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  • What language/framework (technology) to use for website (flash games portal)

    - by cripox
    Hello, I know there are a lot of similar questions on the net, but because I am a newbie in web development I didn't find the solution for my specific problem. I am planing on creating a flash games portal from scratch. It is a big chance that there will be big traffic from the beginning (millions of pageviews). I want to reduce the server costs as much as possible but in the same time to not be tide to an expensive contract as there is a chance that the project will not be as successfully as I want and in that case the money would be very little. The question is : what technology to use? I don't know any web dev technology yet so it doesn't matter what I will learn. My web dev experience is a little php 8 years ago, and from then I programmed in C++ / Java- game and mobile development. I like Java and C syntax and language very much and I tend to dislike dynamic typing or non robust scripting (like php)- but I can get along if these are the best choices. The candidates are now: - Grails (my best for now) Ruby on Rails Cake PHP Other technologies (Google App Engine, Python/Django etc...) I was considering at first using pure C and compiling the web app in the server- just to squeeze more from the servers, but soon I understand that this is overkill. Next my eyes came on Ruby - as there is a lot of buzz for it's easiness of use. Next I discovered Grails and looked at Java because it is said that it is "faster". But I don't know what this "Faster" really means on my needs, so here comes the first question: 1) What will be my biggest consumption on the server, other than bandwidth, for a lot of flash content requests? Is it memory? I heard that Java needs a lot of memory, but is faster. Is it CPU? I am planning to take some daily VPS.NET nodes at first, to see if there is a demand, and if the "spike" is permanent to move to a dedicated server (serverloft.com has some good offers), else to remain with less nodes. I was also considering developing in Google App Engine- cheap or free hosting to use at first - so I can test my assumption- and also very easy to use (no need for sys administration) but the costs became high if used more ( 3 million games played / month .. x mb/ each). And the issue with Google is that it looks me in this technology. My other concern is scalability (not only for traffic/users, but as adding functionality) My plans are to release a functional site in just 4 weeks (just the basics frontend and some quick basic backend - so I can be able to modify some things and add games manually) - but then to raise it and add more things to it. I am planning to take a little different approach than other portals so I need to write it from scratch (a script will not do). 2) Will Grails take much more resources than RoR or Php server wise? I heard that making it on Java stack will be hardware expensive and is overkill if you don't make a bank application. My application will not be very complex (I hope and i will try to) but will have a lot of traffic. I also took in account using CDN for files, but the cheapest CDN found was 5c/GB (vps.net) and the cost per gb on serverloft (http://www.serverloft.com/dedizierte-server/server-details.php?products=4) is only 1.79 cents/GB and comes with the other resources either. I am new to this domain (web). I am learning the ropes and searching on the web for ~half of year but don't have any really practical experience, so I know that I must have some naive thinking and other issues that i don't know from now, so please give me any advice you want regarding anything, not just the specific questions asked. And thank you so much for such great community!

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  • database design help for game / user levels / progress

    - by sprugman
    Sorry this got long and all prose-y. I'm creating my first truly gamified web app and could use some help thinking about how to structure the data. The Set-up Users need to accomplish tasks in each of several categories before they can move up a level. I've got my Users, Tasks, and Categories tables, and a UserTasks table which joins the three. ("User 3 has added Task 42 in Category 8. Now they've completed it.") That's all fine and working wonderfully. The Challenge I'm not sure of the best way to track the progress in the individual categories toward each level. The "business" rules are: You have to achieve a certain number of points in each category to move up. If you get the number of points needed in Cat 8, but still have other work to do to complete the level, any new Cat 8 points count toward your overall score, but don't "roll over" into the next level. The number of Categories is small (five currently) and unlikely to change often, but by no means absolutely fixed. The number of points needed to level-up will vary per level, probably by a formula, or perhaps a lookup table. So the challenge is to track each user's progress toward the next level in each category. I've thought of a few potential approaches: Possible Solutions Add a column to the users table for each category and reset them all to zero each time a user levels-up. Have a separate UserProgress table with a row for each category for each user and the number of points they have. (Basically a Many-to-Many version of #1.) Add a userLevel column to the UserTasks table and use that to derive their progress with some kind of SUM statement. Their current level will be a simple int in the User table. Pros & Cons (1) seems like by far the most straightforward, but it's also the least flexible. Perhaps I could use a naming convention based on the category ids to help overcome some of that. (With code like "select cats; for each cat, get the value from Users.progress_{cat.id}.") It's also the one where I lose the most data -- I won't know which points counted toward leveling up. I don't have a need in mind for that, so maybe I don't care about that. (2) seems complicated: every time I add or subtract a user or a category, I have to maintain the other table. I foresee synchronization challenges. (3) Is somewhere in between -- cleaner than #2, but less intuitive than #1. In order to find out where a user is, I'd have mildly complex SQL like: SELECT categoryId, SUM(points) from UserTasks WHERE userId={user.id} & countsTowardLevel={user.level} groupBy categoryId Hmm... that doesn't seem so bad. I think I'm talking myself into #3 here, but would love any input, advice or other ideas.

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  • A view interface for large object/array dumps

    - by user685107
    I want to embed in a page a detailed structure report of my model objects, like print_r() or var_export() produce (now I’m doing this with running var_export() on get_object_vars()). But what I actually want to see is only some properties (in most cases), but at this moment I have to use Ctrl+F and seek the variable I want, instead of just staring at it right after the page completes loading. So I’m embedding buttons to show/hide large arrays etc. but thought: ‘What if there already is the thing I do right now?’ So is there? Update: What would your ideal interface look like? First of all, dumped models fit in the first screen. All the properties can be seen at the first look at the screen (there are not many of them, around 10 per each, three models total, so it is possible). Small arrays can be shown unrolled too. Let the size of the array to count it as ‘small’ be definable. Ideally, the user can see values of the properties without doing any click, scrolling the screen or typing something. There must be some improvements to representing the values, say, if an array is empty, show array ‘My_big_array’ is empty and if a boolean variable starting with is_, has_, had_ has a false as the value, make the variable (let us take is_available for example) shown as is_NOT_available in red, and if it has true as the value, show is_available in green. Without any value shown. The same goes for defined constants. That would be ideal. I want to make focus on this kind of switches. Krumo seems useful, but since it always closes up the variable without making difference of how large it is, I cannot use it as is, but there might appear something similar on github soon :) Second update starts here: Any programmer who sees is_available = false will know what it means, no need to do more Bringing in color indication I forgot about one thing: the ‘switches’ let’s call them so, may me important or not. So I have right now some of them that will show in green or red, this is for something global, like caching, which is shown as Caching is… ON with ‘ON’ written in green, (and ‘OFF’ in red when disabled) while the words about what it is, i.e. ‘Caching is… ’ are written in black. And some which are not so important, for example I haven’t defined REVEAL_TIES is… not set with ‘not set’ written in gray, while the words describing what it is stay in black. And if it would be set the whole phrase would be in black since there is nothing important: if this small utility for showing some undercover things is working, I will see some messages after it, if it isn’t — site will be working independently of its state. Dividing switches into important ones and not with corresponding color match should improve readability, especially for those users who are not programmers and just enabled debug mode because some guy from bugzilla said do that — for them it would help to understand what is important and what is not.

