Awe Cool!" effect that new learners of a language experience when writing code. New learns of JavaScript are the reason why I created this post. Please enjoy. Note: Place JavaScript in to address bar and then press the enter key. Example 1: JavaScript Alert box displaying My name: John Doe Javascript:alert('My name: \n John Doe') ; Example 2: JavaScript alert box displaying name entered by user. javascript:alert('My name: \n ' + prompt('Enter Name','Name')) ; Example 3: JavaScript alert box displaying name entered by user, and then displays the length of the name. javascript:var name= prompt('Enter Name','Name'); alert('My name: \n ' + name); alert(name.length); If you notice, the address bar will execute JavaScript on the current page loaded in the browser using the Document Object Model (DOM). Additionally, the address bar will allow multiple lines to be executed sequentially even though all of the code is contained within one line due to the fact that the JavaScript interpreter uses the “;” to indicate where a line of ends and a new one begins. After doing a little more research on the topic of JavaScript Browser Hacks I found a few other cool JavaScript hacks which I will list below. Example 4: Make any webpage editableSource: http://www.openjason.com/2008/09/02/browser-hack-make-any-web-page-editable/ javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0; Example 5: CHINESE DRAGON DANCING Source: http://nzeyi.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/dwrajaxjavascript-hacks-the-secrets-of-javascript-in-the-adress-bar/ javascript:R=0;x1=0.1;y1=0.05;x2=0.25;y2=0.24;x3=1.6; y3=0.24;x4=300;y4=200;x5=300;y5=200;DI=document.links; DIL=DI.length;A=function(){for(i=0;i-DIL;i++){DI[i].style. position='absolute';DI[i].style.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+ x5;DI[i].style.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++;}; setInterval('A()',5);void(0); Example 6: Reveal content stored in password protected fields javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = “”; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j Example 7: Force user to close browser windowSource: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=767053 javascript:while(1){alert('Restart your brower to close this box!')} Learn more about JavaScript Browser Hacks.

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• SQL SERVER – 2012 – All Download Links in Single Page – SQL Server 2012

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server 2012 RTM is just announced and recently I wrote about all the SQL Server 2012 Certification on single page. As a feedback, I received suggestions to have a single page where everything about SQL Server 2012 is listed. I will keep this page updated as new updates are announced. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Evaluation Microsoft SQL Server 2012 enables a cloud-ready information platform that will help organizations unlock breakthrough insights across the organization. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express is a powerful and reliable free data management system that delivers a rich and reliable data store for lightweight Web Sites and desktop applications. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack is a collection of stand-alone packages which provide additional value for Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Report Builder Report Builder provides a productive report-authoring environment for IT professionals and power users. It supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services Add-in For Microsoft Excel The Master Data Services Add-in for Excel gives multiple users the ability to update master data in a familiar tool without compromising the data’s integrity in Master Data Services. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Dashboard Reports The SQL Server 2012 Performance Dashboard Reports are Reporting Services report files designed to be used with the Custom Reports feature of SQL Server Management Studio. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel® 2010 Microsoft PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 provides ground-breaking technology; fast manipulation of large data sets, streamlined integration of data, and the ability to effortlessly share your analysis through Microsoft SharePoint. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies 2010 The SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 technologies allows you to integrate your reporting environment with the collaborative SharePoint 2010 experience. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Semantic Language Statistics The Semantic Language Statistics Database is a required component for the Statistical Semantic Search feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Semantic Language Statistics. Microsoft ®SQL Server 2012 FileStream Driver – Windows Logo Certification Catalog file for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 FileStream Driver that is certified for WindowsServer 2008 R2. It meets Microsoft standards for compatibility and recommended practices with the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems. Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight 2.0 Microsoft StreamInsight is Microsoft’s Complex Event Processing technology to help businesses create event-driven applications and derive better insights by correlating event streams from multiple sources with near-zero latency. Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server Download the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server, a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs) available in Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 and 6. Data Quality Services Performance Best Practices Guide This guide focuses on a set of best practices for optimizing performance of Data Quality Services (DQS). Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for SQL Server for PHP The Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for SQL Server for PHP provide connectivity to Microsoft SQLServer from PHP applications. Product Documentation for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 for firewall and proxy restricted environments The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 setup installs only the Help Viewer…install any documentation. All of the SQL Server documentation is available online. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• 5 Steps to getting started with IronRuby

  - by Eric Nelson

  IronRuby is a Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming language for .NET, heavily relying on Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime. The project's #1 goal is to be a true Ruby implementation, meaning it runs existing Ruby code. Check out this summary of using the Ruby standard library and 3rd party libraries in IronRuby. IronRuby has tight integration with .NET, so any .NET types can be used from IronRuby and the IronRuby runtime can be embedded into any .NET application. These 5 steps should get you nicely up and running on IronRuby – OR … you could just watch a video session from the lead developer which took place earlier this month (March 2010 - 60mins). But the 5 steps will be quicker :-) Step 1 – Install IronRuby :-) You can install IronRuby automatically using an MSI or manually. For simplicity I would recommend the MSI install. TIP: As of the 25th of March IronRuby has not quite shipped. The download above is a Release Candidate (RC) which means it is still undergoing final testing by the team. You will need to uninstall this version (RC3) once the final release is available. The good news is that uninstalling IronRuby RC3 will work without a hitch as the MSI does relatively little. Step 2 – Install an IronRuby friendly editor You will need to Install an editor to work with IronRuby as there is no designer support for IronRuby inside Visual Studio. There are many editors to choose from but I would recommend you either went with: SciTE (Download the MSI): This is a lightweight text editor which is simple to get up and running. SciTE understands Ruby syntax and allows you to easily run IronRuby code within the editor with a small change to the config file. SharpDevelop 3.2 (Download the MSI): This is an open source development environment for C#, VB, Boo and now IronRuby. IronRuby support is new but it does include integrated debugging. You might also want to check out the main site for SharpDevelop. TIP: There are commercial tools for Ruby development which offer richer support such as intellisense.. They can be coerced into working with IronRuby. A good one to start with is RubyMine which needs some small changes to make it work with IronRuby. Step 3 – Run the IronRuby Tutorial Run through the IronRuby tutorial which is included in the IronRuby download. It covers off the basics of the Ruby languages and how IronRuby integrates with .NET. In a typical install it will end up at C:\Program Files\IronRuby 0.9.4.0\Samples\Tutorial. Which will give you the tutorial implemented in .NET and Ruby. TIP: You might also want to check out these two introductory posts Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’ and What's IronRuby, and how do I put it on Rails? Step 4 – Get some good books to read Get a great book on Ruby and IronRuby. There are several free ebooks on Ruby which will help you learn the language. The little book of Ruby is a good place to start. I would also recommend you purchase IronRuby Unleashed (Buy on Amazon UK | Buy on Amazon USA). You might also want to check out this mini-review. Other books are due out soon including IronRuby in Action. TIP: Also check out the official documentation for using .NET from IronRuby. Step 5 – Keep an eye on the team blogs Keep an eye on the IronRuby team blogs including Jimmy Schementi, Jim Deville and Tomas Matousek (full list) TIP: And keep a watch out for the final release of IronRuby – due anytime soon!

