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• Why does Java automatically decode %2F in URI encoded filenames?

  - by Lucas

  I have a java servlet that needs to write out files that have a user-configurable name. I am trying to use URI encoding to properly escape special characters, but the JRE appears to automatically convert encoded forward slashes (%2F) into path separators. Example: File dir = new File("C:\Documents and Setting\username\temp"); String fn = "Top 1/2.pdf"; URI uri = new URI( dir.toURI().toASCIIString() + URLEncoder.encoder( fn, "UTF-8" ).toString() ); File out = new File( uri ); System.out.println( dir.toURI().toASCIIString() ); System.out.println( URLEncoder.encoder( fn, "UTF-8" ).toString() ); System.out.println( uri.toASCIIString() ); System.out.println( output.toURI().toASCIIString() ); The output is: file:/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/username/temp/ Top+1%2F2.pdf file:/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/username/temp/Top+1%2F2.pdf file:/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/username/temp/Top+1/2.pdf After the new File object is instantiated, the %2F sequence is automatically converted to a forward slash and I end up with an incorrect path. Does anybody know the proper way to approach this issue? The core of the problem seems to be that uri.equals( new File(uri).toURI() ) == FALSE when there is a '%2F' in the URI. I'm planning to just use the URLEncoded string verbatim rather than trying to use the File(uri) constructor.

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• Which programming idiom to choose for this open source library?

  - by Walkman

  I have an interesting question about which programming idiom is easier to use for beginner developers writing concrete file parsing classes. I'm developing an open source library, which one of the main functionality is to parse plain text files and get structured information from them. All of the files contains the same kind of information, but can be in different formats like XML, plain text (each of them is structured differently), etc. There are a common set of information pieces which is the same in all (e.g. player names, table names, some id numbers) There are formats which are very similar to each other, so it's possible to define a common Base class for them to facilitate concrete format parser implementations. So I can clearly define base classes like SplittablePlainTextFormat, XMLFormat, SeparateSummaryFormat, etc. Each of them hints the kind of structure they aim to parse. All of the concrete classes should have the same information pieces, no matter what. To be useful at all, this library needs to define at least 30-40 of these parsers. A couple of them are more important than others (obviously the more popular formats). Now my question is, which is the best programming idiom to choose to facilitate the development of these concrete classes? Let me explain: I think imperative programming is easy to follow even for beginners, because the flow is fixed, the statements just come one after another. Right now, I have this: class SplittableBaseFormat: def parse(self): "Parses the body of the hand history, but first parse header if not yet parsed." if not self.header_parsed: self.parse_header() self._parse_table() self._parse_players() self._parse_button() self._parse_hero() self._parse_preflop() self._parse_street('flop') self._parse_street('turn') self._parse_street('river') self._parse_showdown() self._parse_pot() self._parse_board() self._parse_winners() self._parse_extra() self.parsed = True So the concrete parser need to define these methods in order in any way they want. Easy to follow, but takes longer to implement each individual concrete parser. So what about declarative? In this case Base classes (like SplittableFormat and XMLFormat) would do the heavy lifting based on regex and line/node number declarations in the concrete class, and concrete classes have no code at all, just line numbers and regexes, maybe other kind of rules. Like this: class SplittableFormat: def parse_table(): "Parses TABLE_REGEX and get information" # set attributes here def parse_players(): "parses PLAYER_REGEX and get information" # set attributes here class SpecificFormat1(SplittableFormat): TABLE_REGEX = re.compile('^(?P<table_name>.*) other info \d* etc') TABLE_LINE = 1 PLAYER_REGEX = re.compile('^Player \d: (?P<player_name>.*) has (.*) in chips.') PLAYER_LINE = 16 class SpecificFormat2(SplittableFormat): TABLE_REGEX = re.compile(r'^Tournament #(\d*) (?P<table_name>.*) other info2 \d* etc') TABLE_LINE = 2 PLAYER_REGEX = re.compile(r'^Seat \d: (?P<player_name>.*) has a stack of (\d*)') PLAYER_LINE = 14 So if I want to make it possible for non-developers to write these classes the way to go seems to be the declarative way, however, I'm almost certain I can't eliminate the declarations of regexes, which clearly needs (senior :D) programmers, so should I care about this at all? Do you think it matters to choose one over another or doesn't matter at all? Maybe if somebody wants to work on this project, they will, if not, no matter which idiom I choose. Can I "convert" non-programmers to help developing these? What are your observations? Other considerations: Imperative will allow any kind of work; there is a simple flow, which they can follow but inside that, they can do whatever they want. It would be harder to force a common interface with imperative because of this arbitrary implementations. Declarative will be much more rigid, which is a bad thing, because formats might change over time without any notice. Declarative will be harder for me to develop and takes longer time. Imperative is already ready to release. I hope a nice discussion will happen in this thread about programming idioms regarding which to use when, which is better for open source projects with different scenarios, which is better for wide range of developer skills. TL; DR: Parsing different file formats (plain text, XML) They contains same kind of information Target audience: non-developers, beginners Regex probably cannot be avoided 30-40 concrete parser classes needed Facilitate coding these concrete classes Which idiom is better?

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• Feb 2nd Links: Visual Studio, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, JQuery, Windows Phone

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I’ve done in the last year. [I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Community News MVCConf Conference Next Wednesday: Attend the free, online ASP.NET MVC Conference being organized by the community next Wednesday.  Here is a list of some of the talks you can watch live. Visual Studio HTML5 and CSS3 in VS 2010 SP1: Good post from the Visual Studio web tools team that talks about the new support coming in VS 2010 SP1 for HTML5 and CSS3. Database Deployment with the VS 2010 Package/Publish Database Tool: Rachel Appel has a nice post that covers how to enable database deployment using the built-in VS 2010 web deployment support.  Also check out her ASP.NET web deployment post from last month. VsVim Update Released: Jared posts about the latest update of his VsVim extension for Visual Studio 2010.  This free extension enables VIM based key-bindings within VS. ASP.NET How to Add Mobile Pages to your ASP.NET Web Forms / MVC Apps: Great whitepaper by Steve Sanderson that covers how to mobile-enable your ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC based applications. New Entity Framework Tutorials for ASP.NET Developers: The ASP.NET and EF teams have put together a bunch of nice tutorials on using the Entity Framework data library with ASP.NET Web Forms. Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with EF Code First (via NuGet): Nice post from David Ebbo that talks about how to use the new EF Code First Library with ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Common Performance Issues with ASP.NET Web Sites: Good post with lots of performance tuning suggestions (mostly deployment settings) for ASP.NET apps. ASP.NET MVC Razor View Converter: Free, automated tool from Terlik that can convert existing .aspx view templates to Razor view templates. ASP.NET MVC 3 Internationalization: Nadeem has a great post that talks about a variety of techniques you can use to enable Globalization and Localization within your ASP.NET MVC 3 applications. ASP.NET MVC 3 Tutorials by David Hayden: Great set of tutorials and posts by David Hayden on some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features. EF Fixed Concurrency Mode and MVC: Chris Sells has a nice post that talks about how to handle concurrency with updates done with EF using ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET and jQuery jQuery Performance Tips and Tricks: A free 30 minute video that covers some great tips and tricks to keep in mind when using jQuery. jQuery 1.5’s AJAX rewrite and ASP.NET services - All is well: Nice post by Dave Ward that talks about using the new jQuery 1.5 to call ASP.NET ASMX Services. Good news according to Dave is that all is well :-) jQuery UI Modal Dialogs for ASP.NET MVC: Nice post by Rob Regan that talks about a few approaches you can use to implement dialogs with jQuery UI and ASP.NET MVC.  Windows Phone 7 Free PDF eBook on Building Windows Phone 7 Applications with Silverlight: Free book that walksthrough how to use Silverlight and Visual Studio to build Windows Phone 7 applications. Hope this helps, Scott

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• ActionResult types in MVC2