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  • bulls and cows game -- programming algorithm(python)

    - by IcyFlame
    This is a simulation of the game Cows and Bulls with three digit numbers I am trying to get the number of cows and bulls between two numbers. One of which is generated by the computer and the other is guessed by the user. I have parsed the two numbers I have so that now I have two lists with three elements each and each element is one of the digits in the number. So: 237 will give the list [2,3,7]. And I make sure that the relative indices are maintained.the general pattern is:(hundreds, tens, units). And these two lists are stored in the two lists: machine and person. ALGORITHM 1 So, I wrote the following code, The most intuitive algorithm: cows and bulls are initialized to 0 before the start of this loop. for x in person: if x in machine: if machine.index(x) == person.index(x): bulls += 1 print x,' in correct place' else: print x,' in wrong place' cows += 1 And I started testing this with different type of numbers guessed by the computer. Quite randomly, I decided on 277. And I guessed 447. Here, I got the first clue that this algorithm may not work. I got 1 cow and 0 bulls. Whereas I should have got 1 bull and 1 cow. This is a table of outputs with the first algorithm: Guess Output Expected Output 447 0 bull, 1 cow 1 bull, 1 cow 477 2 bulls, 0 cows 2 bulls, 0 cows 777 0 bulls, 3 cows 2 bulls, 0 cows So obviously this algorithm was not working when there are repeated digits in the number randomly selected by the computer. I tried to understand why these errors are taking place, But I could not. I have tried a lot but I just could not see any mistake in the algorithm(probably because I wrote it!) ALGORITHM 2 On thinking about this for a few days I tried this: cows and bulls are initialized to 0 before the start of this loop. for x in range(3): for y in range(3): if x == y and machine[x] == person[y]: bulls += 1 if not (x == y) and machine[x] == person[y]: cows += 1 I was more hopeful about this one. But when I tested this, this is what I got: Guess Output Expected Output 447 1 bull, 1 cow 1 bull, 1 cow 477 2 bulls, 2 cows 2 bulls, 0 cows 777 2 bulls, 4 cows 2 bulls, 0 cows The mistake I am making is quite clear here, I understood that the numbers were being counted again and again. i.e.: 277 versus 477 When you count for bulls then the 2 bulls come up and thats alright. But when you count for cows: the 7 in 277 at units place is matched with the 7 in 477 in tens place and thus a cow is generated. the 7 in 277 at tens place is matched with the 7 in 477 in units place and thus a cow is generated.' Here the matching is exactly right as I have written the code as per that. But this is not what I want. And I have no idea whatsoever on what to do after this. Furthermore... I would like to stress that both the algorithms work perfectly, if there are no repeated digits in the number selected by the computer. Please help me with this issue. P.S.: I have been thinking about this for over a week, But I could not post a question earlier as my account was blocked(from asking questions) because I asked a foolish question. And did not delete it even though I got 2 downvotes immediately after posting the question.

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  • Strange behaviour of CUDA kernel

    - by username_4567
    I'm writing code for calculating prefix sum. Here is my kernel __global__ void prescan(int *indata,int *outdata,int n,long int *sums) { extern __shared__ int temp[]; int tid=threadIdx.x; int offset=1,start_id,end_id; int *global_sum=&temp[n+2]; if(tid==0) { temp[n]=blockDim.x*blockIdx.x; temp[n+1]=blockDim.x*(blockIdx.x+1)-1; start_id=temp[n]; end_id=temp[n+1]; //cuPrintf("Value of start %d and end %d\n",start_id,end_id); } __syncthreads(); start_id=temp[n]; end_id=temp[n+1]; temp[tid]=indata[start_id+tid]; temp[tid+1]=indata[start_id+tid+1]; for(int d=n>>1;d>0;d>>=1) { __syncthreads(); if(tid<d) { int ai=offset*(2*tid+1)-1; int bi=offset*(2*tid+2)-1; temp[bi]+=temp[ai]; } offset*=2; } if(tid==0) { sums[blockIdx.x]=temp[n-1]; temp[n-1]=0; cuPrintf("sums %d\n",sums[blockIdx.x]); } for(int d=1;d<n;d*=2) { offset>>=1; __syncthreads(); if(tid<d) { int ai=offset*(2*tid+1)-1; int bi=offset*(2*tid+2)-1; int t=temp[ai]; temp[ai]=temp[bi]; temp[bi]+=t; } } __syncthreads(); if(tid==0) { outdata[start_id]=0; } __threadfence_block(); __syncthreads(); outdata[start_id+tid]=temp[tid]; outdata[start_id+tid+1]=temp[tid+1]; __syncthreads(); if(tid==0) { temp[0]=0; outdata[start_id]=0; } __threadfence_block(); __syncthreads(); if(blockIdx.x==0 && threadIdx.x==0) { for(int i=1;i<gridDim.x;i++) { sums[i]=sums[i]+sums[i-1]; } } __syncthreads(); __threadfence(); if(blockIdx.x==0 && threadIdx.x==0) { for(int i=0;i<gridDim.x;i++) { cuPrintf("****sums[%d]=%d ",i,sums[i]); } } __syncthreads(); __threadfence(); if(blockIdx.x!=gridDim.x-1) { int tid=(blockIdx.x+1)*blockDim.x+threadIdx.x; if(threadIdx.x==0) cuPrintf("Adding %d \n",sums[blockIdx.x]); outdata[tid]+=sums[blockIdx.x]; } __syncthreads(); } In above kernel, sums array will accumulate prefix sum per block and and then first thread will calculate prefix sum of this sum array. Now if I print this sum array from device side it'll show correct results while in cuPrintf("Adding %d \n",sums[blockIdx.x]); this line it prints that it is taking old value. What could be the reason?

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  • Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

    - by Rick Strahl
    ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. .blackborder td { border-bottom: solid 1px silver; border-left: solid 1px silver; } Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in  a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or  you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted  it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject port Uri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString(); What else? I took a look through the old post’s comments and addressed as many of the questions and comments that came up in there. With a few small and silly exceptions this update post handles most of these. But I’m sure there are a more things that go in here. What else would be useful to put onto this post so it serves as a nice all in one place to go for path references? If you think of something leave a comment and I’ll try to update the post with it in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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  • Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