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• Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 (and a cool scenario w/ ASP.NET MVC 2)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the seventeenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers two new language feature being added to C# 4.0 – optional parameters and named arguments – as well as a cool way you can take advantage of optional parameters (both in VB and C#) with ASP.NET MVC 2. Optional Parameters in C# 4.0 C# 4.0 now supports using optional parameters with methods, constructors, and indexers (note: VB has supported optional parameters for awhile). Parameters are optional when a default value is specified as part of a declaration.  For example, the method below takes two parameters – a “category” string parameter, and a “pageIndex” integer parameter.  The “pageIndex” parameter has a default value of 0, and as such is an optional parameter: When calling the above method we can explicitly pass two parameters to it: Or we can omit passing the second optional parameter – in which case the default value of 0 will be passed:   Note that VS 2010’s Intellisense indicates when a parameter is optional, as well as what its default value is when statement completion is displayed: Named Arguments and Optional Parameters in C# 4.0 C# 4.0 also now supports the concept of “named arguments”.  This allows you to explicitly name an argument you are passing to a method – instead of just identifying it by argument position.  For example, I could write the code below to explicitly identify the second argument passed to the GetProductsByCategory method by name (making its usage a little more explicit): Named arguments come in very useful when a method supports multiple optional parameters, and you want to specify which arguments you are passing.  For example, below we have a method DoSomething that takes two optional parameters: We could use named arguments to call the above method in any of the below ways: Because both parameters are optional, in cases where only one (or zero) parameters is specified then the default value for any non-specified arguments is passed. ASP.NET MVC 2 and Optional Parameters One nice usage scenario where we can now take advantage of the optional parameter support of VB and C# is with ASP.NET MVC 2’s input binding support to Action methods on Controller classes. For example, consider a scenario where we want to map URLs like “Products/Browse/Beverages” or “Products/Browse/Deserts” to a controller action method.  We could do this by writing a URL routing rule that maps the URLs to a method like so: We could then optionally use a “page” querystring value to indicate whether or not the results displayed by the Browse method should be paged – and if so which page of the results should be displayed.  For example: /Products/Browse/Beverages?page=2. With ASP.NET MVC 1 you would typically handle this scenario by adding a “page” parameter to the action method and make it a nullable int (which means it will be null if the “page” querystring value is not present).  You could then write code like below to convert the nullable int to an int – and assign it a default value if it was not present in the querystring: With ASP.NET MVC 2 you can now take advantage of the optional parameter support in VB and C# to express this behavior more concisely and clearly.  Simply declare the action method parameter as an optional parameter with a default value: C# VB If the “page” value is present in the querystring (e.g. /Products/Browse/Beverages?page=22) then it will be passed to the action method as an integer.  If the “page” value is not in the querystring (e.g. /Products/Browse/Beverages) then the default value of 0 will be passed to the action method.  This makes the code a little more concise and readable. Summary There are a bunch of great new language features coming to both C# and VB with VS 2010.  The above two features (optional parameters and named parameters) are but two of them.  I’ll blog about more in the weeks and months ahead. If you are looking for a good book that summarizes all the language features in C# (including C# 4.0), as well provides a nice summary of the core .NET class libraries, you might also want to check out the newly released C# 4.0 in a Nutshell book from O’Reilly: It does a very nice job of packing a lot of content in an easy to search and find samples format. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• Software index broken

  - by Arvind Gangwar

  When I was installing MTS Mblaz crossplatformui.deb for MTS data connect, its installed partial and shows error, and So I tried to uninstall "crossplatformui" but every time it showed following error. installArchives() failed: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_IN.ISO8859-1" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory (Reading database ... (Reading database ... 5% (Reading database ... 10% (Reading database ... 15% (Reading database ... 20% (Reading database ... 25% (Reading database ... 30% (Reading database ... 35% (Reading database ... 40% (Reading database ... 45% (Reading database ... 50% (Reading database ... 55% (Reading database ... 60% (Reading database ... 65% (Reading database ... 70% (Reading database ... 75% (Reading database ... 80% (Reading database ... 85% (Reading database ... 90% (Reading database ... 95% (Reading database ... 100% (Reading database ... 205769 files and directories currently installed.) Removing crossplatformui ... ztemtvcdromd: no process found dpkg: error processing crossplatformui (--remove): subprocess installed post-removal script returned error exit status 1 No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: crossplatformui Setting up firmware-b43-installer (4.150.10.5-5) ... --2012-06-01 14:11:21-- http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 Resolving mirror2.openwrt.org... 46.4.11.11 Connecting to mirror2.openwrt.org|46.4.11.11|:80... failed: Connection refused. dpkg: error processing firmware-b43-installer (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 4

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• SQLAuthority News – History of the Database – 5 Years of Blogging at SQLAuthority

  - by pinaldave

  Don’t miss the Contest:Participate in 5th Anniversary Contest   Today is this blog’s birthday, and I want to do a fun, informative blog post. Five years ago this day I started this blog. Intention – my personal web blog. I wrote this blog for me and still today whatever I learn I share here. I don’t want to wander too far off topic, though, so I will write about two of my favorite things – history and databases.  And what better way to cover these two topics than to talk about the history of databases. If you want to be technical, databases as we know them today only date back to the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when computers began to keep records and store memories.  But the idea of memory storage didn’t just appear 40 years ago – there was a history behind wanting to keep these records. In fact, the written word originated as a way to keep records – ancient man didn’t decide they suddenly wanted to read novels, they needed a way to keep track of the harvest, of their flocks, and of the tributes paid to the local lord.  And that is how writing and the database began.  You could consider the cave paintings from 17,0000 years ago at Lascaux, France, or the clay token from the ancient Sumerians in 8,000 BC to be the first instances of record keeping – and thus databases. If you prefer, you can consider the advent of written language to be the first database.  Many historians believe the first written language appeared in the 37th century BC, with Egyptian hieroglyphics. The ancient Sumerians, not to be outdone, also created their own written language within a few hundred years. Databases could be more closely described as collections of information, in which case the Sumerians win the prize for the first archive.  A collection of 20,000 stone tablets was unearthed in 1964 near the modern day city Tell Mardikh, in Syria.  This ancient database is from 2,500 BC, and appears to be a sort of law library where apprentice-scribes copied important documents.  Further archaeological digs hope to uncover the palace library, and thus an even larger database. Of course, the most famous ancient database would have to be the Royal Library of Alexandria, the great collection of records and wisdom in ancient Egypt.  It was created by Ptolemy I, and existed from 300 BC through 30 AD, when Julius Caesar effectively erased the hard drives when he accidentally set fire to it.  As any programmer knows who has forgotten to hit “save” or has experienced a sudden power outage, thousands of hours of work was lost in a single instant. Databases existed in very similar conditions up until recently.  Cuneiform tablets gave way to papyrus, which led to vellum, and eventually modern paper and the printing press.  Someday the databases we rely on so much today will become another chapter in the history of record keeping.  Who knows what the databases of tomorrow will look like! Reference:  Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Solving Euler Project Problem Number 1 with Microsoft Axum