  - by rajbk

  In ASP.NET MVC, incoming browser requests gets mapped to a controller action method. The action method returns a type of ActionResult in response to the browser request. A basic example is shown below: public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } } Here we have an action method called Index that returns an ActionResult. Inside the method we call the View() method on the base Controller. The View() method, as you will see shortly, is a method that returns a ViewResult. The ActionResult class is the base class for different controller results. The following diagram shows the types derived from the ActionResult type. ASP.NET has a description of these methods ContentResult – Represents a text result. EmptyResult – Represents no result. FileContentResult – Represents a downloadable file (with the binary content). FilePathResult – Represents a downloadable file (with a path). FileStreamResult – Represents a downloadable file (with a file stream). JavaScriptResult – Represents a JavaScript script. JsonResult – Represents a JavaScript Object Notation result that can be used in an AJAX application. PartialViewResult – Represents HTML and markup rendered by a partial view. RedirectResult – Represents a redirection to a new URL. RedirectToRouteResult – Represents a result that performs a redirection by using the specified route values dictionary. ViewResult – Represents HTML and markup rendered by a view. To return the types shown above, you call methods that are available in the Controller base class. A list of these methods are shown below.   Methods without an ActionResult return type The MVC framework will translate action methods that do not return an ActionResult into one. Consider the HomeController below which has methods that do not return any ActionResult types. The methods defined return an int, object and void respectfully. public class HomeController : Controller { public int Add(int x, int y) { return x + y; }   public Employee GetEmployee() { return new Employee(); }   public void DoNothing() { } } When a request comes in, the Controller class hands internally uses a ControllerActionInvoker class which inspects the action parameters and invokes the correct action method. The CreateActionResult method in the ControllerActionInvoker class is used to return an ActionResult. This method is shown below. If the result of the action method is null, an EmptyResult instance is returned. If the result is not of type ActionResult, the result is converted to a string and returned as a ContentResult. protected virtual ActionResult CreateActionResult(ControllerContext controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, object actionReturnValue) { if (actionReturnValue == null) { return new EmptyResult(); }   ActionResult actionResult = (actionReturnValue as ActionResult) ?? new ContentResult { Content = Convert.ToString(actionReturnValue, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) }; return actionResult; }   In the HomeController class above, the DoNothing method will return an instance of the EmptyResult() Renders an empty webpage the GetEmployee() method will return a ContentResult which contains a string that represents the current object Renders the text “MyNameSpace.Controllers.Employee” without quotes. the Add method for a request of /home/add?x=3&y=5 returns a ContentResult Renders the text “8” without quotes. Unit Testing The nice thing about the ActionResult types is in unit testing the controller. We can, without starting a web server, create an instance of the Controller, call the methods and verify that the type returned is the expected ActionResult type. We can then inspect the returned type properties and confirm that it contains the expected values. Enjoy! Sulley: Hey, Mike, this might sound crazy but I don't think that kid's dangerous. Mike: Really? Well, in that case, let's keep it. I always wanted a pet that could kill me.

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• How to Manage AutoArchive in Outlook 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you want to keep Outlook 2010 clean and run faster, one method is to set up the AutoArchive feature. Today we show you how to configure and manage the feature in Outlook 2010. Using AutoArchive allows you to manage space in your mailbox or on the email server by moving older items to another location on your hard drive. Enable and Configure Auto Archive In Outlook 2010 Auto Archive is not enabled by default. To turn it on, click on the File tab to access Backstage View, then click on Options. The Outlook Options window opens then click on Advanced then the AutoArchive Settings button. The AutoArchive window opens and you’ll notice everything is grayed out. Check the box next to Run AutoArchive every… Note: If you select the Permanently delete old items option, mails will not be archived. Now you can choose the settings for how you want to manage the AutoArchive feature. Select how often you want it to run, prompt before the feature runs, where to move items, and other actions you want to happen during the process. After you’ve made your selections click OK. Manually Configure Individual Folders For more control over individual folders that are archived, right-click on the folder and click on Properties. Click on the AutoArchive tab and choose the settings you want to change for that folder. For instance you might not want to archive a certain folder or move archived data to a specific folder. If you want to manually archive and backup an item, click on the File tab, Cleanup Tools, then Archive. Click the radio button next to Archive this folder and all subfolders. Select the folder you want to archive. In this example we want to archive this folder to a specific location of its own. The .pst files are saved in your documents folder and if you need to access them at a later time you can. After you’ve setup AutoArchive you can find items in the archived files. In the Navigation Pane expand the Archives folder in the list. You can then view and access your messages. You can also access them by clicking the File tab \ Open then Open Outlook Data File. Then you can browse to the archived file you want to open. Archiving old emails is a good way to help keep a nice clean mailbox, help speed up your Outlook experience, and save space on the email server. The other nice thing is you can configure your email archives and specific folders to meet your email needs. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Configure AutoArchive In Outlook 2007Quickly Clean Your Inbox in Outlook 2003/2007Open Different Outlook Features in Separate Windows to Improve ProductivityMake Outlook Faster by Disabling Unnecessary Add-InsCreate an Email Template in Outlook 2003 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 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3

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• Add the Recycle Bin to Start Menu in Windows 7

  - by Matthew Guay

  Have you ever tried to open the Recycle Bin by searching for “recycle bin” in the Start menu search, only to find nothing?  Here’s a quick trick that will let you find the Recycle Bin directly from your Windows Start menu search. The Start menu search may be the best timesaver ever added to Windows.  In fact, we use it so much that it seems painful to manually search for a program when using Windows XP or older versions of Windows.  You can easily find files, folders, programs and more through the Start menu search in both Vista and Windows 7. However, one thing you cannot find is the recycle bin; if you enter this in the start menu search it will not find it. Here’s how to add the Recycle Bin to your Start menu search. What to do To access the Recycle Bin from the Start menu search, we need to add a shortcut to the start menu.  Windows includes a personal Start menu folder, and an All Users start menu folder which all users on the computer can see.  This trick only works in the personal Start menu folder. Open up an Explorer window (Simply click the Computer link in the start menu), click the white part of the address bar, and, enter the following (substitute your username for your_user_name) and hit Enter. C:\Users\your_user_name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu Now, right-click in the folder, select New, and then click Shortcut. In the location box, enter the following: explorer.exe shell:RecycleBinFolder When you’ve done this, click Next. Now, enter a name for the shortcut.  You can enter Recycle Bin like the standard shortcut, or you could name it something else such as Trash…if that’s easier for you to remember.  Click Finish when your done. By default it will have a folder icon.  Let’s switch that to the standard Recycle Bin icon.  Right-click on the new shortcut and click Properties. Click Change Icon… Type the following in the “Look for icons in this file:” box, and press the Enter key on your keyboard: %SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll Now, scroll and find the Recycle Bin icon and click Ok. Click Ok in the previous dialog, and now your Recycle Bin shortcut has the correct icon.   You can even have multiple shortcuts with different names, so when you searched either Recycle Bin or Trash it would come up in the Start menu.  To do that, simply repeat these directions, and enter another name of your choice at the prompt.  Here we have both a Recycle Bin and a Trash icon. Now, when you enter Recycle Bin (or trash, depending on what you chose) in your Start menu search, you will see it at the top of your Start menu.  Simply press Enter or click on the icon to open the Recycle Bin.   This trick will work in Windows Vista too!  Simply follow these same directions, and you can add the Recycle Bin to your Vista Start menu and find it via search. This is a simple trick, but may make it  much easier for you to open your Recycle Bin directly from your Windows Vista or 7 Start menu search.  If you’re using Windows 7, you can also check out our directions on how to Add the Recycle Bin to the Taskbar in Windows 7. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Hide, Delete, or Destroy the Recycle Bin Icon in Windows 7 or VistaDisable Deletion of the Recycle Bin in Windows VistaHide the Recycle Bin Icon Text on Windows VistaAdd the Recycle Bin to the Taskbar in Windows 7Resize the Recycle Bin in XP 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 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 Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 20, Using Task with Existing APIs