    - by smisner
    Many people like me want (or need) to do their business intelligence development work on a laptop. As someone who frequently speaks at various events or teaches classes on all subjects related to the Microsoft business intelligence stack, I need a way to run multiple server products on my laptop with reasonable performance. Once upon a time, that requirement meant only that I had to load the current version of SQL Server and the client tools of choice. In today's post, I'll review my latest experience with trying to make the newly released Microsoft BI products work with a Windows 7 operating system.The entrance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the BI stack complicated matters and I started using Virtual Server to establish a "suitable" environment. As part of the team that delivered a lot of education as part of the Yukon pre-launch activities (that would be SQL Server 2005 for the uninitiated), I was working with four - yes, four - virtual servers. That was a pretty brutal workload for a 2GB laptop, which worked if I was very, very careful. It could also be a finicky and unreliable configuration as I learned to my dismay at one TechEd session several years ago when I had to reboot a very carefully cached set of servers just minutes before my session started. Although it worked, it came back to life very, very slowly much to the displeasure of the audience. They couldn't possibly have been less pleased than me.At that moment, I resolved to get the beefiest environment I could afford and consolidate to a single virtual server. Enter the 4GB 64-bit laptop to preserve my sanity and my livelihood. Likewise, for SQL Server 2008, I managed to keep everything within a single virtual server and I could function reasonably well with this approach.Now we have SQL Server 2008 R2 plus Office SharePoint Server 2010. That means a 64-bit operating system. Period. That means no more Virtual Server. That means I must use Hyper-V or another alternative. I've heard alternatives exist, but my few dabbles in this area did not yield positive results. It might have been just me having issues rather than any failure of those technologies to adequately support the requirements.My first run at working with the new BI stack configuration was to set up a 64-bit 4GB laptop with a dual-boot to run Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. However, I was generally not happy with running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop. For one, I couldn't put it into sleep mode, which is helpful if I want to prepare for a presentation beforehand and then walk to the podium without the need to hold my laptop in its open state along the way (my strategy at the TechEd session long, long ago). Secondly, it was finicky with projectors. I had issues from time to time and while I always eventually got it to work, I didn't appreciate those nerve-wracking moments wondering whether this would be the time that it wouldn't work.Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was possible to load SharePoint 2010 in a Windows 7 which piqued my interest. I had just acquired a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit, and thought surely running the BI stack natively on my laptop must be better than running Hyper-V. (I have not tried booting to Hyper-V VHD yet, but that's on my list of things to try so the jury of one is still out on this approach.) Recently, I had to build up a server with the RTM versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint Server 2010 and decided to follow suit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop. The process is slightly different, but I'm happy to report that it IS possible, although I had some fits and starts along the way.DISCLAIMER: These products are NOT intended to be run in production mode on the Windows 7 operating system. The configuration described in this post is strictly for development or learning purposes and not supported by Microsoft. If you have trouble, you will NOT get help from them. I might be able to help, but I provide no guarantees of my ability or availablity to help. I won't provide the step-by-step instructions in this post as there are other resources that provide these details, but I will provide an overview of my approach, point you to the relevant resources, describe some of the problems I encountered, and explain how I addressed those problems to achieve my desired goal.Because my goal was not simply to set up SharePoint Server 2010 on my laptop, but specifically PowerPivot for SharePoint, I started out by referring to the installation instructions at the PowerPiovt-Info site, but mainly to confirm that I was performing steps in the proper sequence. I didn't perform the steps in Part 1 because those steps are applicable only to a server operating system which I am not running on my laptop. Then, the instructions in Part 2, won't work exactly as written for the same reason. Instead, I followed the instructions on MSDN, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. In general, I found the following differences in installation steps from the steps at PowerPivot-Info:You must copy the SharePoint installation media to the local drive so that you can edit the config.xml to allow installation on a Windows client.You also have to manually install the prerequisites. The instructions provides links to each item that you must manually install and provides a command-line instruction to execute which enables required Windows features.I will digress for a moment to save you some grief in the sequence of steps to perform. I discovered later that a missing step in the MSDN instructions is to install the November CTP Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. When I went to test my SharePoint site (I believe I tested after I had a successful PowerPivot installation), I ran into the following error: Could not load file or assembly 'RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I was rather surprised that Reporting Services was required. Then I found an article by Alan le Marquand, Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010,that instructed readers to install the November add-in. My first reaction was, "Really?!?" But I confirmed it in another TechNet article on hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. It doesn't refer explicitly to the November CTP but following the link took me there. (Interestingly, I retested today and there's no longer any reference to the November CTP. Here's the link to download the latest and greatest Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies 2010.) You don't need to download the add-in anymore if you're doing a regular server-based installation of SharePoint because it installs as part of the prerequisites automatically.When it was time to start the installation of SharePoint, I deviated from the MSDN instructions and from the PowerPivot-Info instructions:On the Choose the installation you want page of the installation wizard, I chose Server Farm.On the Server Type page, I chose Complete.At the end of the installation, I did not run the configuration wizard.Returning to the PowerPivot-Info instructions, I tried to follow the instructions in Part 3 which describe installing SQL Server 2008 R2 with the PowerPivot option. These instructions tell you to choose the New Server option on the Setup Role page where you add PowerPivot for SharePoint. However, I ran into problems with this approach and got installation errors at the end.It wasn't until much later as I was investigating an error that I encountered Dave Wickert's post that installing PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7 is unsupported. Uh oh. But he did want to hear about it if anyone succeeded, so I decided to take the plunge. Perseverance paid off, and I can happily inform Dave that it does work so far. I haven't tested absolutely everything with PowerPivot for SharePoint but have successfully deployed a workbook and viewed the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. I have not yet tested the data refresh feature, but I have installed. Continue reading to see how I accomplished my objective.I unintalled SQL Server 2008 R2 and started again. I had different problems which I don't recollect now. However, I uninstalled again and approached installation from a different angle and my next attempt succeeded. The downside of this approach is that you must do all of the things yourself that are done automatically when you install PowerPivot as a new server. Here are the steps that I followed:Install SQL Server 2008 R2 to get a database engine instance installed.Run the SharePoint configuration wizard to set up the SharePoint databases.In Central Administration, create a Web application using classic mode authentication as per a TechNet article on PowerPivot Authentication and Authorization.Then I followed the steps I found at How to: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint on an Existing SharePoint Server. Especially important to note - you must launch setup by using Run as administrator. I did not have to manually deploy the PowerPivot solution as the instructions specify, but it's good to know about this step because it tells you where to look in Central Administration to confirm a successful deployment.I did spot some incorrect steps in the instructions (at the time of this writing) in How To: Configure Stored Credentials for PowerPivot Data Refresh. Specifically, in the section entitled Step 1: Create a target application and set the credentials, both steps 10 and 12 are incorrect. They tell you to provide an actual Windows user name and password on the page where you are simply defining the prompts for your application in the Secure Store Service. To add the Windows user name and password that you want to associate with the application - after you have successfully created the target application - you select the target application and then click Set credentials in the ribbon.Lastly, I followed the instructions at How to: Install Office Data Connectivity Components on a PowerPivot server. However, I have yet to test this in my current environment.I did have several stops and starts throughout this process and edited those out to spare you from reading non-essential information. I believe the explanation I have provided here accurately reflect the steps I followed to produce a working configuration. If you follow these steps and get a different result, please let me know so that together we can work through the issue and correct these instructions. I'm sure there are many other folks in the Microsoft BI community that will appreciate the ability to set up the BI stack in a Windows 7 environment for development or learning purposes. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Turn Photos and Home Videos into Movies with Windows Live Movie Maker