  - by Jeff Ferguson

  Note: The code below applies to version 0.3 of Microsoft Axum. If you are not using this version of Axum, then your code may differ from that shown here. I have just solved Problem 1 of Project Euler using Microsoft Axum. The problem statement is as follows: If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. My Axum-based solution is as follows: namespace EulerProjectProblem1{ // http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=1 // // If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. // The sum of these multiples is 23. // Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. channel SumOfMultiples { input int Multiple1; input int Multiple2; input int UpperBound; output int Sum; } agent SumOfMultiplesAgent : channel SumOfMultiples { public SumOfMultiplesAgent() { int Multiple1 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple1); int Multiple2 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple2); int UpperBound = receive(PrimaryChannel::UpperBound); int Sum = 0; for(int Index = 1; Index < UpperBound; Index++) { if((Index % Multiple1 == 0) || (Index % Multiple2 == 0)) Sum += Index; } PrimaryChannel::Sum <-- Sum; } } agent MainAgent : channel Microsoft.Axum.Application { public MainAgent() { var SumOfMultiples = SumOfMultiplesAgent.CreateInNewDomain(); SumOfMultiples::Multiple1 <-- 3; SumOfMultiples::Multiple2 <-- 5; SumOfMultiples::UpperBound <-- 1000; var Sum = receive(SumOfMultiples::Sum); System.Console.WriteLine(Sum); System.Console.ReadLine(); PrimaryChannel::ExitCode <-- 0; } }} Let’s take a look at the various parts of the code. I begin by setting up a channel called SumOfMultiples that accepts three inputs and one output. The first two of the three inputs will represent the two possible multiples, which are three and five in this case. The third input will represent the upper bound of the problem scope, which is 1000 in this case. The lone output of the channel represents the sum of all of the matching multiples: channel SumOfMultiples{ input int Multiple1; input int Multiple2; input int UpperBound; output int Sum;} I then set up an agent that uses the channel. The agent, called SumOfMultiplesAgent, received the three inputs from the channel sent to the agent, stores the results in local variables, and performs the for loop that iterates from 1 to the received upper bound. The agent keeps track of the sum in a local variable and stores the sum in the output portion of the channel: agent SumOfMultiplesAgent : channel SumOfMultiples{ public SumOfMultiplesAgent() { int Multiple1 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple1); int Multiple2 = receive(PrimaryChannel::Multiple2); int UpperBound = receive(PrimaryChannel::UpperBound); int Sum = 0; for(int Index = 1; Index < UpperBound; Index++) { if((Index % Multiple1 == 0) || (Index % Multiple2 == 0)) Sum += Index; } PrimaryChannel::Sum <-- Sum; }} The application’s main agent, therefore, simply creates a new SumOfMultiplesAgent in a new domain, prepares the channel with the inputs that we need, and then receives the Sum from the output portion of the channel: agent MainAgent : channel Microsoft.Axum.Application{ public MainAgent() { var SumOfMultiples = SumOfMultiplesAgent.CreateInNewDomain(); SumOfMultiples::Multiple1 <-- 3; SumOfMultiples::Multiple2 <-- 5; SumOfMultiples::UpperBound <-- 1000; var Sum = receive(SumOfMultiples::Sum); System.Console.WriteLine(Sum); System.Console.ReadLine(); PrimaryChannel::ExitCode <-- 0; }} The result of the calculation (which, by the way, is 233,168) is sent to the console using good ol’ Console.WriteLine().

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• Fake It Easy On Yourself

  - by Lee Brandt

  I have been using Rhino.Mocks pretty much since I started being a mockist-type tester. I have been very happy with it for the most part, but a year or so ago, I got a glimpse of some tests using Moq. I thought the little bit I saw was very compelling. For a long time, I had been using: 1: var _repository = MockRepository.GenerateMock<IRepository>(); 2: _repository.Expect(repo=>repo.SomeCall()).Return(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository); 4:  5: ... some exercising code 6: _repository.AssertWasCalled(repo => repo.SomeCall()); I was happy with that syntax. I didn’t go looking for something else, but what I saw was: 1: var _repository = new Mock(); And I thought, “That looks really nice!” The code was very expressive and easier to read that the Rhino.Mocks syntax. I have gotten so used to the Rhino.Mocks syntax that it made complete sense to me, but to developers I was mentoring in mocking, it was sometimes to obtuse. SO I thought I would write some tests using Moq as my mocking tool. But I discovered something ugly once I got into it. The way Mocks are created makes Moq very easy to read, but that only gives you a Mock not the object itself, which is what you’ll need to pass to the exercising code. So this is what it ends up looking like: 1: var _repository = new Mock<IRepository>(); 2: _repository.SetUp(repo=>repo.SomeCall).Returns(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository.Object); 4: .. some exercizing code 5: _repository.Verify(repo => repo.SomeCall()); Two things jump out at me: 1) when I set up my mocked calls, do I set it on the Mock or the Mock’s “object”? and 2) What am I verifying on SomeCall? Just that it was called? that it is available to call? Dealing with 2 objects, a “Mock” and an “Object” made me have to consider naming conventions. Should I always call the mock _repositoryMock and the object _repository? So I went back to Rhino.Mocks. It is the most widely used framework, and show other how to use it is easier because there is one natural object to use, the _repository. Then I came across a blog post from Patrik Hägne, and that led me to a post about FakeItEasy. I went to the Google Code site and when I saw the syntax, I got very excited. Then I read the wiki page where Patrik stated why he wrote FakeItEasy, and it mirrored my own experience. So I began to play with it a bit. So far, I am sold. the syntax is VERY easy to read and the fluent interface is super discoverable. It basically looks like this: 1: var _repository = A.Fake<IRepository>(); 2: a.CallTo(repo=>repo.SomeMethod()).Returns(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository); 4: ... some exercising code 5: A.CallTo(() => _repository.SOmeMethod()).MustHaveHappened(); Very nice. But is it mature? It’s only been around a couple of years, so will I be giving up some thing that I use a lot because it hasn’t been implemented yet? I doesn’t seem so. As I read more examples and posts from Patrik, he has some pretty complex scenarios. He even has support for VB.NET! So if you are looking for a mocking framework that looks and feels very natural, try out FakeItEasy!

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• IE9, HTML5 and truck load of other stuff happening around the web

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  First of all, I haven’t been updating this blog as regularly as it used to be.  Primarily, due to the fact was I was visiting a lot of cities talking about SharePoint, Web Matrix, IE9 and few other stuff.  IE9 is my new found love and I simply think we have done great work in improving the browser and browsing experiences for our users. This post would talk about IE, general things happening around the web and few misconceptions around IE (I had earlier written about IE8 and common myths When you think about the way web has transformed, its truly amazing.  Rewind back to late 90s and early 2000s, web was a luxury.  There were lot of desktop applications running around and web applications was starting to pick up.  Primarily reason was not a lot of folks were into web development and the areas of web were confined to HTML and JavaScript.  CSS was around here and there but no one took it so seriously.  XML, XSLT was fast picking up and contributed to decent web development techniques. So as a web developer all we had to worry about was, building good looking websites which worked well with IE6 and occasionally with Safari.  Firefox was  not even in the picture then and so was Chrome.  But with the various arms of W3C consortium and other bodies working actively on stuff like CSS, SVG and XHTML, few more areas came into picture when it comes to browsers supporting standards.  IE6 for sure wasn’t up to the speed and the main issue we were tackling then was privacy and piracy.  We did invest a lot of our efforts to curb piracy and one of the steps into it was that, IE7 the next version of IE would install only on genuine windows machines.  What this means, is that, people who were running pirated windows xp knowingly/unknowingly could not install IE7 and the limitations of IE6 really hurt them.  One more thing of importance is that, if you were running pirated windows, lots of chances that you didn’t get the security updates and thereby were vulnerable to run viruses/trojans on your system. Many of them actually block using IE in the first place and make it difficult to browse.  SP2 came as a big boon but again was there only for genuine windows machines. With Firefox coming as a free install and also heavily pushed by Google then, it was natural that people would try an alternative.  By then, we had started working on IE8 supporting the best standards (note HTML5, CSS 2.1 and other specs were then work in progress.  they are still) Later, Google in their infinite wisdom realized that with Firefox they were going nowhere and they released Chrome.  Now, they heavily push Chrome even for Firefox users, which is natural since its their browser. In the meanwhile, these browsers push their updates as mandatory and therefore have a very short lifecycle to add enhancements and support for stuff like CSS etc., Meanwhile, when IE8 came out, it really was the best standards supported browser and a lot of people saw our efforts in improving our browser. HTML5 is the buzz word in the industry and there is a lot of noise being made by many browsers claiming their support for it.  IE8 doesn’t have much support for HTML5.  But, with IE9 Beta, we have great support for many of HTML5 specifications.  Note that, HTML5 is still work under progress and one of the board of members working on the spec has mentioned that these specs might change and relying on them heavily is dangerous.  But, some of the advances such as video tag, etc., are indeed supported in IE9 Beta.  IE9 Beta also has full hardware acceleration support which other browsers don’t have. IE8 had advanced security features such as smartscreen filter, in-private browsing, anti-phishing and a lot of other stuff.  IE9 builds on top of these with the best in town security standards as well as support for HTML5, CSS3, Hardware acceleration, SVG and many other advancements in browser.  Read more at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/#/highlights/html5  To summarize, IE9 Beta is really innovative and you should try it to believe what it provides.  You can visit http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/  to install as well as read more on this. Cheers !!!