  - by Reed

  Although the Task class provides a huge amount of flexibility for handling asynchronous actions, the .NET Framework still contains a large number of APIs that are based on the previous asynchronous programming model.  While Task and Task<T> provide a much nicer syntax as well as extending the flexibility, allowing features such as continuations based on multiple tasks, the existing APIs don’t directly support this workflow. There is a method in the TaskFactory class which can be used to adapt the existing APIs to the new Task class: TaskFactory.FromAsync.  This method provides a way to convert from the BeginOperation/EndOperation method pair syntax common through .NET Framework directly to a Task<T> containing the results of the operation in the task’s Result parameter. While this method does exist, it unfortunately comes at a cost – the method overloads are far from simple to decipher, and the resulting code is not always as easily understood as newer code based directly on the Task class.  For example, a single call to handle WebRequest.BeginGetResponse/EndGetReponse, one of the easiest “pairs” of methods to use, looks like the following: var task = Task.Factory.FromAsync<WebResponse>( request.BeginGetResponse, request.EndGetResponse, null); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The compiler is unfortunately unable to infer the correct type, and, as a result, the WebReponse must be explicitly mentioned in the method call.  As a result, I typically recommend wrapping this into an extension method to ease use.  For example, I would place the above in an extension method like: public static class WebRequestExtensions { public static Task<WebResponse> GetReponseAsync(this WebRequest request) { return Task.Factory.FromAsync<WebResponse>( request.BeginGetResponse, request.EndGetResponse, null); } } This dramatically simplifies usage.  For example, if we wanted to asynchronously check to see if this blog supported XHTML 1.0, and report that in a text box to the user, we could do: var webRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://www.reedcopsey.com"); webRequest.GetReponseAsync().ContinueWith(t => { using (var sr = new StreamReader(t.Result.GetResponseStream())) { string str = sr.ReadLine();; this.textBox1.Text = string.Format("Page at {0} supports XHTML 1.0: {1}", t.Result.ResponseUri, str.Contains("XHTML 1.0")); } }, TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext());   By using a continuation with a TaskScheduler based on the current synchronization context, we can keep this request asynchronous, check based on the first line of the response string, and report the results back on our UI directly.

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• Stream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media Player

  - by DigitalGeekery

  So you’ve got yourself a new computer with Windows 7 and you’re itching to take advantage of it’s ability to stream media across your home network. But, the rest of the family is still on Windows XP and you’re not quite ready to shell out the cash for the upgrades. Well, today we’ll show you how to easily stream media from Windows 7 to Windows XP with VLC Media Player. On the host computer running Windows 7, you’ll need to have an account set up with both a username and password. A blank password will not work. The media files will need to be located in a shared folder. Note: If the media files are located within the Public directory, or within the profile of the user account you use to log into the Windows 7 computer, they will be shared automatically. Sharing your Media Folders On your Windows 7 computer, right-click on the folder containing the files you’d like to stream and choose Properties.     On the Sharing Tab of the folder properties, click the Share button. Click OK.   Type or select from the drop down the user account you’ll use to log in, or select “Everyone” to share with all users. Then click Add. You may change the permission level, but only Read permission is required to play the media. Repeat this process for any additional folders you wish to share.    The Windows XP Client Computer Now that we’ve shared our media folders from the Windows 7 computer, we’re ready to play our files on the Windows XP computer. Download and install the VLC Media Player. (See link below) Then open VLC. Click on Media from the and select Open File… Browse your network for the shared folder that contains your media.   You’ll be prompted to log in to the host computer. Provide the credentials for a user on the Windows 7 computer. Click OK.   Select your media file and click Open.    Your media playback will begin momentarily.   This is a nice and easy way to stream media across your home network without upgrading multiple computers to Windows 7.  Plus, VLC is certainly no slouch as a Media Player. It’ll play virtually any video or audio file you can throw at it. Have you already upgraded all your home PCs to Windows 7? Check out our previous article on streaming media between Windows 7 computers on your home network. Download VLC Media Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesShare Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxInstalling Windows Media Player Plugin for Firefox 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Need Help with Your Home Network? Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images

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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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• Having Fun with Coding4Fun&rsquo;s Windows Phone 7 Controls

  - by mbcrump

  I’m a big believer in having a hobby project as you can probably tell from the first sentence in my “personal webpage using Silverlight” article. One of my current hobby projects is to re-do my current WP7 application in the marketplace. I knew up front that I needed a “Loading” animation and a better “About” box. After starting to develop my own, I noticed a great set of WP7 controls by Coding4Fun and decided to use them in my new application. Before I go any further they are FREE and Open-Source. It is really simple to get started, just go to the CodePlex site and click the download button. After you have downloaded it then extract it to a Folder and you will have 4 DLL files. They are listed below: Now create a Windows Phone 7 Project and add references to the DLL’s by right clicking on the References folder and clicking “Add references”.   After adding the references, we can get started. I needed a ProgressOverlay animation or “Loading Screen” while my RSS feed is downloading. Basically, you just need to add the following namespace to whatever page you want the control on: xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls;assembly=Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls" And then the code inside your Grid or wherever you want the Loading screen placed. <Controls:ProgressOverlay Name="progressOverlay" > <Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> <TextBlock>Loading</TextBlock> </Controls:ProgressOverlay.Content> </Controls:ProgressOverlay> Bam, you now have a great looking loading screen. Of course inside the ProgressOverlay, you may want to add a Visibility property to turn it off after your data loads if you are using MVVM or similar pattern.   Next up, I needed a nice clean “About Box” that looks good but is also functional. Meaning, if they click on my twitter name, web or email to launch the appropriate task. Again, this is only a few lines of code: var p = new AboutPrompt(); p.VersionNumber = "2.0"; p.Show("Michael Crump", "@mbcrump", "[email protected]", @"http://michaelcrump.net"); A nice clean “About” box with just a few lines of code! I’m all for code that I don’t have to write. It also comes with a pretty sweet InputPrompt for grabbing info from a user: The code for this is also very simple: InputPrompt input = new InputPrompt(); input.Completed += (s, e) => { MessageBox.Show(e.Result.ToString()); }; input.Title = "Input Box"; input.Message = "What does a \"Developer Large\" T-Shirt Mean? "; input.Show(); I also enjoyed the PhoneHelper that allows you to get data out of the WMAppManifest File very easy. So for example if I wanted the Version info from the WMAppManifest file. I could write one line and get it. PhoneHelper.GetAppAttribute("Version") Of course you would want to make sure you add the following using statement: using Coding4Fun.Phone.Controls.Data; You can’t have all these cool controls without a great set of Converters. The included BooleanToVisibility converter will convert a Boolean to and from a Visibility value. This is excellent when using something like a CheckBox to display a TextBox when its checked. See the example below: The code is below: <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <Converters:BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter"/> </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.Resources> <CheckBox x:Name="checkBox"/> <TextBlock Text="Display Text" Visibility="{Binding ElementName=checkBox, Path=IsChecked, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter} }"/> That’s not all the goodies included. They also provide a RoundedButton, TimePicker and several other converters. The documentation is great and I would recommend you give them a shot if you need any of this functionality. Btw, thank Brian Peek for his awesome work on Coding4Fun!  Subscribe to my feed

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• ASP.NET MVC CRUD Validation