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Are you looking for an easy way to take your digital photos and videos and turn them into a movie or slideshow? Today we’ll take a detailed look at how to do use Windows Live Movie Maker. Installation Windows Live Movie Maker comes bundled as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite (link below). However, you don’t have to install any of the programs you may not want. Take notice of the You’re almost done screen. Before clicking Continue, be sure to uncheck the boxes to set your search provider and homepage. Adding Pictures and Videos Open Windows Live Movie Maker. You can add videos or photos by simply dragging and dropping them onto the storyboard area. You can also click on the storyboard area or on the Add videos and photos button on the Home tab to browse for videos and photos. Windows Live Movie Maker supports most video, image, and audio file types. Select your files and add click Open to add them to Windows Live Movie Maker. By default WLMM doesn’t allow you to add files from network locations…so check out our article on how to add network support to Windows Live MovieMaker if the files you want to add are on a network drive. Layout All of your added clips will appear in the storyboard area on the right, while the currently selected clip will appear in the preview window on the left. You can adjust the size of the two areas by clicking and dragging the dividing line in the middle.    Make the clips on the storyboard bigger or smaller by clicking on the thumbnail size icon. The slider at the lower right adjusts the zoom time scale.   Previewing your Movie At any time, you can playback your movie and preview how it will look in the Preview window by clicking the space bar, or by pushing the play button under the preview window. You can also manually move the preview bar slider across the storyboard to view the clips as the video progresses. Adjusting Clips on the Storyboard You can click and drag clips on the storyboard to change the order in which the photos and videos appear.   Adding Music Nothing brings a movie to life quite like music. Selecting Add music will add your music to the beginning of the movie. Select Add music at the current point to include it in the movie to the current location of your preview bar slider, then browse for your music clip. WLMM supports many common audio files such as WAV, MP3, M4A, WMA, AIFF, and ASF. The music clip will appear above the video / photos clips on the storyboard.   You can change the location of music clips by clicking and dragging them to a different location on the storyboard. Add Titles, Captions, and Credits To add a Title screen to your movie, click the Title button on the Home tab. Type your title directly into the text box on the preview screen. The title will be placed at the location of the preview slider on the storyboard. However, you can change the location by clicking and dragging title to other areas of the storyboard. On the Format tab, there are a handful of text settings. You can change the font, color, size, alignment,  and transparency. The Adjust group allows you to change the background color, edit the text, and set the length of time the Title will appear in the movie.   The Effects group on the Format tab allows you to select an effect for your title screen. By hovering your cursor over each option, you will get a live preview of how each effect will appear in the preview window. Click to apply any of the effects. For captions, select where you want your caption to appear with the preview slider on the storyboard, then click the captions button on the Home tab. Just like the title, you type your caption directly into the text box on the preview screen, and you can make any adjustments by using the Font and Paragraph, Adjust, and Effects groups above. Credits are done the same as titles and captions, except they are automatically placed at the end of the movie.   Transitions Go to the Animation tab on the ribbon to apply transitions. Select a clip from the storyboard and hover over one of the transition to see it in the preview window. Click on the transition to apply it to the clip. You can apply transitions separately to clips or hold down Ctrl button while clicking to select multiple clips to which to apply the same transition. Pan and zoom effects are also located on the Animations tab, but can be applied to photos only. Like transition, you can apply them individually to a clip or hold down Ctrl button while clicking to select multiple clips to which to apply the same pan and zoom effect. Once applied, you can adjust the duration of the transitions and pan and zoom effects. You can also click the dropdown for additional transitions or effects. Visual Effects Similar to Pan and Zoom and Transitions, you can apply a variety of Visual Effects to individual or multiple clips. Editing Video and Music Note: This does not actually edit the original video you imported into your Windows Live Movie Maker project, only how it appears in your WLMM project. There are some very basic editing tools located on the Home tab. The Rotate left and Rotate right button will adjust any clip that may be oriented incorrectly. The Fit to music button will automatically adjust the duration of the photos (if you have any in your project) to fit the length of the music in your movie. Audio mix allows you to change the volume level   You can also do some slightly more advanced editing from the Edit tab. Select the video clip on the storyboard and click the Trim tool to edit or remove portions of a video clip. Next, click and drag the sliders in the preview windows to select the are you wish to keep. For example, the area outside the sliders is the area trimmed from the movie. The area inside is the section that is kept in the movie. You can also adjust the Start and End points manually on the ribbon.   When you are finished, click Save trim. You can also split your video clips. Move the preview slider to the location in the video clip where you’d like to split it, and select Split. Your video will be split into separate sections. Now you can apply different effects or move them to different locations on the storyboard. Editing Music Clips Select the music clip on the storyboard and then the Options tab on the ribbon. You can adjust the music volume by moving the slider right and left.   You can also choose to have your music clip fade in or out at the beginning and end of your movie. From the Fade in and Fade out dropdowns, select None, Slow, Medium, or Fast. To adjust the sound of your audio clips, click on the Edit tab, select the Video volume button, and adjust the slider. Move it all the way to the left to mute any background noise in your video clips.   AutoMovie As you have seen, Windows Live Movie Maker allows you to add effects, transitions, titles, and more. If you don’t want to do any of that stuff yourself, AutoMovie will automatically add title, credits, cross fade transitions between items, pan and zoom effects to photos, and fit your project to the music. Just select the AutoMovie button on the Home tab. You can go from zero to movie in literally a couple minutes.   Uploading to YouTube You can share your video on YouTube directly from Windows Live Movie Maker. Click on the YouTube icon in the Sharing group on the Home tab. You’ll be prompted for your YouTube username and password. Fill in the details about your movie and click Publish. The movie will be converted to WMV before being uploaded to YouTube. As soon as the YouTube conversion is complete, you’re new movie is live and ready to be viewed. Saving your Movie as a Video File Select the icon at the top left, then select Save movie. As you hover your mouse over each of the options, you will see the output display size, aspect ratio, and estimated file size per minute of video. All of these settings will output your movie as a WMV file. (Unfortunately, the only option is to save a movie as a WMV file.) The only difference is how they are encoded based on preset common settings. The Burn to DVD option also outputs a WMV file, but then opens Windows DVD Maker and walks you through the process of creating and burning a DVD.   If you choose the Burn to DVD option, close this window when the WMV file conversion is complete and the Windows DVD Maker will prompt you to begin. When your movie is finished, it’s time to relax and enjoy.   Conclusion Windows Live Movie Maker makes it easy for the average person to quickly churn out nice looking movies and slideshows from there own pictures and videos. However, long time users of previous editions (formerly called Windows Movie Maker) will likely be disappointed by some features missing in Windows Live Movie Maker that existed in earlier editions. Looking for details on burning your new project to DVD, check out our article on how to create and author DVDs with Windows DVD Maker. Download Windows Live Movie Maker Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Family Fun: Share Photos with Photo Gallery and Windows Live SpacesCreate and Author DVDs in Windows 7Rotate a Video 90 degrees with VLC or Windows Live Movie MakerInstall Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7How to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows Vista 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 Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor Gmail Button Addon (Firefox) Hyperwords addon (Firefox) Backup Outlook 2010

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  • MySQL Connect: What to Expect From the Wondrous Land of MySQL Cluster

    - by Mat Keep
    The MySQL Connect conference is only a couple of weeks away, with MySQL engineers, support teams, consultants and community aces busy putting the final touches to their talks. There will be many exciting new announcements and sharing of best practices at the conference, covering the range of MySQL technologies. MySQL Cluster will a big part of this, so I wanted to share some key sessions for those of you who plan on attending, as well as some resources for those who are not lucky enough to be able to make the trip, but who can't afford to miss the key news. Of course, this is no substitute to actually being there….and the good news is that registration is still open ;-) Roadmap: Whats New in MySQL Cluster Saturday 29th, 1300-1400, in Golden Gate room 5.                                                                                        Bernd Ocklin, director of MySQL Cluster development, and myself will be taking a look at what follows the latest MySQL Cluster 7.2 release. I don't want to give to much away - lets just say its not often you can add powerful new functionality to a product while at the same time making life radically simpler for its users. For those not making it to the Conference, a live webinar repeating the talk is scheduled for Thursday 25th October at 09.00 pacific time. Hold the date, registration will be open for that soon and published to our MySQL Webinars page Best Practices Getting Started with MySQL Cluster, Hands-On Lab Saturday 29th, 1600-1700, in Plaza Room A.                                                              Santo Leto, one of our lead MySQL Cluster support engineers, regularly works with users new to MySQL Cluster, assisting them in installation, configuration, scaling, etc. In this lab, Santo will share best-practices in getting started. Delivering Breakthrough Performance with MySQL Cluster Saturday 29th, 1730-1830, in Golden Gate room 5. Frazer Clement, lead MySQL Cluster software engineer, will demonstrate how to translate the awesome Cluster benchmarks (remember 1 BILLION UPDATEs per minute ?!) into real-world performance. You can also get some best practices from our new MySQL Cluster performance guide  MySQL Cluster BoF Saturday 29th, 1900-2000, room Golden Gate 5.                                                                                                           Come and get a demonstration of new tools for the installation and configuration of MySQL Cluster, and spend time with the engineering team discussing any questions or issues you may have. Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster Sunday 30th, 1145 - 1245, in Golden Gate room 7.   In this session, JD Duncan and Andrew Morgan will present how to get started with both Memcached and new NoSQL APIs. JD and I recently ran a webinar demonstrating how to build simple Twitter-like services with Memcached and MySQL Cluster. The replay is available for download.  Case Studies: MySQL Cluster @ El Chavo, Latin America’s #1 Facebook Game Sunday 30th, 1745 - 1845, in Golden Gate room 4.                             Playful Play deployed MySQL Cluster CGE to power their market leading social game. This session will discuss the challenges they faced, why they selected MySQL Cluster and their experiences to date. You can read more about Playful Play and MySQL Cluster here  A Journey into NoSQLand: MySQL’s NoSQL Implementation Sunday 30th, 1345 - 1445, in Golden Gate room 4.                                          Lig Turmelle, web DBA at Kaplan Professional and esteemed Oracle Ace, will discuss her experiences working with the NoSQL interfaces for both MySQL Cluster and InnoDB Evaluating MySQL HA Alternatives Saturday 29th, 1430-1530, room Golden Gate 5                                                                                   Henrik Ingo, former member of the MySQL sales engineering team, will provide an overview of various HA technologies for MySQL, starting with replication, progressing to InnoDB, Galera and MySQL Cluster What about the other stuff? Of course MySQL Connect has much, much more than MySQL Cluster. There will be lots on replication (which I'll blog about soon), MySQL 5.6, InnoDB, cloud, etc, etc. Take a look at the full Content Catalog to see more. If you are attending, I hope to see you at one of the Cluster sessions...and remember, registration is still open