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• Generate a merge statement from table structure

  - by Nigel Rivett

  This code generates a merge statement joining on he natural key and checking all other columns to see if they have changed. The full version deals with type 2 processing and an audit trail but this version is useful. Just the insert or update part is handy too. Change the table at the top (spt_values in master in the version) and the join columns for the merge in @nk. The output generated is at the top and the code to run to generate it below. Output merge spt_values a using spt_values b on a.name = b.name and a.number = b.number and a.type = b.type when matched and (1=0 or (a.low b.low) or (a.low is null and b.low is not null) or (a.low is not null and b.low is null) or (a.high b.high) or (a.high is null and b.high is not null) or (a.high is not null and b.high is null) or (a.status b.status) or (a.status is null and b.status is not null) or (a.status is not null and b.status is null) ) then update set low = b.low , high = b.high , status = b.status when not matched by target then insert ( name , number , type , low , high , status ) values ( b.name , b.number , b.type , b.low , b.high , b.status ); Generator set nocount on declare @t varchar(128) = 'spt_values' declare @i int = 0 -- this is the natural key on the table used for the merge statement join declare @nk table (ColName varchar(128)) insert @nk select 'Number' insert @nk select 'Name' insert @nk select 'Type' declare @cols table (seq int, nkseq int, type int, colname varchar(128)) ;with cte as ( select ordinal_position, type = case when columnproperty(object_id(@t), COLUMN_NAME,'IsIdentity') = 1 then 3 when nk.ColName is not null then 1 else 0 end, COLUMN_NAME from information_schema.columns c left join @nk nk on c.column_name = nk.ColName where table_name = @t ) insert @cols (seq, nkseq, type, colname) select ordinal_position, row_number() over (partition by type order by ordinal_position) , type, COLUMN_NAME from cte declare @result table (i int, j int, k int, data varchar(500)) select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, 'merge ' + @t + ' a' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' using cte b' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, j, data) select @i, nkseq, ' ' + case when nkseq = 1 then 'on' else 'and' end + ' a.' + ColName + ' = b.' + ColName from @cols where type = 1 select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' when matched and (1=0' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, j, k, data) select @i, seq, 1, ' or (a.' + ColName + ' b.' + ColName + ')' + ' or (a.' + ColName + ' is null and b.' + ColName + ' is not null)' + ' or (a.' + ColName + ' is not null and b.' + ColName + ' is null)' from @cols where type 1 select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' )' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' then update set' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, j, data) select @i, nkseq, ' ' + case when nkseq = 1 then ' ' else ', ' end + colname + ' = b.' + colname from @cols where type = 0 select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' when not matched by target then insert' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' (' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, j, data) select @i, seq, ' ' + case when seq = 1 then ' ' else ', ' end + colname from @cols where type 3 select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' )' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' values' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' (' select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, j, data) select @i, seq, ' ' + case when seq = 1 then ' ' else ', ' end + 'b.' + colname from @cols where type 3 select @i = @i + 1 insert @result (i, data) select @i, ' );' select data from @result order by i,j,k,data

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• New R Interface to Oracle Data Mining Available for Download

  - by charlie.berger

    The R Interface to Oracle Data Mining ( R-ODM) allows R users to access the power of Oracle Data Mining's in-database functions using the familiar R syntax. R-ODM provides a powerful environment for prototyping data analysis and data mining methodologies. R-ODM is especially useful for: Quick prototyping of vertical or domain-based applications where the Oracle Database supports the application Scripting of "production" data mining methodologies Customizing graphics of ODM data mining results (examples: classification, regression, anomaly detection) The R-ODM interface allows R users to mine data using Oracle Data Mining from the R programming environment. It consists of a set of function wrappers written in source R language that pass data and parameters from the R environment to the Oracle RDBMS enterprise edition as standard user PL/SQL queries via an ODBC interface. The R-ODM interface code is a thin layer of logic and SQL that calls through an ODBC interface. R-ODM does not use or expose any Oracle product code as it is completely an external interface and not part of any Oracle product. R-ODM is similar to the example scripts (e.g., the PL/SQL demo code) that illustrates the use of Oracle Data Mining, for example, how to create Data Mining models, pass arguments, retrieve results etc. R-ODM is packaged as a standard R source package and is distributed freely as part of the R environment's Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). For information about the R environment, R packages and CRAN, see www.r-project.org. R-ODM is particularly intended for data analysts and statisticians familiar with R but not necessarily familiar with the Oracle database environment or PL/SQL. It is a convenient environment to rapidly experiment and prototype Data Mining models and applications. Data Mining models prototyped in the R environment can easily be deployed in their final form in the database environment, just like any other standard Oracle Data Mining model. What is R? R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs stored in script files. The design of R has been heavily influenced by two existing languages: Becker, Chambers & Wilks' S and Sussman's Scheme. Whereas the resulting language is very similar in appearance to S, the underlying implementation and semantics are derived from Scheme. R was initially written by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. Since mid-1997 there has been a core group (the "R Core Team") who can modify the R source code archive. Besides this core group many R users have contributed application code as represented in the near 1,500 publicly-available packages in the CRAN archive (which has shown exponential growth since 2001; R News Volume 8/2, October 2008). Today the R community is a vibrant and growing group of dozens of thousands of users worldwide. It is free software distributed under a GNU-style copyleft, and an official part of the GNU project ("GNU S"). Resources: R website / CRAN R-ODM

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• Sprinkle Some Magik on that Java Virtual Machine

  - by Jim Connors

  GE Energy, through its Smallworld subsidiary, has been providing geospatial software solutions to the utility and telco markets for over 20 years.  One of the fundamental building blocks of their technology is a dynamically-typed object oriented programming language called Magik.  Like Java, Magik source code is compiled down to bytecodes that run on a virtual machine -- in this case the Magik Virtual Machine. Throughout the years, GE has invested considerable engineering talent in the support and maintenance of this virtual machine.  At the same time vast energy and resources have been invested in the Java Virtual Machine. The question for GE has been whether to continue to make that investment on its own or to leverage massive effort provided by the Java community? Utilizing the Java Virtual Machine instead of maintaining its own virtual machine would give GE more opportunity to focus on application solutions.   At last count, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of programming languages that have been hosted atop the Java Virtual Machine.  Prior to the release of Java 7, that effort, although certainly possible, was generally less than optimal for languages like Magik because of its dynamic nature.  Java, as a statically typed language had little use for this capability.  In the quest to be a more universal virtual machine, Java 7, via JSR-292, introduced a new bytecode called invokedynamic.  In short, invokedynamic affords a more flexible method call mechanism needed by dynamic languages like Magik. With this new capability GE Energy has succeeded in hosting their Magik environment on top of the Java Virtual Machine.  So you may ask, why would GE wish to do such a thing?  The benefits are many: Competitors to GE Energy claimed that the Magik environment was proprietary.  By utilizing the Java Virtual Machine, that argument gets put to bed.  JVM development is done in open source, where contributions are made world-wide by all types of organizations and individuals. The unprecedented wealth of class libraries and applications written for the Java platform are now opened up to Magik/JVM platform as first class citizens. In addition, the Magik/JVM solution vastly increases the developer pool to include the 9 million Java developers -- the largest developer community on the planet. Applications running on the JVM showed substantial performance gains, in some cases as much as a 5x speed up over the original Magik platform. Legacy Magik applications can still run on the original platform.  They can be seamlessly migrated to run on the JVM by simply recompiling the source code. GE can now leverage the huge Java community.  Undeniably the best virtual machine ever created, hundreds if not thousands of world class developers continually improve, poke, prod and scrutinize all aspects of the Java platform.  As enhancements are made, GE automatically gains access to these. As Magik has little in the way of support for multi-threading, GE will benefit from current and future Java offerings (e.g. lambda expressions) that aim to further facilitate multi-core/multi-threaded application development. As the JVM is available for many more platforms, it broadens the reach of Magik, including the potential to run on a class devices never envisioned just a few short years ago.  For example, Java SE compatible runtime environments are available for popular embedded ARM/Intel/PowerPC configurations that could theoretically host this software too. As compared to other JVM language projects, the Magik integration differs in that it represents a serious commercial entity betting a sizable part of its business on the success of this effort.  Expect to see announcements not only from General Electric, but other organizations as they realize the benefits of utilizing the Java Virtual Machine.