  - by Ricardo Peres

  One thing I didn’t refer on my previous post on ASP.NET MVC CRUD with AJAX was how to retrieve model validation information into the client. We want to send any model validation errors to the client in the JSON object that contains the ProductId, RowVersion and Success properties, specifically, if there are any errors, we will add an extra Errors collection property. Here’s how: 1: [HttpPost] 2: [AjaxOnly] 3: [Authorize] 4: public JsonResult Edit(Product product) 5: { 6: if (this.ModelState.IsValid == true) 7: { 8: using (ProductContext ctx = new ProductContext()) 9: { 10: Boolean success = false; 11:  12: ctx.Entry(product).State = (product.ProductId == 0) ? EntityState.Added : EntityState.Modified; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: success = (ctx.SaveChanges() == 1); 17: } 18: catch (DbUpdateConcurrencyException) 19: { 20: ctx.Entry(product).Reload(); 21: } 22:  23: return (this.Json(new { Success = success, ProductId = product.ProductId, RowVersion = Convert.ToBase64String(product.RowVersion) })); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: Dictionary<String, String> errors = new Dictionary<String, String>(); 29:  30: foreach (KeyValuePair<String, ModelState> keyValue in this.ModelState) 31: { 32: String key = keyValue.Key; 33: ModelState modelState = keyValue.Value; 34:  35: foreach (ModelError error in modelState.Errors) 36: { 37: errors[key] = error.ErrorMessage; 38: } 39: } 40:  41: return (this.Json(new { Success = false, ProductId = 0, RowVersion = String.Empty, Errors = errors })); 42: } 43: } As for the view, we need to change slightly the onSuccess JavaScript handler on the Single view: 1: function onSuccess(ctx) 2: { 3: if (typeof (ctx.Success) != 'undefined') 4: { 5: $('input#ProductId').val(ctx.ProductId); 6: $('input#RowVersion').val(ctx.RowVersion); 7:  8: if (ctx.Success == false) 9: { 10: var errors = ''; 11:  12: if (typeof (ctx.Errors) != 'undefined') 13: { 14: for (var key in ctx.Errors) 15: { 16: errors += key + ': ' + ctx.Errors[key] + '\n'; 17: } 18:  19: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: the model contained the following errors.\n\n' + errors); 20: } 21: else 22: { 23: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: it may have been modified by third parties. Please try again.'); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: window.alert('Saved successfully'); 29: } 30: } 31: else 32: { 33: if (window.confirm('Not logged in. Login now?') == true) 34: { 35: document.location.href = '<% 1: : FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl %>?ReturnURL=' + document.location.pathname; 36: } 37: } 38: } The logic is as this: If the Edit action method is called for a new entity (the ProductId is 0) and it is valid, the entity is saved, and the JSON results contains a Success flag set to true, a ProductId property with the database-generated primary key and a RowVersion with the server-generated ROWVERSION; If the model is not valid, the JSON result will contain the Success flag set to false and the Errors collection populated with all the model validation errors; If the entity already exists in the database (ProductId not 0) and the model is valid, but the stored ROWVERSION is different that the one on the view, the result will set the Success property to false and will return the current (as loaded from the database) value of the ROWVERSION on the RowVersion property. On a future post I will talk about the possibilities that exist for performing model validation, stay tuned!

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• Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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• Failure Sucks, But Does It Have To?

  - by steve.diamond

  Hey Folks--It's "elephant in the room" time. Imagine a representative from a CRM VENDOR discussing CRM FAILURES. Well. I recently saw this blog post from Michael Krigsman on "six ways CRM projects go wrong." Now, I know this may come off defensive, but my comments apply to ALL CRM vendors, not just Oracle. As I perused the list, I couldn't find any failures related to technology. They all seemed related to people or process. Now, this isn't about finger pointing, or impugning customers. I love customers! And when they fail, WE fail. Although I sit in the cheap seats, i.e., I haven't funded any multi-million dollar CRM initiatives lately, I kept wondering how to convert the perception of failure as something that ends and is never to be mentioned again (see Michael's reason #4), to something that one learns from and builds upon. So to continue my tradition of speaking in platitudes, let me propose the following three tenets: 1) Try and get ahead of your failures while they're very very small. 2) Immediately assess what you can learn from those failures. 3) With more than 15 years of CRM deployments, seek out those vendors that have a track record both in learning from "misses" and in supporting MANY THOUSANDS of CRM successes at companies of all types and sizes. Now let me digress briefly with an unpleasant (for me, anyway) analogy. I really don't like flying. Call it 'fear of dying' or 'fear of no control.' Whatever! I've spoken with quite a few commercial pilots over the years, and they reassure me that there are multiple failures on most every flight. We as passengers just don't know about them. Most of them are too miniscule to make a difference, and most of them are "caught" before they become LARGER failures. It's typically the mid-sized to colossal failures we hear about, and a significant percentage of those are due to human error. What's the point? I'd propose that organizations consider the topic of FAILURE in five grades. On one end, FAILURE Grade 1 is a minor/miniscule failure. On the other end, FAILURE Grade 5 is a colossal failure A Grade 1 CRM FAILURE could be that a particular interim milestone was missed. Why? What can we learn from that? How can we prevent that from happening as we proceed through the project? Individual organizations will need to define their own Grade 2 and Grade 3 failures. The opportunity is to keep those Grade 3 failures from escalating any further. Because honestly, a GRADE 5 failure may not be recoverable. It could result in a project being pulled, countless amounts of hours and dollars lost, and jobs lost. We don't want to go there. In closing, I want to thank Michael for opening my eyes up to the world of "color," versus thinking of failure as both "black and white" and a dead end road that organizations can't learn from and avoid discussing like the plague.

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• Oracle at The Forrester Customer Intelligence and Marketing Leadership Forums

  - by Christie Flanagan

  The Forrester Customer Intelligence Forum and the Forrester Marketing Leadership Forums will soon be here.  This year’s events will be co-located on April 18-19 at the J.W. Marriott at the L.A. Live entertainment complex in downtown Los Angeles.  Last year’s Marketing Forum was quite memorable for me.  You see, while Forrester analysts and business marketers were busy mingling over at the Marriott, another marketing powerhouse was taking up residence a few feet away at The Staples Center.  That’s right folks. Lada Gaga was coming to town.  And, as I came to learn, it made perfect sense for Lady Gaga and her legions of fans to be sharing a small patch of downtown L.A. with marketing leaders from all over the world.  After all, whether you like Lady Gaga or not, what pop star in recent memory has done more to build herself into a brand and to create an engaging, social and interactive customer experience for her Little Monsters?  While Lady Gaga won’t be back in town for this year’s Forrester events, there are still plenty of compelling reasons to make the trip out to Los Angeles.   The theme for The Forrester Customer Intelligence and Marketing Leadership Forums this year is “From Cool To Critical: Creating Engagement In The Age Of The Customer” and will tackle the important questions about how marketers can survive and thrive in the age of the empowered customer: •    How can you assess consumer uptake of new innovations?•    How do you build deep customer knowledge to drive competitive advantage?•    How do you drive deep, personalized customer engagement?•    What is more valuable — eyeballs or engagement?•    How do business customers engage in new media types?•    How can you tie social data to corporate data?•    Who should lead the movement to customer obsession?•    How should you shift your planning and measurement approaches to accommodate more data and a higher signal-to-noise ratio?•    What role does technology play in customizing and synchronizing marketing efforts across channels?As a platinum sponsor of the event, there will be a numbers of ways to interact with Oracle while you’re attending the Forums.  Here are some of the highlights:Oracle Speaking SessionThursday, April 19, 9:15am – 9:55amMaximize Customer Engagement and Retention with Integrated Marketing & LoyaltyMelissa Boxer, Vice President, Oracle CRM Marketing & LoyaltyCustomers expect to interact with your company, brand and products in more ways than ever before.   New devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. While Marketing's objectives (attract, convert, retain) remain fundamentally the same, your approach and tools must adapt quickly to succeed in this more complex, cross-channel world. Hear how leading brands are using Oracle's integrated marketing and loyalty solutions to maximize customer engagement and retention through better planning, execution, and measurement of synchronized cross-channel marketing initiatives.Solution ShowcaseWednesday, April 1810:20am – 11:50am 12:30pm – 1:30pm2:55pm – 3:40pmThursday, April 199:55am – 10:40am12:00pm – 1:00pmSolution Showcase & Networking ReceptionWednesday, April 185:10pm – 6:20pmBe sure to follow the #webcenter hashtag for updates on these events.  And for a more considered perspective on what Lady Gaga can teach businesses about branding and customer experience, check out Denise Lee Yohn’s post, Lessons from Lady Gaga from the Brand as Business Bites blog.