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  • Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

    - by ScottGu
    This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup.  Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box.  The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues.  Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications?  Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used:   When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility.  You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular).  Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class.  The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render.  The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page.  To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime:   If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”.  This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable.  This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as.  To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control.  This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs.  Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below.  Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript.  We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered):   Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference.  The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control.  This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications.  In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls.  In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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  • Java Logger API

    - by Koppar
    This is a more like a tip rather than technical write up and serves as a quick intro for newbies. The logger API helps to diagnose application level or JDK level issues at runtime. There are 7 levels which decide the detailing in logging (SEVERE, WARNING, INFO, CONFIG, FINE, FINER, FINEST). Its best to start with highest level and as we narrow down, use more detailed logging for a specific area. SEVERE is the highest and FINEST is the lowest. This may not make sense until we understand some jargon. The Logger class provides the ability to stream messages to an output stream in a format that can be controlled by the user. What this translates to is, I can create a logger with this simple invocation and use it add debug messages in my class: import java.util.logging.*; private static final Logger focusLog = Logger.getLogger("java.awt.focus.KeyboardFocusManager"); if (focusLog.isLoggable(Level.FINEST)) { focusLog.log(Level.FINEST, "Calling peer setCurrentFocusOwner}); LogManager acts like a book keeper and all the getLogger calls are forwarded to LogManager. The LogManager itself is a singleton class object which gets statically initialized on JVM start up. More on this later. If there is no existing logger with the given name, a new one is created. If there is one (and not yet GC’ed), then the existing Logger object is returned. By default, a root logger is created on JVM start up. All anonymous loggers are made as the children of the root logger. Named loggers have the hierarchy as per their name resolutions. Eg: java.awt.focus is the parent logger for java.awt.focus.KeyboardFocusManager etc. Before logging any message, the logger checks for the log level specified. If null is specified, the log level of the parent logger will be set. However, if the log level is off, no log messages would be written, irrespective of the parent’s log level. All the messages that are posted to the Logger are handled as a LogRecord object.i.e. FocusLog.log would create a new LogRecord object with the log level and message as its data members). The level of logging and thread number are also tracked. LogRecord is passed on to all the registered Handlers. Handler is basically a means to output the messages. The output may be redirected to either a log file or console or a network logging service. The Handler classes use the LogManager properties to set filters and formatters. During initialization or JVM start up, LogManager looks for logging.properties file in jre/lib and sets the properties if the file is provided. An alternate location for properties file can also be specified by setting java.util.logging.config.file system property. This can be set in Java Control Panel ? Java ? Runtime parameters as -Djava.util.logging.config.file = <mylogfile> or passed as a command line parameter java -Djava.util.logging.config.file = C:/Sunita/myLog The redirection of logging depends on what is specified rather registered as a handler with JVM in the properties file. java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler sends the output to system.err and java.util.logging.FileHandler sends the output to file. File name of the log file can also be specified. If you prefer XML format output, in the configuration file, set java.util.logging.FileHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.XMLFormatter and if you prefer simple text, set set java.util.logging.FileHandler.formatter =java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter Below is the default logging Configuration file: ############################################################ # Default Logging Configuration File # You can use a different file by specifying a filename # with the java.util.logging.config.file system property. # For example java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=myfile ############################################################ ############################################################ # Global properties ############################################################ # "handlers" specifies a comma separated list of log Handler # classes. These handlers will be installed during VM startup. # Note that these classes must be on the system classpath. # By default we only configure a ConsoleHandler, which will only # show messages at the INFO and above levels. handlers= java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler # To also add the FileHandler, use the following line instead. #handlers= java.util.logging.FileHandler, java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler # Default global logging level. # This specifies which kinds of events are logged across # all loggers. For any given facility this global level # can be overriden by a facility specific level # Note that the ConsoleHandler also has a separate level # setting to limit messages printed to the console. .level= INFO ############################################################ # Handler specific properties. # Describes specific configuration info for Handlers. ############################################################ # default file output is in user's home directory. java.util.logging.FileHandler.pattern = %h/java%u.log java.util.logging.FileHandler.limit = 50000 java.util.logging.FileHandler.count = 1 java.util.logging.FileHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.XMLFormatter # Limit the message that are printed on the console to INFO and above. java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = INFO java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter ############################################################ # Facility specific properties. # Provides extra control for each logger. ############################################################ # For example, set the com.xyz.foo logger to only log SEVERE # messages: com.xyz.foo.level = SEVERE Since I primarily use this method to track focus issues, here is how I get detailed awt focus related logging. Just set the logger name to java.awt.focus.level=FINEST and change the default log level to FINEST. Below is a basic sample program. The sample programs are from http://www2.cs.uic.edu/~sloan/CLASSES/java/ and have been modified to illustrate the logging API. By changing the .level property in the logging.properties file, one can control the output written to the logs. To play around with the example, try changing the levels in the logging.properties file and notice the difference in messages going to the log file. Example --------KeyboardReader.java------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- import java.io.*; import java.util.*; import java.util.logging.*; public class KeyboardReader { private static final Logger mylog = Logger.getLogger("samples.input"); public static void main (String[] args) throws java.io.IOException { String s1; String s2; double num1, num2, product; // set up the buffered reader to read from the keyboard BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader (new InputStreamReader (System.in)); System.out.println ("Enter a line of input"); s1 = br.readLine(); if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.SEVERE)) { mylog.log (Level.SEVERE,"The line entered is " + s1); } if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.INFO)) { mylog.log (Level.INFO,"The line has " + s1.length() + " characters"); } if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.FINE)) { mylog.log (Level.FINE,"Breaking the line into tokens we get:"); } int numTokens = 0; StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer (s1); while (st.hasMoreTokens()) { s2 = st.nextToken(); numTokens++; if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.FINEST)) { mylog.log (Level.FINEST, " Token " + numTokens + " is: " + s2); } } } } ----------MyFileReader.java---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- import java.io.*; import java.util.*; import java.util.logging.*; public class MyFileReader extends KeyboardReader { private static final Logger mylog = Logger.getLogger("samples.input.file"); public static void main (String[] args) throws java.io.IOException { String s1; String s2; // set up the buffered reader to read from the keyboard BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader (new FileReader ("MyFileReader.txt")); s1 = br.readLine(); if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.SEVERE)) { mylog.log (Level.SEVERE,"ATTN The line is " + s1); } if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.INFO)) { mylog.log (Level.INFO, "The line has " + s1.length() + " characters"); } if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.FINE)) { mylog.log (Level.FINE,"Breaking the line into tokens we get:"); } int numTokens = 0; StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer (s1); while (st.hasMoreTokens()) { s2 = st.nextToken(); numTokens++; if (mylog.isLoggable(Level.FINEST)) { mylog.log (Level.FINEST,"Breaking the line into tokens we get:"); mylog.log (Level.FINEST," Token " + numTokens + " is: " + s2); } } //end of while } // end of main } // end of class ----------MyFileReader.txt------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My first logging example -------logging.properties------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- handlers= java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler, java.util.logging.FileHandler .level= FINEST java.util.logging.FileHandler.pattern = java%u.log java.util.logging.FileHandler.limit = 50000 java.util.logging.FileHandler.count = 1 java.util.logging.FileHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = FINEST java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter java.awt.focus.level=ALL ------Output log------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main SEVERE: ATTN The line is My first logging example May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main INFO: The line has 24 characters May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINE: Breaking the line into tokens we get: May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Breaking the line into tokens we get: May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Token 1 is: My May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Breaking the line into tokens we get: May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Token 2 is: first May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Breaking the line into tokens we get: May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Token 3 is: logging May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Breaking the line into tokens we get: May 21, 2012 11:44:55 AM MyFileReader main FINEST: Token 4 is: example Invocation command: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_29\bin\java.exe" -Djava.util.logging.config.file=logging.properties MyFileReader References Further technical details are available here: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/guide/util/logging/overview.html#1.0 http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/logging/package-summary.html http://www2.cs.uic.edu/~sloan/CLASSES/java/