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• Future Of F# At Jazoon 2011

  - by Alois Kraus

  I was at the Jazoon 2011 in Zurich (Switzerland). It was a really cool event and it had many top notch speaker not only from the Microsoft universe. One of the most interesting talks was from Don Syme with the title: F# Today/F# Tomorrow. He did show how to use F# scripting to browse through open databases/, OData Web Services, Sharepoint, …interactively. It looked really easy with the help of F# Type Providers which is the next big language feature in a future F# version. The object returned by a Type Provider is used to access the data like in usual strongly typed object model. No guessing how the property of an object is called. Intellisense will show it just as you expect. There exists a range of Type Providers for various data sources where the schema of the stored data can somehow be dynamically extracted. Lets use e.g. a free database it would be then let data = DbProvider(http://.....); data the object which contains all data from e.g. a chemical database. It has an elements collection which contains an element which has the properties: Name, AtomicMass, Picture, …. You can browse the object returned by the Type Provider with full Intellisense because the returned object is strongly typed which makes this happen. The same can be achieved of course with code generators that use an input the schema of the input data (OData Web Service, database, Sharepoint, JSON serialized data, …) and spit out the necessary strongly typed objects as an assembly. This does work but has the downside that if the schema of your data source is huge you will quickly run against a wall with traditional code generators since the generated “deserialization” assembly could easily become several hundred MB. *** The following part contains guessing how this exactly work by asking Don two questions **** Q: Can I use Type Providers within C#? D: No. Q: F# is after all a library. I can reference the F# assemblies and use the contained Type Providers? D: F# does annotate the generated types in a special way at runtime which is not a static type that C# could use. The F# type providers seem to use a hybrid approach. At compilation time the Type Provider is instantiated with the url of your input data. The obtained schema information is used by the compiler to generate static types as usual but only for a small subset (the top level classes up to certain nesting level would make sense to me). To make this work you need to access the actual data source at compile time which could be a problem if you want to keep the actual url in a config file. Ok so this explains why it does work at all. But in the demo we did see full intellisense support down to the deepest object level. It looks like if you navigate deeper into the object hierarchy the type provider is instantiated in the background and attach to a true static type the properties determined at run time while you were typing. So this type is not really static at all. It is static if you define as a static type that its properties shows up in intellisense. But since this type information is determined while you are typing and it is not used to generate a true static type and you cannot use these “intellistatic” types from C#. Nonetheless this is a very cool language feature. With the plotting libraries you can generate expressive charts from any datasource within seconds to get quickly an overview of any structured data storage. My favorite programming language C# will not get such features in the near future there is hope. If you restrict yourself to OData sources you can use LINQPad to query any OData enabled data source with LINQ with ease. There you can query Stackoverflow with The output is also nicely rendered which makes it a very good tool to explore OData sources today.

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• DATEFROMPARTS

  - by jamiet

  I recently overheard a remark by Greg Low in which he said something akin to "the most interesting parts of a new SQL Server release are the myriad of small things that are in there that make a developer's life easier" (I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the actual quote but it was something like that). The new DATEFROMPARTS function is a classic example of that . It simply takes three integer parameters and builds a date out of them (if you have used DateSerial in Reporting Services then you'll understand). Take the following code which generates the first and last day of some given years: SELECT 2008 AS Yr INTO #Years UNION ALL SELECT 2009 UNION ALL SELECT 2010 UNION ALL SELECT 2011 UNION ALL SELECT 2012SELECT [FirstDayOfYear] = CONVERT(DATE,CONVERT(CHAR(8),((y.[Yr] * 10000) + 101))),      [LastDayOfYear] = CONVERT(DATE,CONVERT(CHAR(8),((y.[Yr] * 10000) + 1231)))FROM   #Years y here are the results: That code is pretty gnarly though with those CONVERTs in there and, worse, if the character string is constructed in a certain way then it could fail due to localisation, check this out: SET LANGUAGE french;SELECT dt,Month_Name=DATENAME(mm,dt)FROM   (       SELECT  dt = CONVERT(DATETIME,CONVERT(CHAR(4),y.[Yr]) + N'-01-02')       FROM    #Years y       )d;SET LANGUAGE us_english;SELECT dt,Month_Name=DATENAME(mm,dt)FROM   (       SELECT  dt = CONVERT(DATETIME,CONVERT(CHAR(4),y.[Yr]) + N'-01-02')       FROM    #Years y       )d; Notice how the datetime has been converted differently based on the language setting. When French, the string "2012-01-02" gets interpreted as 1st February whereas when us_english the same string is interpreted as 2nd January. Instead of all this CONVERTing nastiness we have DATEFROMPARTS: SELECT [FirstDayOfYear] = DATEFROMPARTS(y.[Yr],1,1),    [LasttDayOfYear] = DATEFROMPARTS(y.[Yr],12,31)FROM   #Years y How much nicer is that? The bad news of course is that you have to upgrade to SQL Server 2012 or migrate to SQL Azure if you want to use it, as is the way of the world! Don't forget that if you want to try this code out on SQL Azure right this second, for free, you can do so by connecting up to AdventureWorks On Azure. You don't even need to have SSMS handy - a browser that runs Silverlight will do just fine. Simply head to https://mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net/ and use the following credentials: Database AdventureWorks2012 User sqlfamily Password sqlf@m1ly One caveat, SELECT INTO doesn't work on SQL Azure so you'll have to use this instead: DECLARE @y TABLE ( [Yr] INT);INSERT @y([Yr])SELECT 2008 AS Yr UNION ALL SELECT 2009 UNION ALL SELECT 2010 UNION ALL SELECT 2011 UNION ALL SELECT 2012;SELECT [FirstDayOfYear] = DATEFROMPARTS(y.[Yr],1,1),      [LastDayOfYear] = DATEFROMPARTS(y.[Yr],12,31)FROM @y y;SELECT [FirstDayOfYear] = CONVERT(DATE,CONVERT(CHAR(8),((y.[Yr] * 10000) + 101))),      [LastDayOfYear] = CONVERT(DATE,CONVERT(CHAR(8),((y.[Yr] * 10000) + 1231)))FROM @y y; @Jamiet

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• Why don't we just fix Javascript?