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• Experience the iPad UI On Your PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to test drive iPad without heading over to an Apple store?  Here’s a way you can experience some of the iPad UI straight from your browser! The iPad is the latest gadget from Apple to wow the tech world, and people even waited in line all night to be one of the first to get their hands on one.  Thanks to a simple JavaScript trick, however, you can get a feel for some of its new features without leaving your computer.  This won’t let you try out everything on the iPad, but it will let you see how the new lists and pop-over menus work just like they do in the new apps. Test drive the iPad’s UI from your browser Normally, the Apple iPhone developer library online looks like a standard webpage. But, on the iPad, it looks and feels like a full-blown native iPad app.  With a nifty JavaScript trick from boredzo.org you can use this same interface on your PC.  Since the iPad uses the Safari browser, we ran this test in Safari for Windows.  If you don’t already have it installed, you can download it from Apple (link below) and setup as normal. Now, open Safari and browse to Apple’s developer page at: http://www.developer.apple.com   Now, enter the following in the address bar, and press Enter. javascript:localStorage.setItem('debugSawtooth', 'true')   Finally, click this link to go to the iPhone OS documentation. http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/iPad/ After a short delay, it should open in full iPad style! The left menu works just like the menus on the iPad, complete with transitions.  It feels entirely like a native application, instead of a webpage.  To scroll through text, click and pull up or down similar to the way you would use it on a touch screen. Some pages even include a pop-over menu like many of the new iPad apps use. Note that the page will be rendered for the size of your browser, and if you resize your window the page will not resize with it.  Simply press F5 to reload the page, and it will resize to fit the new window size.  If you resize your window to be tall and narrow, like the iPad in horizontal mode, the webpage will change and the left menu will disappear in lieu of a drop-down menu just like it would if you rotated the iPad. This works in Chrome as well, since it, like Safari, is based on Webkit.  However, it didn’t seem to work in our test on Firefox or other browsers. We’ve previously covered how you can experience some of the iPhone’s UI with the online iPhone user guide.  Check it out if you haven’t yet: View Mobile Websites in Windows with Safari 4 Developer Tools Conclusion Although this doesn’t let you really try out all of the iPad’s interface, it at least gives you a taste of how it works.  It’s exciting to see how much functionality can be packed into webapps today.  And don’t forget, How-to Geek is giving away an iPad to a random fan!  Head over to our Facebook page and fan How-to Geek if you haven’t already done so. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and TutorialsShare Your Windows Vista Experience Index ScoreAnother Blog You Should Subscribe To 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awesome Lyrics Finder for Winamp & Windows Media Player Download Videos from Hulu Pixels invade Manhattan Convert PDF files to ePub to read on your iPad Hide Your Confidential Files Inside Images Get Wildlife Photography Tips at BBC’s PhotoMasterClasses

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• Stay on Schedule in Chrome with DayHiker

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you keep your schedule and tasks in Google Calendar?  Here’s a handy extension for Google Chrome that can keep you on top of your appointments without having to open Google Calendar in another tab. Integrate Google Calendar with Chrome DayHiker is a handy extension for Google Chrome that can help you stay on schedule in your browser.  Desktop applications typically can keep you notified easier with popups or alerts, but webapps require you to visit them to view your information.  DayHiker takes the best of both, and can make your Google Calendar work more like a desktop application. To get started, open the DayHiker page from the Chrome Extensions Gallery (link below), and click Install.  Confirm you wish to install it at the prompt. Now you’ll have a new extension button in your Chrome toolbar.  Click the calendar icon to view your Google Calendar.  You’ll need to be signed into your Google account for your calendar to display; click the key icon to select your account if it doesn’t show your appointments automatically. If you’re signed into multiple Google accounts, such as your public Gmail and a Google Apps account, you can select the calendar you wish and click Continue. Now you can quickly see your upcoming appointments.  Simply hover over the icon to see your upcoming events.  Or, just glance at it to see if there are any appointments coming up, as the indicator icon will change colors to show how long you have until your next appointment. Click the icon to see more information about your appointments. Or, click the Add link to add a new appointment.  If you need to edit the appointment details, click Edit Details and the appointment will open in Google Calendar for you to edit. You can also view and manage your tasks in Google Calendar.  Click the checkmark icon, and then add or check-off tasks directly from the extension pane. You can also set an alarm clock in DayHiker.  Click the green circle icon, and then enter the time for the alarm to go off.  Strangely it will only chime if the extension pane is left open, so if you click anywhere else in the browser or even switch to another program it will not chime.   If you’d like to customize DayHiker’s settings, right-click on it and select Options, or select Options in the Chrome Extensions page.  Here you can customize your badges and the DayHiker icon, or enter a custom domain for your Google Apps Pro calendar.   Conclusion If you rely on Google Calendar to stay on top of your schedule, DayHiker can help you stay scheduled and know what’s coming up.  We wish DayHiker supported multiple calendars so we could combine our Google Apps calendars with our personal Google Calendar, but even still, it is a very useful tool.  Whether you’re a tightly scheduled person or just like to jot down to-dos and keep track of them, this extension will help you do this efficiently with familiar Google tools. Link Download DayHiker from the Chrome Extensions Gallery Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Configure Disk Defragmenter Schedule in Windows 7 or VistaSchedule Updates for Windows Media CenterOpen Multiple Sites Without Reopening the Menus in FirefoxFind a Website’s Actual Location with Chrome FlagsSubscribe to RSS Feeds in Chrome with a Single Click 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good

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• A quick look at: sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors

  - by Jonathan Allen

  SQL Server places data into cache as it reads it from disk so as to speed up future queries. This dmv lets you see how much data is cached at any given time and knowing how this changes over time can help you ensure your servers run smoothly and are adequately resourced to run your systems. This dmv gives the number of cached pages in the buffer pool along with the database id that they relate to: USE [tempdb] GO SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count , CASE database_id WHEN 32767 THEN 'ResourceDb' ELSE DB_NAME(database_id) END AS Database_name FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id) , database_id ORDER BY cached_pages_count DESC; This gives you results which are quite useful, but if you add a new column with the code: …to convert the pages value to show a MB value then they become more relevant and meaningful. To see how your server reacts to queries, start up SSMS and connect to a test server and database – mine is called AdventureWorks2008. Make sure you start from a know position by running: -- Only run this on a test server otherwise your production server's-- performance may drop off a cliff and your phone will start ringing. DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS GO Now we can run a query that would normally turn a DBA’s hair white: USE [AdventureWorks2008] go SELECT * FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] AS sod INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS soh ON [sod].[SalesOrderID] = [soh].[SalesOrderID] …and then check our cache situation: A nice low figure – not! Almost 2000 pages of data in cache equating to approximately 15MB. Luckily these tables are quite narrow; if this had been on a table with more columns then this could be even more dramatic. So, let’s make our query more efficient. After resetting the cache with the DROPCLEANBUFFERS and FREEPROCCACHE code above, we’ll only select the columns we want and implement a WHERE predicate to limit the rows to a specific customer. SELECT [sod].[OrderQty] , [sod].[ProductID] , [soh].[OrderDate] , [soh].[CustomerID] FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] AS sod INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS soh ON [sod].[SalesOrderID] = [soh].[SalesOrderID] WHERE [soh].[CustomerID] = 29722 …and check our effect cache: Now that is more sympathetic to our server and the other systems sharing its resources. I can hear you asking: “What has this got to do with logging, Jonathan?” Well, a smart DBA will keep an eye on this metric on their servers so they know how their hardware is coping and be ready to investigate anomalies so that no ‘disruptive’ code starts to unsettle things. Capturing this information over a period of time can lead you to build a picture of how a database relies on the cache and how it interacts with other databases. This might allow you to decide on appropriate schedules for over night jobs or otherwise balance the work of your server. You could schedule this job to run with a SQL Agent job and store the data in your DBA’s database by creating a table with: IF OBJECT_ID('CachedPages') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE CachedPages CREATE TABLE CachedPages ( cached_pages_count INT , MB INT , Database_Name VARCHAR(256) , CollectedOn DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE() ) …and then filling it with: INSERT INTO [dbo].[CachedPages] ( [cached_pages_count] , [MB] , [Database_Name] ) SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count , ( COUNT(*) * 8.0 ) / 1024 AS MB , CASE database_id WHEN 32767 THEN 'ResourceDb' ELSE DB_NAME(database_id) END AS Database_name FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY database_id After this has been left logging your system metrics for a while you can easily see how your databases use the cache over time and may see some spikes that warrant your attention. This sort of logging can be applied to all sorts of server statistics so that you can gather information that will give you baseline data on how your servers are performing. This means that when you get a problem you can see what statistics are out of their normal range and target you efforts to resolve the issue more rapidly.