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  • Letter to Ballmer: Making Better Consumer Devices

    - by andrewbrust
    Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back.  The email contained a scan of a column I wrote praising Microsoft’s BI strategy.  His reply contained three simple words: “Super nice  thanks.” Well, now I’d like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher.  But I’m still super earnest. The past two days have been eventful ones for Microsoft: The company announced the departure of company veterans Robbie Bach and J Allard and the market announced Apple is now besting Microsoft in market capitalization. Plus, announcements were made that make it plain that Ballmer will, in effect, be running Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices division himself. With that in mind, I’d like to offer my list of a dozen things I think Microsoft’s CEO should do to improve that division’s offerings and, hopefully, its bottom line. So here goes:   1. On Windows Phone 7, Stay the Course The press is teeming with headlines and reader comments proclaiming the death-before-arrival of Windows Phone 7.  That’s plain silly.  You’ve got the makings of a great and unique SmartPhone platform, and you’re the only company (even considering RIM) that can offer full fidelity Exchange integration, not to mention implementing Office on the device.  Let the existing team finish this puppy and ship it. And then have them pump out a few updates, over-the-air, quickly.  Show them that Google Android’s not the only product that can do good, rapid dot releases. And another thing: make sure your OEMs’ devices have flawless touch screens.  If they don’t, then you shouldn’t certify them for delivery to customers.  Period. Oh, and kill the Kin, quietly.  It was DOA, and you know it.   2. Move Media Center to the Xbox Platform Media Center is, at its core, a good product.  But delivering a media distribution and DVR platform on a sophisticated PC operating system like Windows 7 just creates too many moving parts.  Xbox already functions as the best Media Center extender device – it should actually be the hub as well. Media Center is mostly based on .NET code – and XNA is a .NET environment for Xbox – find a way to bridge that small gap and make Media Center a joy to work with instead of a frustration.  Beating Apple TV out of this sub-market is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree (goofy pun, but it’s true).   3. Integrate Media Center with Mediaroom, or Kill the Latter You have two media products with almost identical names.  One is for standalone DVRs and the other is for IPTV cable set tops with DVR capabilities.  Can we merge these please?  My previous request of putting Media Center on Xbox would seem to tie into this nicely, since you’ve announced plans to do that with Mediaroom already.   4. Fix the Red Ring of Death People love the Xbox, but they really don’t love sending their consoles back every 18-24 months, when they get a bunch of red lights flashing on power up.  You’ve handled this defect about as gracefully as possible, but it’s been around for a long time now and it doesn’t seem to be fixed yet.  You can do better.  In fact, you must do better, or you insult your customers.   5. Add Blu Ray to Xbox I know, streaming movies are the future; physical media is legacy technology.  So if that’s true, why did you back HD DVD so hard?  You know why: for now, the film studios won’t allow a large selection of new release, HD, surround sound content be distributed on any medium other than Blu Ray or cable pay per view/on-demand.  Don’t you want home theater buffs to see the Xbox as a fantastic device for their rigs?  Don’t you want to put PlayStation 3 out of its misery?  And if you follow my suggestions above (move Media Center to the Xbox and fix the Red Ring problem), you’d have it all sewn up.  Do I think Blu Ray functionality will move a lot of units?  No.  Do I think that it would move more units with desperately needed influential home theater consumers?  You bet.  And you might sell more ZunePass subscriptions in the process. But while you’re at it, make the fan quieter, please.   6. Make More of Windows Home Server Home Server is a fantastic product.  And for reasons unknown to me, it seems like you’re letting it languish.  Development of the add-in ecosystem seems underfunded.  WHS’ unparalleled ease of use and reliability for home PC backup (and emergency restores) goes unsung.  Product cycles are slow.  Support for your OEMs, who are doing great work, especially in the green space with Atom CPUs, seems lacking.  You’ve married a trophy girl and you keep her cloistered at home!  That’s cruel, unusual and, um, incredibly ill-advised.  Make use of this ace card, and while you’re at it, give it real integration with Media Center.  The integration thus far proof-of-concept quality.  You should go way past that – both products will benefit immeasurably.   7. Set Up a Partner Platform for Custom Installers There’s a whole sub-industry of companies that install, integrate and configure home theater, security and connected home products.  They have an industry group. They are influential in the high-end of the consumer electronics industry, and so are their customers.  They love Media Center and they love Windows Home Server.  But I have talked to several of them at the Consumer Electronics Show and they tell me you don’t love them.  They find it very difficult to do business with Microsoft, even though they want nothing more than to sell and evangelize your platform.  This is a travesty.  Please fix it.  Get Allison Watson and the Microsoft Partner Network on board and have her hire someone who knows how to run a channel program for consumer electronics companies.  Problem solved.  Markets expanded.   8. Make Your Own Hardware In other areas, I know you love your partners.  I help run one, so I appreciate that.  But when it came to Xbox and Zune you built them it yourself (albeit on a contract basis, which is fine).  Windows Phone 7 has a chance to work as an OEM play, but it would work better if you produced the devices.  At least consider building a reference device that sells alongside your OEMs’ offerings.  That’s what Google did with the Nexxus One.  And while that phone was not itself a big seller, it catalyzed two wonderful things : (1) a quality bar was set and (2) partners exceeded it.  Before the Nexxus One, the best Android handset out there was the Motorola Droid. The Nexxus One was better, and the HTC Droid Incredible and Evo 4G are now even better than Google’s phone, which is why Verizon and Sprint decided not to carry it.  Imagine if all Windows Phone 6.x devices were on par with the HTC HD2.  I tend to believe you’d have a lot bigger market share than you do now.   9. Continue with Your Retail Initiative From what I hear, it sounds like it’s going well.  And this goes right along with making your own hardware.  When you build it, they will come.  And then it makes the likes of Best Buy and Staples do better.   10. Make an Acquisition (or Two) TiVo and/or Moxi look ripe for the picking.  With their ability to build stuff people love and your ability to run a business, you might just have something.  But do a better job than you did when you bought Danger.  Buy the ideas, not just the customers, eh?   11. Make Beautiful Stuff You’ve heard this one before, I know.  But I have some head-shrinking advice on this one.  You know that Apple obsesses over its industrial design.  You know that appeals to consumers.  But it seems you think doing so is Apple’s game exclusively and so you shouldn’t even try.  Bull dinky.  Come to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design gallery.  You’ll see that lots of companies and product categories have had very high design value well before Apple existed.  You can do this, and the Zune HD was a great start.  Now run with that.  Find those negative voices in your head that are telling you that you can’t and shut them up.  For good.   12. Burst the Bubble Some of the products you’ve built seem like they were conceived in a bizarro world.  That would appear to be the result of groupthink.  You must do better.  And there’s lots of people willing to advise you.  This includes just about everyone in the Regional Director program, and probably a bunch of MVPs.  Heck, I bet the guys at Engadget could help out too.  Imagine if you let them see the Kin before it shipped.  Talk to high-end gear consumers.  Talk to Best Buy and CostCo customers too.   Signing Off I hope this was of value to you.  As I wrote this I kept telling myself how obvious, even trite, some of these pieces of advice were and then, because of that, doubting they’d really help.  But I decided that they must not be obvious to Microsoft.  Sometimes when you get wrapped up in stuff, it’s hard to clear your head.  I think my head’s pretty clear here though (I’m wrapped up in other stuff), so maybe my perspective can help.  If not, well, then, I guess they all can’t be super nice.