  - by Jan Meyer

  Javascript sucks because of a few fatalities well pointed out by Douglas Crockford. We talk a lot about it. But the point here is, why we don't fix it? Coffeescript of course does that and a lot more. But the question here is another: if we provide a webservice that can convert one version of Javascript to the next, and so on, we can keep the language up to date. Such a conversion allows old code to run, albeit with an ever-increasing startup delay, as newer browsers convert old code to the new syntax. To avoid that delay, the site only needs to take the output of the code-transform and paste it in! The effort has immediate benefits for those businesses interested in the results. The rest can sleep tight: their code will continue to run. If we provide backward code-transformation also, then elder browsers can also run ANY new code! Migration scripts should be created by those that make changes to a language. Today they don't, which is in itself a fundamental omission! It should be am obvious part of their job to provide them, as their job isn't really done without them. The onus of making it work should be on them. With this system Any site will be able to run in Any browser, but new code will run best on the newest browsers. This way we reap the benefit of an up-to-date and productive development environment, where today we suffer, supposedly because of yesterday. This is a misconception. We are all trapped in committee-thinking, and we drag along things that only worsen our performance over time! We cause an ever increasing complexity that is hard to underestimate. Javascript is easily fixed. The fact is we don't. As an example, I have seen Patrick Michaud tackle the migration problem in PmWiki. It included forward migration scripts. Whenever syntax changes were made, a migration script was added to transform pages to the new syntax. As far as I know, ALL migrations have worked flawlessly. In other words, we don't tackle the migration problem, we just drag it along. We are incompetent! And why is that? Because technically incompetent people feel they must decide for us. Because they are incompetent, fear rules them. They are obnoxiously conservative, and we suffer the consequence of bad leadership. But the competent don't need to play by the same rules. They can (and must) change them. They are the path forward. It is about time to leave the past behind, and pursue the leanest meanest, no, eternal functionality. That would in and of itself revolutionize programming. So, why don't we stop whining and fix programming? Begin with Javascript and change the world. Even if the browser doesn't hook into this system, coders could. So language updaters should take it upon them to provide migration scripts. Once they exist, browsers may take advantage of them.

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• Fun with Python

  - by dotneteer

  I am taking a class on Coursera recently. My formal education is in physics. Although I have been working as a developer for over 18 years and have learnt a lot of programming on the job, I still would like to gain some systematic knowledge in computer science. Coursera courses taught by Standard professors provided me a wonderful chance. The three languages recommended for assignments are Java, C and Python. I am fluent in Java and have done some projects using C++/MFC/ATL in the past, but I would like to try something different this time. I first started with pure C. Soon I discover that I have to write a lot of code outside the question that I try to solve because the very limited C standard library. For example, to read a list of values from a file, I have to read characters by characters until I hit a delimiter. If I need a list that can grow, I have to create a data structure myself, something that I have taking for granted in .Net or Java. Out of frustration, I switched to Python. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Python is very easy to learn. The tutorial on the official Python site has the exactly the right pace for me, someone with experience in another programming. After a couple of hours on the tutorial and a few more minutes of toying with IDEL, I was in business. I like the “battery supplied” philosophy that gives everything that I need out of box. For someone from C# or Java background, curly braces are replaced by colon(:) and tab spaces. Although I tend to miss colon from time to time, I found that the idea of tab space is actually very nice once I get use to them. I also like to feature of multiple assignment and multiple return parameters. When I need to return a by-product, I just add it to the list of returns. When would use Python? I would use Python if I need to computer anything quick. The language is very easy to use. Python has a good collection of libraries (packages). The REPL of the interpreter allows me test ideas quickly before committing them into script. Lots of computer science work have been ported from Lisp to Python. Some universities are even teaching SICP in Python. When wouldn’t I use Python? I mostly would not use it in a managed environment, such as Ironpython or Jython. Both .Net and Java already have a rich library so one has to make a choice which library to use. If we use the managed runtime library, the code will tie to the particular runtime and thus not portable. If we use the Python library, then we will face the relatively long start-up time. For this reason, I would not recommend to use Ironpython for WP7 development. The only situation that I see merit with managed Python is in a server application where I can preload Python so that the start-up time is not a concern. Using Python as a managed glue language is an over-kill most of the time. A managed Scheme could be a better glue language as it is small enough to start-up very fast.

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• Configuring Seam for Glassfish