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• Remove Ubuntu or XP from the Windows 7 Boot Menu

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you’ve ever used a dual-boot system and then removed one of the operating systems, it can still show up in Windows 7’s boot menu. We’ll show you how to get rid of old entries and speed up the boot process. To edit the boot menu, we will use a program called bcdedit that’s included with Windows 7. There are some third-party graphical applications that will edit the menu, but we prefer to use built-in applications when we can. First, we need to open a command prompt with Administrator privileges. Open the start menu and type cmd into the search box. Right click on the cmd program that shows up, and select Run as administrator. Alternatively, if you’ve disabled the search box, you can find the command prompt in All Programs > Accessories. In the command prompt, type in bcdedit and press enter. A list of the boot menu entries will appear. Find the entry that you would like to delete – in our case, this is the last one, with the description of “Ubuntu”. What we need is the long sequence of characters marked as the identifier. Rather than type it out, we will copy it to be pasted later. Right-click somewhere in the command prompt window and select Mark. By clicking the left mouse button and dragging over the appropriate text, select the identifier for the entry you want to delete, including the left and right curly braces on either end. Press the Enter button. This will copy the text to the clipboard. In the command prompt, type in: bcdedit /delete and then right-click somewhere in the command prompt window and select Paste. Press Enter to input the now completed command. The boot menu entry will now be deleted. Type in bcdedit again to confirm that the offending entry is now gone from the list. If you reboot your machine now, you will notice that the boot menu does not even come up, because there is only one entry in the list (unless you had more than two entries to begin with). You’ve shaved a few seconds off of the boot process! Not to mention the added effort of pressing the enter button. There’s a lot more that you can do with bcdedit, like change the description of boot menu entries, create new entries, and much more. For a list of what you can do with bcdedit, type the following into the Command Window. bcdedit /help While there are third-party GUI solutions for accomplishing the same thing, using this method will save you time by not having to go through the extra steps of installing an extra program. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reinstall Ubuntu Grub Bootloader After Windows Wipes it OutClean Up Ubuntu Grub Boot Menu After UpgradesHow To Switch to Console Mode for Ubuntu VMware GuestSet Windows as Default OS when Dual Booting UbuntuChange the GRUB Menu Timeout on Ubuntu 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 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010 Daily Motivator (Firefox) FetchMp3 Can Download Videos & Convert Them to Mp3

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• Ubuntu 11.04 and 10.04 hang with black screen while installing from USB disk

  - by Bill

  I've been trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 from a USB flash stick and each time I try to boot from the USB key one of two things happen: A) The screen that asks you what you would like to do (e.g. run Ubuntu from the USB key or install it) shows up and the countdown to the default option starts to count down but as soon as I either touch the keyboard (sometimes I press enter or the arrow keys to select an option) or the countdown gets to zero the screen just locks up and nothing happens no matter how long I wait. B) When I boot from the USB key the screen will flicker for a second and then go black with a flashing white underscore at the top left corner of the screen. Again it doesn't matter how long I wait, nothing happens and pressing keys doesn't do a thing. The very first time I tried to install it I got a terminal-like screen that said something about a directory called 'casper' having an error of some sort. I have tried installing from USB using both 11.04 and 10.10. I'm about to try 10.04. I have read tons of forum posts about this but so far I haven't seen anything in the solutions that apply to me. My intention is to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I must keep Windows as I am required to use Visual Studio for one of my college courses. Right now I'm using Wubi but I really want a full install. I can't use LVPM because it doesn't work with the version of Wubi I used. So now I'm thinking my best bet is to try to get a clean install working. I'd also convert Wubi to a full install too but there's no solution as far as I've read. So could someone tell me a reason why this is happening or if there's something I can do to get around the problem? I'm using a Gateway LT2802u netbook with and Intel Atom N455 processor, 1GB RAM, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 graphics card, and a 250GB HDD. I don't have anything on my current Wubi install that I can't replace so keep in mind when answering that I don't care if I lose my current settings and files from Wubi. Thanks everyone! UPDATE I just answered my own question so in case anyone else is having this same problem using similar hardware, do the following: When I first tried installing 11.04 I used the recommended universal installer tool to create the USB live/installation disk. That caused the original problem. Note that I had already downloaded the 11.04 ISO and did not use the included downloader from the USB creator. After that failed I used the same USB creator but had it download 10.10 for me. It also failed with the same issue. I repeated this process with unetbootin as well for both versions. Finally, I downloaded the Ubuntu 10.04 ISO and used the recommended USB creator once again. There was an error while creating the USB live install so I reformatted the USB key as FAT32 and tried again. It created the USB key. I then booted from the USB flash drive and selected "Install Ubuntu" (exact wording was different). It worked! It took me through the process that you see shown in pictures on the Ubuntu website. I let it create the appropriate partitions for me and it simply worked. I did get a few errors while the system tried to restart after it installed. It hung on a terminal-like screen but I pressed ENTER and it restarted. I booted into Windows 7, it checked the disks as it sensed that I messed with a partition, then it booted into Windows normally. Now I'm going to uninstall Wubi and update my new full install of Ubuntu! I'm excited to get the benefits of a full install now. So in the end, hopefully someone can learn from what I did.

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• Upgrading from MVC 1.0 to MVC2 in Visual Studio 2010 and VS2008.

  - by Sam Abraham

  With MVC2 officially released, I was involved in a few conversations regarding the feasibility of upgrading existing MVC 1.0 projects to quickly leverage the newly introduced MVC features. Luckily, Microsoft has proactively addressed this question for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 and many online resources discussing the upgrade process are a "Bing/Google Search" away. As I will happen to be speaking about MVC2 and Visual Studio 2010 at the Ft Lauderdale ArcSig .Net User Group Meeting on April 20th 2010 (Check http://www.fladotnet.com for more info.), I decided to include a quick demo on upgrading the NerdDinner project (which I consider the "Hello MVC World" project) from MVC 1.0 to MVC2 using Visual studio 2010 to demonstrate how simple the upgrade process is. In the next few lines, I will be briefly touching on upgrading to MVC2 for Visual Studio 2008 then discussing, in more detail, the upgrade process using Visual Studio 2010 while highlighting the advantage of its multi-targeting support. Using Visual Studio 2008 SP1 For upgrading to MVC2 Using VS2008 SP1, a Microsoft White Paper [1] presents two approaches:  1- Using a provided automated upgrade tool, 2-Manually upgrading the project. I personally prefer using the automated tool although it comes with an "AS IS" disclaimer. For those brave souls, or those who end up with no luck using the tool, detailed manual upgrade steps are also provided as a second option. Backing up the project in question is a must regardless of which route one would take to upgrade. Using Visual Studio 2010 Life is much easier for developers who already adopted Visual Studio 2010. Simply opening the MVC 1.0 solution file brings up the upgrade wizard as shown in figures 1, 2, 3 and 4. As we proceed with the upgrade process, the wizard requests confirmation on whether we choose to upgrade our target framework version to .Net 4.0 or keep the existing .Net 3.5 (Figure 5). VS2010 does a good job with multi-targeting where we can still develop .Net 3.5 applications while leveraging all the new bells and whistles that VS2010 brings to the table (Multi-targeting enables us to develop with as early as .Net 2.0 in VS2010) Figure 1 - Open Solution File Using VS2010   Figure 2 - VS2010 Conversion Wizard Figure 3- Ready To Convert To VS2010 Confirmation Screen Figure 4 - VS2010 Solution Conversion Progress Figure 5 - Confirm Target Framework Upgrade In an attempt to make my demonstration realistic, I decided to opt to keep the project targeted to the .Net 3.5 Framework.  After the successful completion of the conversion process,  a quick sanity check revealed that the NerdDinner project is still targeted to the .Net 3.5 framework as shown in figure 6. Inspecting the Web.Config revealed that the MVC DLL version our code compiles against has been successfully upgraded to 2.0 (Figure 7) and hence we should now be able to leverage the newly introduced features in MVC2 and VS2010 with no effort or time invested on modifying existing code. Figure 6- Confirm Target Framework Remained .Net 3.5  Figure 7 - Confirm MVC DLL Version Has Been Upgraded In Conclusion, Microsoft has empowered developers with the tools necessary to quickly and seamlessly upgrade their MVC solutions to the newly released MVC2. The multi-targeting feature in Visual Studio 2010 enables us to adopt this latest and greatest development tool while supporting development in as early as .Net 2.0. References 1. "Upgrading an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Application to ASP.NET MVC 2" http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/aspnet-mvc2-upgrade-notes