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  • Fitting it together, database, reporting, applications in C#

    - by alvonellos
    Introduction Preamble I was hesitant to post this, since it's an application whose intricate details are defined elsewhere, and answers may not be helpful to others. Within the past few weeks (I was actually going to write a blog post about this after I finished) I've discovered that the barrier I'm encountering is one that's actually quite common for newer developers. This question is not so much about a specific thing as it is about piecing those things together. I've searched the internet far and wide, and found many tutorials on how to create applications that are kind of similar to what I'm looking for. I've also looked at hiring another, more experienced, developer to help me along, but all I've gotten are unqualified candidates that don't have the experience necessary and won't take care of the client or project like I will. I'd rather have the project never transpire than to release a solution that is half-baked. I've asked professors at my school, but they've not turned up answers to my question. I'm an experienced developer, and I've written many applications that are -- very abstractly -- close to what I'm doing, but my experiences from those applications aren't giving me enough leverage to solve this particular problem. I just hope that posting this article isn't a mistake for me to write. Project Description I have a project I'm working on for a client that is a rewrite of an application, originally written in Foxpro 2.6 by someone before me, that performs some analysis (which, sadly, I'm not allowed to disclose as per of my employment contract) on financial data. One day, after a long talk between the client and I -- where he intimately described his frustrations with all the bugs I've been hacking out of this code for 6 months now -- he told me to just rewrite it and gave me a month to write a good 1/8 of this 65k LOC Foxpro monstrosity. this 65k line of code foxpro monstrosity. It'll take me a good 3 - 6 months to rewrite this software (I know things the original programmer did not, like inheritance) going as I am right now, but I'm quickly discovering that I'm going to need to use databases. Prior to this contract I didn't even know about foxpro, and so I've had to learn foxpro on the fly, write procedures and make modifications to the database. I've actually come to like it, and this project would be rewritten in Foxpro if it were still a supported language, because over the past few months, I've come to like the features of Foxpro that make it so easy to develop data-driven applications. I once perfomed an experiment, comparing C# to Foxpro. What took me 45 minutes in C# took me two in Foxpro, and I knew C# prior to Foxpro. I was hoping to leverage the power of C#, but it intimidates me that in foxpro, you can have one line of code and be using a database. Prior to this, I have never written any serious database development from scratch. All the applications that I've written are in a different league. They are either completely data-naive or data-naive enough that I can get away with not using a database through serialization or by designing algorithms that work with the data in a manner that is stateless, so there is no need to worry about databases. I've come to realize, very quickly, that serialization and my efficacy with data structures has been my crutch all these years that's prevented me from adventuring into databases, and has consequently hindered my success in real-world programming. Sure, I've written some database stuff in Perl and Python, and I've done forms and worked with relational databases and tables, I'm a wizard in Access and Excel (seriously) and can do just about anything, but it just feels unnatural writing SQL code in another language... I don't mind writing SQL, and I don't It's that bridge between the database and the program code that drives me absolutely bonkers. I hope I'm not the only one to think this, but it bothers me that I have to create statements like the following string sSql = "SELECT * from tablename" When there's really no reason for that kind of unchecked language binding between two languages and two API's. Don't get my wrong, SQL is great, but I don't like the idea that, when executing commands on a SQL database, that one must intermix database and application software, and there's no database independence, which means that different versions of different databases can break code. This isn't very nice. The nicest thing about Foxpro is the cohesiveness between programming language and database. It's so easy, and Foxpro makes it easy, because the tool just fits the task. I can see why so many developers have created a career with this language, because it lowered the barrier of entry to data-driven applications that so many businesses need. It was wonderful. For my purposes today, with the demands and need for community support, extensibility, and language features, Foxpro isn't a solution that I feel would be the right tool for the job. I'm also worried about working too heavy with the database, because I've seen data-driven .NET applications have issues with database caches, running out of memory, and objects in the database not being collected. (Memory leaks) And OH the queries. Which one, how, and why? There are a plethora of different ways that a database can be setup, I think I counted 5 or 6 different kinds of database applications alone that I can chose from. That is a great mountain for me to climb when I don't even know where to begin when it comes to writing data-driven applications. The problem isn't that I don't know SQL or that I don't know C#. I know both and have worked with both extensively. It's making them work together that's the problem, and it's something I've never done in C# before. Reports The client likes paper. The data needs to be printed out in a format that is extensible, layered, and easy to use. I have never done reporting before, and so this is a bit of a problem. From the data source comes crystal reports, and so there's a dependency on the database, from what I understand. Code reuse A large part of the design decision that I've gone through so far is to break the task of writing a piece of this software into routines and modular DLL's and so forth such that much of the code can be reused. For example, when I setup this database, I want to be able to reuse the same database code over and over again. I also want to make sure that when the day comes that another developer is here, that he/she will be able to pick up just where I left off. The quicker I develop these applications, the better off I am. Tasks & Goals In my project, I need to write routines that apply algorithms and look for predefined patterns in financial data. Additionally, I need to simulate trading based on predefined algorithms and data. Then I need to prepare reports on that data. Additionally, I need to have a way to change the code base for this application quickly and effectively, without hacking together some band-aid solution for a problem that really needs a trauma ward. Special Considerations The solution must be fast, run quickly on existing hardware, and not be too much of a pain to maintain and write. I understand that anything I write I'm married to -- I'm responsible for the things that I write because my reputation and livelihood is dependent on it. Do I really need a database? What about performance? Performance was such a big issue that I hand wrote a data structure that is capable of performing 2 billion operations, using a total of 4 gigs of memory in under 1/4 of a second using the standard core two duo processor. I could not find a similar, pre-written data structure in C# to perform this task. What setup do I use in terms of database? What about reporting? I'd prefer to have PDF's generated, but I'd like to be able to visually sketch those reports and then just have a ReportFactory of some sort, that when I pass some variables in, it just does that data. About Me I'm a lone developer for a small business in this area. This is the first time I've done this and I've never had the breadth and depth of my knowledge tested. I'm incredibly frustrated with this project because I feel incredibly overwhelmed with the task at hand. I'm looking for that entry level point where I can draw a line and say "this is what I need to do" Conclusion I may have not been clear enough on my post. I'm still new to this whole thing, and I've been doing my best to contribute back to the community that I've leached so much knowledge from. I'd be glad to edit my post and add more information if possible. I'm looking for a big-picture solution or design process that helps me get off the ground in this world of data-driven applications, because I have a feeling that it's going to be concentric to my entire career as a programmer for some time. Specifically, if you didn't get it from the rest of the post (I may not have been clear enough) I really need some guidance as to where to go in terms of the design decisions for this project. Some things that'll be useful will be a pro/con list for the different kinds of database projects available in VS2010. I've tried, but generating that list has been as hard as solving the problem itself... If you could walk a developer writing a data-driven application for the first time in C#, how would you do that? Where would you point them to?