  - by Walter White

  Hi all, I am still migrating to Glassfish instead of Jetty for our application servers and am running into some problems. The application starts up fine, the database tables are created by hibernate and data is imported by my database importer, so Seam is alive, running and well. It appears that Seam is not properly bound to any JSF lifecycle as I'm getting no active application scope: INFO: Initializing filter: com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.security.authenticationFailureEventFilter Apr 26, 2010 7:31:28 PM org.jboss.seam.contexts.Contexts flushAndDestroyContexts SEVERE: could not discover transaction status Apr 26, 2010 7:31:28 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve log WARNING: StandardWrapperValve[Faces Servlet]: PWC1406: Servlet.service() for servlet Faces Servlet threw exception java.lang.IllegalStateException: No active application scope at org.jboss.seam.core.Init.instance(Init.java:115) at org.jboss.seam.contexts.Contexts.flushAndDestroyContexts(Contexts.java:347) at org.jboss.seam.contexts.Lifecycle.endRequest(Lifecycle.java:164) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.endWebRequestAfterException(ExceptionFilter.java:89) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:70) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:73) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:277) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:188) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java:641) at com.sun.enterprise.web.WebPipeline.invoke(WebPipeline.java:97) at com.sun.enterprise.web.PESessionLockingStandardPipeline.invoke(PESessionLockingStandardPipeline.java:85) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:185) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:332) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:233) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:165) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:791) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:693) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:954) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:170) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:135) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:102) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:88) at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:76) at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:53) at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:57) at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:69) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:330) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:309) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Apr 26, 2010 7:31:28 PM org.jboss.seam.exception.Exceptions handle SEVERE: handled and logged exception java.lang.NullPointerException at com.walterjwhite.util.persistence.QueryUtil.setParameter(QueryUtil.java:71) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.web.file.FileAliasFilter.filterHttpServletRequest(FileAliasFilter.java:57) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractHttpServletFilter.doFilter(AbstractHttpServletFilter.java:30) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractHttpServletFilter.doFilter(AbstractHttpServletFilter.java:36) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RewriteFilter.doFilter(RewriteFilter.java:63) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.IdentityFilter.doFilter(IdentityFilter.java:40) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.MultipartFilter.doFilter(MultipartFilter.java:90) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:64) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:497) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.forward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:314) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.web.content.WelcomeFilter.process(WelcomeFilter.java:56) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractSinglePassPreFilter.singlePass(AbstractSinglePassPreFilter.java:28) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractSinglePassFilter.filterHttpServletRequest(AbstractSinglePassFilter.java:27) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractHttpServletFilter.doFilter(AbstractHttpServletFilter.java:30) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RewriteFilter.doFilter(RewriteFilter.java:63) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.IdentityFilter.doFilter(IdentityFilter.java:40) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.MultipartFilter.doFilter(MultipartFilter.java:90) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:64) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:499) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.custom(StandardHostValve.java:475) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.dispatchToErrorPage(StandardHostValve.java:669) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.throwable(StandardHostValve.java:301) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.postInvoke(StandardHostValve.java:241) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:334) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:233) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:165) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:791) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:693) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:954) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:170) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:135) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:102) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:88) at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:76) at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:53) at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:57) at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:69) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:330) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:309) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Apr 26, 2010 7:31:28 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher log WARNING: ApplicationDispatcher[/WalterJWhite-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-Development] PWC1231: Servlet.service() for servlet Faces Servlet threw exception org.jboss.seam.InstantiationException: Could not instantiate Seam component: com.walterjwhite.listener.exception.exceptionListener at org.jboss.seam.Component.newInstance(Component.java:2156) at org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:2021) at org.jboss.seam.Component.getInstance(Component.java:1983) at org.jboss.seam.core.Events.raiseEvent(Events.java:77) at org.jboss.seam.exception.Exceptions.handle(Exceptions.java:103) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.endWebRequestAfterException(ExceptionFilter.java:114) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:70) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:497) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.forward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:314) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.web.content.WelcomeFilter.process(WelcomeFilter.java:56) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractSinglePassPreFilter.singlePass(AbstractSinglePassPreFilter.java:28) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractSinglePassFilter.filterHttpServletRequest(AbstractSinglePassFilter.java:27) at com.walterjwhite.servlet.filter.base.AbstractHttpServletFilter.doFilter(AbstractHttpServletFilter.java:30) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RewriteFilter.doFilter(RewriteFilter.java:63) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.IdentityFilter.doFilter(IdentityFilter.java:40) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.MultipartFilter.doFilter(MultipartFilter.java:90) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:64) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:499) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.custom(StandardHostValve.java:475) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.dispatchToErrorPage(StandardHostValve.java:669) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.throwable(StandardHostValve.java:301) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.postInvoke(StandardHostValve.java:241) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:334) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:233) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:165) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:791) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:693) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:954) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:170) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:135) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:102) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:88) at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:76) at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:53) at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:57) at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:69) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:330) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:309) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Caused by: javax.naming.NamingException: Lookup failed for 'java:comp/env/localhost/ExceptionListener/local' in SerialContext [Root exception is javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: No object bound to name java:comp/env/localhost/ExceptionListener/local] at com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.SerialContext.lookup(SerialContext.java:442) at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:392) at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:392) at org.jboss.seam.Component.instantiateSessionBean(Component.java:1400) at org.jboss.seam.Component.instantiate(Component.java:1364) at org.jboss.seam.Component.newInstance(Component.java:2134) ... 66 more Caused by: javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: No object bound to name java:comp/env/localhost/ExceptionListener/local at com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.GlassfishNamingManagerImpl.lookup(GlassfishNamingManagerImpl.java:684) at com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.GlassfishNamingManagerImpl.lookup(GlassfishNamingManagerImpl.java:657) at com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.JavaURLContext.lookup(JavaURLContext.java:148) at com.sun.enterprise.naming.impl.SerialContext.lookup(SerialContext.java:428) ... 71 more Apr 26, 2010 7:31:28 PM org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher log WARNING: ApplicationDispatcher[/WalterJWhite-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-Development] PWC1231: Servlet.service() for servlet Faces Servlet threw exception java.lang.IllegalStateException at org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.sendRedirect(ResponseFacade.java:522) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponseWrapper.sendRedirect(HttpServletResponseWrapper.java:170) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter$1.sendRedirect(RedirectFilter.java:72) at org.jboss.seam.mock.MockExternalContext.redirect(MockExternalContext.java:528) at org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesManager.redirect(FacesManager.java:220) at org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesManager.redirect(FacesManager.java:185) at org.jboss.seam.faces.Navigator.redirect(Navigator.java:55) at org.jboss.seam.faces.Navigator.redirect(Navigator.java:42) at org.jboss.seam.exception.RedirectHandler.handle(RedirectHandler.java:51) at org.jboss.seam.exception.Exceptions.handle(Exceptions.java:76) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.endWebRequestAfterException(ExceptionFilter.java:114) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:70) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:499) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.custom(StandardHostValve.java:475) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.dispatchToErrorPage(StandardHostValve.java:669) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.throwable(StandardHostValve.java:301) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.postInvoke(StandardHostValve.java:241) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:334) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:233) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:165) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:791) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:693) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:954) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:170) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:135) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:102) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:88) at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:76) at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:53) at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:57) at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:69) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:330) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:309) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Apr 26, 2010 7:31:28 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve log WARNING: org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve@1bb5d98: Exception Processing ErrorPage[exceptionType=java.lang.Throwable, location=/content/error/500.xhtml] javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.IllegalStateException at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.endWebRequestAfterException(ExceptionFilter.java:126) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:70) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:499) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.custom(StandardHostValve.java:475) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.dispatchToErrorPage(StandardHostValve.java:669) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.throwable(StandardHostValve.java:301) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.postInvoke(StandardHostValve.java:241) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:334) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:233) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:165) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:791) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:693) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:954) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:170) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.executeProtocolFilter(DefaultProtocolChain.java:135) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:102) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.execute(DefaultProtocolChain.java:88) at com.sun.grizzly.http.HttpProtocolChain.execute(HttpProtocolChain.java:76) at com.sun.grizzly.ProtocolChainContextTask.doCall(ProtocolChainContextTask.java:53) at com.sun.grizzly.SelectionKeyContextTask.call(SelectionKeyContextTask.java:57) at com.sun.grizzly.ContextTask.run(ContextTask.java:69) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.doWork(AbstractThreadPool.java:330) at com.sun.grizzly.util.AbstractThreadPool$Worker.run(AbstractThreadPool.java:309) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619) Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException at org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.sendRedirect(ResponseFacade.java:522) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponseWrapper.sendRedirect(HttpServletResponseWrapper.java:170) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter$1.sendRedirect(RedirectFilter.java:72) at org.jboss.seam.mock.MockExternalContext.redirect(MockExternalContext.java:528) at org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesManager.redirect(FacesManager.java:220) at org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesManager.redirect(FacesManager.java:185) at org.jboss.seam.faces.Navigator.redirect(Navigator.java:55) at org.jboss.seam.faces.Navigator.redirect(Navigator.java:42) at org.jboss.seam.exception.RedirectHandler.handle(RedirectHandler.java:51) at org.jboss.seam.exception.Exceptions.handle(Exceptions.java:76) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.endWebRequestAfterException(ExceptionFilter.java:114) ... 35 more ----- Root Cause ----- java.lang.IllegalStateException at org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.sendRedirect(ResponseFacade.java:522) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponseWrapper.sendRedirect(HttpServletResponseWrapper.java:170) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter$1.sendRedirect(RedirectFilter.java:72) at org.jboss.seam.mock.MockExternalContext.redirect(MockExternalContext.java:528) at org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesManager.redirect(FacesManager.java:220) at org.jboss.seam.faces.FacesManager.redirect(FacesManager.java:185) at org.jboss.seam.faces.Navigator.redirect(Navigator.java:55) at org.jboss.seam.faces.Navigator.redirect(Navigator.java:42) at org.jboss.seam.exception.RedirectHandler.handle(RedirectHandler.java:51) at org.jboss.seam.exception.Exceptions.handle(Exceptions.java:76) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.endWebRequestAfterException(ExceptionFilter.java:114) at org.jboss.seam.web.ExceptionFilter.doFilter(ExceptionFilter.java:70) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.RedirectFilter.doFilter(RedirectFilter.java:45) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.web.HotDeployFilter.doFilter(HotDeployFilter.java:53) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter$FilterChainImpl.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:69) at org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter.doFilter(SeamFilter.java:158) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:256) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInvoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:800) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:664) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:499) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doDispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:468) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.dispatch(ApplicationDispatcher.java:364) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.custom(StandardHostValve.java:475) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.dispatchToErrorPage(StandardHostValve.java:669) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.throwable(StandardHostValve.java:301) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.postInvoke(StandardHostValve.java:241) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.doService(CoyoteAdapter.java:334) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:233) at com.sun.enterprise.v3.services.impl.ContainerMapper.service(ContainerMapper.java:165) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.invokeAdapter(ProcessorTask.java:791) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.doProcess(ProcessorTask.java:693) at com.sun.grizzly.http.ProcessorTask.process(ProcessorTask.java:954) at com.sun.grizzly.http.DefaultProtocolFilter.execute(DefaultProtocolFilter.java:170) at com.sun.grizzly.DefaultProtocolChain.exec

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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• Try and catch error trapping. why is it so significant

  - by oded

  sorry if it sounds dumb ' as i am i a process of learnning java i try to understand , why on earth i should "try" a method to catch errors. it looks to me like the concept is:- ' letting a process run assuming its not properly developed. should i always assume that a program based on classes and inheritance is bound for unexpected errors, which i should handle with such a heavy tools like try catch throw throws ? should all java programs be included withing try catch framework? Thanks Oded.