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• How to Use Sparklines in Excel 2010

  - by DigitalGeekery

  One of the cool features of Excel 2010 is the addition of Sparklines. A Sparkline is basically a little chart displayed in a cell representing your selected data set that allows you to quickly and easily spot trends at a glance. Inserting Sparklines on your Spreadsheet You will find the Sparklines group located on the Insert tab.   Select the cell or cells where you wish to display your Sparklines. Select the type of Sparkline you’d like to add to your spreadsheet. You’ll notice there are three types of Sparklines, Line, Column, and Win/Loss. We’ll select Line for our example. A Create Sparklines pops up and will prompt you to enter a Data Range you are using to create the Sparklines. You’ll notice that the location range (the range where the Sparklines will appear) is already filled in. You can type in the data range manually, or click and drag with your mouse across to select the data range. This will auto-fill the data range for you. Click OK when you are finished.   You will see your Sparklines appear in the desired cells.   Customizing Sparklines Select the one of more of the Sparklines to reveal the Design tab. You can display certain value points like high and low points, negative points, and first and last points by selecting the corresponding options from the Show group. You can also mark all value points by selecting  Markers. Select your desired Sparklines and click one of the included styles from the Style group on the Design tab. Click the down arrow on the lower right corner of the box to display additional pre-defined styles…   or select Sparkline Color or Marker Color options to fully customize your Sparklines. The Axis options allow additional options such as Date Axis Type, Plotting Data Left to Right, and displaying an axis point to represent the zero line in your data with Show Axis. Column Sparklines Column Sparklines display your data in individual columns as opposed to the Line view we’ve been using for our examples. Win/Loss Sparklines Win/Loss shows a basic positive or negative representation of your data set.   You can easily switch between different Sparkline types by simply selecting the current cells (individually or the entire group), and then clicking the desired type on the Design tab. For those that may be more visually oriented, Sparklines can be a wonderful addition to any spreadsheet. Are you just getting started with Office 2010? Check out some of our other great Excel posts such as how to copy worksheets, print only selected areas of a spreadsheet, and how to share data with Excel in Office 2010. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Convert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy WayShare Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

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• Industry perspectives on managing content

  - by aahluwalia

  Earlier this week I was noodling over a topic for my first blog post. My intention for this blog is to bring a practitioner's perspective on ECM to the community; to share and collaborate on best practices and approaches that address today's business problems. Reviewing my past 14 years of experience with web technologies, I wondered what topic would serve as a good "conversation starter". During this time, I received a call from a friend who was seeking insights on how content management applies to specific industries. She approached me because she vaguely remembered that I had worked in the Health Insurance industry in the recent past. She wanted me to tell her about the specific business needs of this industry. She was in for quite a surprise as she found out that I had spent the better part of a decade managing content within the Health Insurance industry and I discovered a great topic for my first blog post! I offer some insights from Health Insurance and invite my fellow practitioners to share their insights from other industries. What does content management mean to these industries? What can solution providers be aware of when offering solutions to these industries? The United States health care system relies heavily on private health insurance, which is the primary source of coverage for approximately 58% Americans. In the late 19th century, "accident insurance" began to be available, which operated much like modern disability insurance. In the late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs. The first thing a solution provider must be aware of about the Health Insurance industry is that it tends to be transaction intensive. They are the ones who manage and administer our health plans and process our claims when we visit our health care providers. It helps to keep in mind that they are in the business of delivering health insurance and not technology. You may find the mindset conservative in comparison to the IT industry, however, the Health Insurance industry has benefited and will continue to benefit from the efficiency that technology brings to traditionally paper-driven processes. We are all aware of the impact that Healthcare reform bill has had a significant impact on the Health Insurance industry. They are under a great deal of pressure to explore ways to reduce their administrative costs and increase operational efficiency. Overall, administrative costs of health insurance include the insurer's cost to administer the health plan, the costs borne by employers, health-care providers, governments and individual consumers. Inefficiencies plague health insurance, owing largely to the absence of standardized processes across the industry. To achieve this, industry leaders have come together to establish standards and invest in initiatives to help their healthcare provider partners transition to the next generation of healthcare technology. The move to online services and paperless explanation of benefits are some manifestations of technological advancements in health insurance. Several companies have adopted Toyota's LEAN methodology or Six Sigma principles to improve quality, reduce waste and excessive costs, thereby increasing the value of their plan offerings. A growing number of health insurance companies have transformed their business systems in the past decade alone and adopted some form of content management to reduce the costs involved in administering health plans. The key strategy has been to convert paper documents and forms into electronic formats, automate the content development process and securely distribute content to various audiences via diverse marketing channels, including web and mobile. Enterprise content management solutions can enable document capture of claim forms, manage digital assets, integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, build Business Process Management (BPM) processes, define retention and disposition instructions to comply with state and federal regulations and allow eBusiness and Marketing departments to develop and deliver web content to multiple websites, mobile devices and portals. Content can be shared securely within and outside the organization using Information Rights Management.  At the end of the day, solution providers who can translate strategic goals into solutions that maximize process automation, increase ease of use and minimize IT overhead are likely to be successful in today's health insurance environment.

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• Bitmask data insertions in SSDT Post-Deployment scripts

  - by jamiet

  On my current project we are using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) to manage our database schema and one of the tasks we need to do often is insert data into that schema once deployed; the typical method employed to do this is to leverage Post-Deployment scripts and that is exactly what we are doing. Our requirement is a little different though, our data is split up into various buckets that we need to selectively deploy on a case-by-case basis. I was going to use a SQLCMD variable for each bucket (defaulted to some value other than “Yes”) to define whether it should be deployed or not so we could use something like this in our Post-Deployment script: IF ($(DeployBucket1Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN   :r .\Bucket1.data.sqlENDIF ($(DeployBucket2Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN   :r .\Bucket2.data.sqlENDIF ($(DeployBucket3Flag) = 'Yes')BEGIN   :r .\Bucket3.data.sqlEND That works fine and is, I’m sure, a very common technique for doing this. It is however slightly ugly because we have to litter our deployment with various SQLCMD variables. My colleague James Rowland-Jones (whom I’m sure many of you know) suggested another technique – bitmasks. I won’t go into detail about how this works (James has already done that at Using a Bitmask - a practical example) but I’ll summarise by saying that you can deploy different combinations of the buckets simply by supplying a different numerical value for a single SQLCMD variable. Each bit of that value’s binary representation signifies whether a particular bucket should be deployed or not. This is better demonstrated using the following simple script (which can be easily leveraged inside your Post-Deployment scripts): /* $(DeployData) is a SQLCMD variable that would, if you were using this in SSDT, be declared in the SQLCMD variables section of your project file. It should contain a numerical value, defaulted to 0. In this example I have declared it using a :setvar statement. Test the affect of different values by changing the :setvar statement accordingly. Examples: :setvar DeployData 1 will deploy bucket 1 :setvar DeployData 2 will deploy bucket 2 :setvar DeployData 3   will deploy buckets 1 & 2 :setvar DeployData 6   will deploy buckets 2 & 3 :setvar DeployData 31  will deploy buckets 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 */ :setvar DeployData 0 DECLARE  @bitmask VARBINARY(MAX) = CONVERT(VARBINARY,$(DeployData)); IF (@bitmask & 1 = 1) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 1 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 2 = 2) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 2 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 4 = 4) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 3 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 8 = 8) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 4 insertions'; END IF (@bitmask & 16 = 16) BEGIN     PRINT 'Bucket 5 insertions'; END An example of running this using DeployData=6 The binary representation of 6 is 110. The second and third significant bits of that binary number are set to 1 and hence buckets 2 and 3 are “activated”. Hope that makes sense and is useful to some of you! @Jamiet P.S. I used the awesome HTML Copy feature of Visual Studio’s Productivity Power Tools in order to format the T-SQL code above for this blog post.