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• Map a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  We’ve received a lot of questions about mapping a drive from XP to Windows 7 to access data easily. Today we look at how to map a drive in Windows 7, and how to map to an XP drive from Windows 7. With the new Homegroup feature in Windows 7, it makes sharing data between computers a lot easier. But you might need to map a network drive so you can go directly into a folder to access its contents. Mapping a network drive may sound like “IT talk”, but the process is fairly easy. Map Network Drive in Windows 7 Note: All of the computers used in this article are part of the same workgroup on a home network. In this first example we’re mapping to another Windows 7 drive on the network. Open Computer and from the toolbar click on Map Network Drive. Alternately in Computer you can hit “Alt+T” to pull up the toolbar and click on Tools \ Map Network Drive. Now give it an available drive letter, type in the path or browse to the folder you want to map to. Check the box next to Reconnect at logon if you want it available after a reboot, and click Finish. If both machines aren’t part of the same Homegroup, you may be prompted to enter in a username and password. Make sure and check the box next to Remember my credentials if you don’t want to log in every time to access it. The drive will map and the contents of the folder will open up. When you look in Computer, you’ll see the drive under network location. This process works if you want to connect to a server drive as well. In this example we map to a Home Server drive. Map an XP Drive to Windows 7 There might be times when you need to map a drive on an XP machine on your network. There are extra steps you’ll need to take to make it work however. Here we take a look at the problem you’ll encounter when trying to map to an XP machine if things aren’t set up correctly. If you try to browse to your XP machine you’ll see a message that you don’t have permission. Or if you try to enter in the path directly, you’ll be prompted for a username and password, and the annoyance is, no matter what credentials you put in, you can’t connect. To solve the problem we need to set up the Windows 7 machine as a user on the XP machine and make them part of the Administrators group. Right-click My Computer and select Manage. Under Computer Management expand Local Users and Groups and click on the Users folder. Right-click an empty area and click New User. Add in the user credentials, uncheck User must change password at next logon, then check Password never expires then click Create. Now you see the new user you created in the list. After the user is added you might want to reboot before proceeding to the next step.   Next we need to make the user part of the Administrators group. So go back into Computer Management \ Local Users and Groups \ Groups then double click on Administrators. Click the Add button in Administrators Properties window. Enter in the new user you created and click OK. An easy way to do this is to enter the name of the user you created then click Check Names and the path will be entered in for you. Now you see the user as a member of the Administrators group. Back on the Windows 7 machine we’ll start the process of mapping a drive. Here we’re browsing to the XP Media Center Edition machine. Now we can enter in the user name and password we just created. If you only want to access specific shared folders on the XP machine you can browse to them. Or if you want to map to the entire drive, enter in the drive path where in this example it’s “\\XPMCE\C$” –Don’t forget the “$” sign after the local drive letter. Then login… Again the contents of the drive will open up for you to access. Here you can see we have two drives mapped. One to another Windows 7 machine on the network, and the other one to the XP computer.   If you ever want to disconnect a drive, just right-click on it and then Disconnect. There are several scenarios where you might want to map a drive in Windows 7 to access specific data. It takes a little bit of work but you can map to an XP drive from Windows 7 as well. This comes in handy where you have a network with different versions of Windows running on it. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Find Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XPMake Vista Index Your Network ConnectionsEasily Backup & Import Your Wireless Network Settings in Windows 7Quickly Open Network Connections List in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Find Drives Easily with Desk Drive TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher

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• Uninstalling Reporting Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008

  - by Piotr Rodak

  Ha. I had quite disputable pleasure of installing and reinstalling and reinstalling and reinstalling – I think about 5 times before it worked – Reporting Server 2008 on Windows Server with the same year number in name. During my struggle I came across an error which seems to be not quite unfamiliar to some more unfortunate developers and admins who happen to uninstall SSRS 2008 from the server. I had the SSRS 2008 installed as named instance, SQL2008. I wanted to uninstall the server and install it to default instance. And this is when it bit me – not the first time and not the last that day . The setup complained that it couldn’t access a DLL: Error message: TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Setup ------------------------------ The following error has occurred: Access to the path 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\perf-ReportServer$SQL2008-rsctr.dll' is denied. For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=20476&ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&EvtSrc=setup.rll&EvtID=50000&ProdVer=10.0.1600.22&EvtType=0x60797DC7%25400x84E8D3C0 ------------------------------ BUTTONS: OK This is a screenshot that shows the above error: This issue seems to have a bit of literature dedicated to it and even seemingly a KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956173 and a similar Connect item: http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/363653/error-messages-when-upgrading-from-sql-2008-rc0-to-rtm The article describes issue as following: When you try to uninstall Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services from the server, you may receive the following error message: An error has occurred: Access to the path 'Drive_Letter:\WINDOWS\system32\perf-ReportServer-rsctr.dll' is denied. Note Drive_Letter refers to the disc drive into which the SQL Server installation media is inserted. In my case, the Note was not true; the error pointed to a dll that was located in Windows folder on C:\, not where the installation media were. Despite this difference I tried to identify any processes that might be keeping lock on the dll. I downloaded Sysinternals process explorer and ran it to find any processes I could stop. Unfortunately, there was no such process. I tried to rerun the installation, but it failed at the same step. Eventually I decided to remove the dll before the setup was executed. I changed name of the dll to be able to restore it in case of some issues. Interestingly, Windows let me do it, which means that indeed, it was not locked by any process. I ran the setup and this time it uninstalled the instance without any problems:   To summarize my experience I should say – be very careful, don’t leave any leftovers after uninstallation – remove/rename any folders that are left after setup has finished. For some reason, setup doesn’t remove folders and certain files. Installation on Windows Server 2008 requires more attention than on Windows 2003 because of the changed security model, some actions can be executed only by administrator in elevated execution mode. In general, you have to get used to UAC and a bit different experience than with Windows Server 2003. Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008,Windows Server 2008,SRS,Reporting Services

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• How to integerate Skype in Messaging Menu with Skype-Wrapper?

  - by Tahir Akram

  I cant see skype-wrapper in unity dash (alt f2). So I run it from terminal and attach it with skype. But it only appears in menu, when I run it from terminal like tahir@StoneCode:~$ skype-wrapper Starting skype-wrapper /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gobject/constants.py:24: Warning: g_boxed_type_register_static: assertion `g_type_from_name (name) == 0' failed import gobject._gobject INFO: Initializing Skype API INFO: Waiting for Skype Process INFO: Attaching skype-wrapper to Skype process INFO: Attached complete When I quit the terminal, skype disappear from messaging menu. So I need to run skype-wrapper instead of skype and need to add it in startup? Or any other work around? I followed this tutorial. Restart also does not help. Thanks.

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• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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• Ask How-To Geek: Tiling Windows, iOS Remote Desktop, and Getting a Handle on Windows 7 Libraries

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  This week we’re taking a look at how to tile application windows in Windows 7, remote controlling your desktop from iOS devices, and understanding exactly what Windows 7 libraries are. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see the fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Colorize Black and White Vintage Photographs in Photoshop How To Get SSH Command-Line Access to Windows 7 Using Cygwin The How-To Geek Video Guide to Using Windows 7 Speech Recognition How To Create Your Own Custom ASCII Art from Any Image How To Process Camera Raw Without Paying for Adobe Photoshop How Do You Block Annoying Text Message (SMS) Spam? Battlestar Galactica – Caprica Map of the 12 Colonies (Wallpaper Also Available) View Enlarged Versions of Thumbnail Images with Thumbnail Zoom for Firefox IntoNow Identifies Any TV Show by Sound Walk Score Calculates a Neighborhood’s Pedestrian Friendliness Factor Fantasy World at Twilight Wallpaper Hack a Wireless Doorbell into a Snail Mail Indicator

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