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• Converting from mp4 to Xvid avi using avconv?

  - by Ricardo Gladwell

  I normally use avidemux to convert mp4s to Xvid AVI for my Philips Streamium SLM5500. Normally I select MPEG-4 ASP (Xvid) at Two Pass with an average bitrate f 1500kb/s for video and AC3 (lav) audio and it converts correctly. However, I'm trying to using avconv so I can automate the process with a script, but when I do this the video stutters and stops playing part way through. I have a suspicion its something to do with a faulty audio conversion. The commands I'm using are as follows: avconv -y -i video.mp4 -pass 1 -vtag xvid -c:a ac3 -b:a 128k -b:v 1500k -f avi /dev/null avconv -y -i video.mp4 -pass 2 -vtag xvid -c:a ac3 -b:a 128k -b:v 1500k -f avi video.avi There is a bewildering array of arguments for avconv. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Is there a way I can script avidemux from a headless server? Please see command line output: $ avconv -y -i video.mp4 -pass 1 -vtag xvid -an -b:v 1500k -f avi /dev/null avconv version 0.8.5-6:0.8.5-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the Libav developers built on Jan 24 2013 14:49:20 with gcc 4.7.2 Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'video.mp4': Metadata: major_brand : isom minor_version : 1 compatible_brands: isomavc1 creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 Duration: 00:44:09.16, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 669 kb/s Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 720x404 [PAR 1:1 DAR 180:101], 538 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 100 tbn, 50 tbc Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 Stream #0.1(und): Audio: ac3, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 127 kb/s Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:42 [buffer @ 0x7f4c40] w:720 h:404 pixfmt:yuv420p Output #0, avi, to '/dev/null': Metadata: major_brand : isom minor_version : 1 compatible_brands: isomavc1 creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 ISFT : Lavf53.21.1 Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x404 [PAR 1:1 DAR 180:101], q=2-31, pass 1, 1500 kb/s, 25 tbn, 25 tbc Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 Stream mapping: Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 -> mpeg4) Press ctrl-c to stop encoding frame=66227 fps=328 q=2.0 Lsize= 0kB time=2649.16 bitrate= 0.0kbits/s video:401602kB audio:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead -100.000000% $ avconv -y -i video.mp4 -pass 2 -vtag xvid -c:a ac3 -b:a 128k -b:v 1500k -f avi video.avi avconv version 0.8.5-6:0.8.5-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the Libav developers built on Jan 24 2013 14:49:20 with gcc 4.7.2 Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'video.mp4': Metadata: major_brand : isom minor_version : 1 compatible_brands: isomavc1 creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 Duration: 00:44:09.16, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 669 kb/s Stream #0.0(und): Video: h264 (High), yuv420p, 720x404 [PAR 1:1 DAR 180:101], 538 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 100 tbn, 50 tbc Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 Stream #0.1(und): Audio: ac3, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 127 kb/s Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:42 [buffer @ 0x12b4f00] w:720 h:404 pixfmt:yuv420p Incompatible sample format 's16' for codec 'ac3', auto-selecting format 'flt' [mpeg4 @ 0x12b3ec0] [lavc rc] Using all of requested bitrate is not necessary for this video with these parameters. Output #0, avi, to 'video.avi': Metadata: major_brand : isom minor_version : 1 compatible_brands: isomavc1 creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 ISFT : Lavf53.21.1 Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x404 [PAR 1:1 DAR 180:101], q=2-31, pass 2, 1500 kb/s, 25 tbn, 25 tbc Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:38 Stream #0.1(und): Audio: ac3, 44100 Hz, stereo, flt, 128 kb/s Metadata: creation_time : 2013-02-04 13:53:42 Stream mapping: Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (h264 -> mpeg4) Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (ac3 -> ac3) Press ctrl-c to stop encoding Input stream #0:1 frame changed from rate:44100 fmt:s16 ch:2 to rate:44100 fmt:flt ch:2 frame=66227 fps=284 q=2.2 Lsize= 458486kB time=2649.13 bitrate=1417.8kbits/s video:413716kB audio:41393kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.741969%

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• MVC Portable Areas &ndash; Deploying Static Files

  - by Steve Michelotti

  This is the second post in a series related to build and deployment considerations as I’ve been exploring MVC Portable Areas: #1 – Using Web Application Project to build portable areas #2 – Conventions for deploying portable area static files #3 – Portable area static files as embedded resources As I’ve been digging more into portable areas, one of the things I’ve liked best is the deployment story which enables my *.aspx, *.ascx pages to be compiled into the assembly as embedded resources rather than having to maintain all those files separately. In traditional web forms, that was always the thing to prevented developers from utilizing *.ascx user controls across projects (see this post for using portable areas in web forms).  However, though the aspx pages are embedded, the supporting static files (e.g., images, css, javascript) are *not*. Most of the demos available online today tend to brush over this issue and focus solely on the aspx side of things. But to create truly robust portable areas, it’s important to have a good story for these supporting files as well.  I’ve been working with two different approaches so far (of course I’d really like to hear if other people are using alternatives). Scenario For the approaches below, the scenario really isn’t that important. It could be something as trivial as this partial view: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> 2: <img src="<%: Url.Content("~/images/arrow.gif") %>" /> Hello World! The point is that there needs to be careful consideration for *any* scenario that links to an external file such as an image, *.css, *.js, etc. In the example shown above, it uses the Url.Content() method to convert to a relative path. But this method won’t necessary work depending on how you deploy your portable area. One approach to address this issue is to build your portable area project with MSDeploy/WebDeploy so that it is packaged properly before incorporating into the host application. All of the *.cs files are removed and the project is ready for xcopy deployment – however, I do *not* need the “Views” folder since all of the mark up has been compiled into the assembly as embedded resources. Now in the host application we create a folder called “Modules” and deploy any portable areas as sub-folders under that: At this point we can add a simple assembly reference to the Widget1.dll sitting in the Modules\Widget1\bin folder. I can now render the portable image in my view like any other portable area. However, the problem with that is that the view results in this:   It couldn’t find arrow.gif because it looked for /images/arrow.gif and it was *actually* located at /images/Modules/Widget1/images/arrow.gif. One solution is to make the physical location of the portable configurable from the perspective of the host like this: 1: <appSettings> 2: <add key="Widget1" value="Modules\Widget1"/> 3: </appSettings> Using the <appSettings> section is a little cheesy but it could be better formalized into its own section. In fact, if were you willing to rely on conventions (e.g., “Modules\{areaName}”) then then config could be eliminated completely. With this config in place, we could create our own Html helper method called Url.AreaContent() that “wraps” the OOTB Url.Content() method while simply pre-pending the area location path: 1: public static string AreaContent(this UrlHelper urlHelper, string contentPath) 2: { 3: var areaName = (string)urlHelper.RequestContext.RouteData.DataTokens["area"]; 4: var areaPath = (string)ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[areaName]; 5:   6: return urlHelper.Content("~/" + areaPath + "/" + contentPath); With these two items in place, we just change our Url.Content() call to Url.AreaContent() like this: 1: <img src="<%: Url.AreaContent("/images/arrow.gif") %>" /> Hello World! and the arrow.gif now renders correctly:     Since we’re just using our own Url.AreaContent() rather than the built-in Url.Content(), this solution works for images, *.css, *.js, or any externally referenced files.  Additionally, any images referenced inside a css file will work provided it’s a relative reference and not an absolute reference. An alternative to this approach is to build the static file into the assembly as embedded resources themselves. I’ll explore this in another post (linked at the top).

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