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 10, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 10, 2012Popular ReleasesPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 Metro (BETA): Player Framework for HTML/JavaScript and XAML/C# Metro Style Applications.WPF Application Framework (WAF): WAF for .NET 4.5 (Experimental): Version: 2.5.0.440 (Experimental): This is an experimental release! It can be used to investigate the new .NET Framework 4.5 features. The ideas shown in this release might come in a future release (after 2.5) of the WPF Application Framework (WAF). More information can be found in this dicussion post. Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 11) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 11 Professional Changelog All: Upgrade all proje...SSH.NET Library: 2012.3.9: There are still few outstanding issues I wanted to include in this release but since its been a while and there are few new features already I decided to create a new release now. New Features Add SOCKS4, SOCKS5 and HTTP Proxy support when connecting to remote server. For silverlight only IP address can be used for server address when using proxy. Add dynamic port forwarding support using ForwardedPortDynamic class. Add new ShellStream class to work with SSH Shell. Add supports for mu...Test Case Import Utilities for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 11 Beta: V1.2 RTM: This release (V1.2 RTM) includes: Support for connecting to Hosted Team Foundation Server Preview. Support for connecting to Team Foundation Server 11 Beta. Fix to issue with read-only attribute being set for LinksMapping-ReportFile which may have led to problems when saving the report file. Fix to issue with “related links” not being set properly in certain conditions. Fix to ensure that tool works fine when the Excel file contained rich text data. Note: Data is still imported in pl...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 3.5.0: Modules (mod, xm, it, etc..) supportcallisto: callisto 2.0.19: BUG FIX: Autorun.load() function in scripting now has sandboxed path (Thanks Mikey!) BUG FIX: UserObject.Name property now allows full 20 byte string replacements. FEATURE REQUEST: File.* script functions now allow file extensions.EntitiesToDTOs - Entity Framework DTO Generator: EntitiesToDTOs.v2.1: Changelog Fixed template file access issue on Win7. Fix on configuration load when target project was not found and "Use project default namespace" was checked. Minor fix on loading latest configuration at startup. Minor fix in VisualStudioHelper class. DTO's properties accessors are now in one line. Improvements in PropertyHelper to get a cleaner and more performant code. Added Website project type as a not supported project type. Using Error List pane from VS IDE to show Enti...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.01.04: Major Highlights Fixed issue with loading the splash page skin in the login, privacy and terms of use pages Fixed issue when searching for words with special characters in them Fixed redirection issue when the user does not have permissions to access a resource Fixed issue when clearing the cache using the ClearHostCache() function Fixed issue when displaying the site structure in the link to page feature Fixed issue when inline editing the title of modules Fixed issue with ...Mayhem: Mayhem Developer Preview: This is the developer preview of Mayhem. Enjoy!Team Foundation Server Process Template Customization Guidance: v1 - For Visual Studio 11: Welcome to the BETA release of the Team Foundation Server Process Template Customization preview. As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation has not been rev...Magelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 1.2: Medium trust compliant lot of small change for medium trust compliance full refactoring of user management refactoring of Client Refactoring of user management Magelia.WebStore.Client no longer reference Magelia.WebStore.Services.Contract Refactoring page category multi parent category added copy category feature added Refactoring page catalog copy catalog feature added variant management improvement ability to define a default variant for a variable product ability to ord...PDFsharp - A .NET library for processing PDF: PDFsharp and MigraDoc Foundation 1.32: PDFsharp and MigraDoc Foundation 1.32 is a stable version that fixes a few bugs that were found with version 1.31. Version 1.32 includes solutions for Visual Studio 2010 only (but it should be possible to add the project files to existing solutions for VS 2005 or VS 2008). Users of VS 2005 or VS 2008 can still download version 1.31 with the solutions for those versions that allow them to easily try the samples that are included. While it may create smaller PDF files than version 1.30 because...Terminals: Version 2.0 - Release: Changes since version 1.9a:New art works New usability in Organize favorites window Improved usability of imports/exports and scans Large number of fixes Improvements in single instance mode Comparing November beta 4, this corrects: New application icons Doesn't show Logon error codes Fixed command line arguments exception for single instance mode Fixed detaching of tabs improved usability in detached window Fixed option settings for Capture manager Fixed system tray noti...MFCMAPI: March 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1032 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 2.3.1: bugfix releaseSimple Injector: Simple Injector v1.4.1: This release adds two small improvements to the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll. No changes have been made to the core library. New features and improvements in this release for the SimpleInjector.Extensions.dll The RegisterManyForOpenGeneric extension methods now accept non-generic decorator, as long as they implement the given open generic service type. GetTypesToRegister methods added to the OpenGenericBatchRegistrationExtensions class which allows to customize the behavior. Note that the...CommonLibrary: Code: CodeVidCoder: 1.3.1: Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.6 release (svn 4472). Removed erroneous "None" container choice. Change some logic and help text to stop assuming you have to pick the VIDEO_TS folder for a DVD scan. This should make previewing DVD titles on the Queue Multiple Titles window possible when you've picked the root DVD directory.Google Books Downloader for Windows: Google Books Downloader: Google Books Downloader 1.8ExtAspNet: ExtAspNet v3.1.0: ExtAspNet - ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???,????? AJAX ?????????? ExtAspNet ????? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET 2.0 ???,????? AJAX ??????????。 ExtAspNet ??????? JavaScript,?? CSS,?? UpdatePanel,?? ViewState,?? WebServices ???????。 ??????: IE 7.0, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 3.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 3.0+ ????:Apache License 2.0 (Apache) ??:http://extasp.net/ ??:http://bbs.extasp.net/ ??:http://extaspnet.codeplex.com/ ??:http://sanshi.cnblogs.com/ ????: +2012-03-04 v3.1.0 -??Hidden???????(〓?〓)。 -?PageManager??...New ProjectsAres Backup: Ares Backup is a Backup software which can save bytediffs and provides several storage plugins.BackItUp: Backup-Tool für Visual Studio Projektebinbin domain: binbin domain Blexus Service Plattform: Some cool stuff about Wcf Services. - can communicate files - can communicate xaml objects (generate dynamically Gui) CardPlay - a Solitaire Framework for .Net: CardPlay is a C# framework for developing Solitaire card games. The solution includes a sample WPF client along with over 100 games.Cloud Files Upload: Windows application to script cloud file uploads.Code First API Library, Scaffolding & Guidance for Coded UI Tests: Code first Coded UI Tests for web apps. Library, Scaffolding and Guidance.CPEBook by FMUG & TPAY: CPEBook by MUG & TPAY Projet dot NET CPEBookDot Net Application String Resources Viewer: Dot Net Application String Resources ViewerFilter for SharePoint Web Settings Page: This solution show a simple way to integrate a filter box by using jquery, a global farm feature and a simple delegate control for AdditionalPageHead.Google Books Downloader for Windows: Save Google books in PDF, JPEG or PNG format.GUIToolkit: C++ Windowless GUI,DirectUIHarvest Sports: Harvest SportsInfoPath Analyzer: InfoPath Analyzer makes InfoPath form development and troubleshooting much easier. You're easy to find the relationship between controls and data fields, search data fields or controls by name, edit InfoPath inner html directly.Kinectsignlanguage project: This project will help kinect be used for sign language to speech so that sign language people can be understood while talking to important people. LotteryVote: ????manager123: Trying out CodePlexMcRegister: McRegister is an asp.net mvc 3 razor website that enables you to register users on your minecraft server it works in conjunction with a minecraft mod called EasyAuth.MetroTipi: HelloTipi Sous l'interface Metro de Windows 8Microsoft AppFactory: AppFactory is a powerful data-driven build system for Windows Phone (and soon Windows 8) projects. Its purpose is to help developers start with template projects and turn them into suites of applications.MiniStock: MiniStock is an experimental reference architecture for scalable cloud-based architectures. Implemented in .net.online book shopping: online book shoppingScopa: Carousel Team Scopa per WP7 XNA testtom03092012tfs01: testtom03092012tfs01UsingLib: A library of automatically removed utilities: 1.Changing cursor to hourglass in Windows Forms 2.Logging It's developed in C#WHMCS Library: WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. Handling everything from signup to termination, WHMCS is a powerful business automation tool that puts you firmly in control. The WHMCS Library is a .NET wrapper for the WHMCS API. Written entirely in C# but really easy to port over to VB.NET. Coming from a VB.NET background we tried hard to make sure porting would be simple for VB.NET community members. ZoneEditService: Windows service to update ZoneEdit for dynamic dns.

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  • Introducing… SharePress!

    - by Bil Simser
    For those that follow me I’ve been away from blogging and twittering for a couple of months. This is the reason. For the last few months I’ve been working with a cross-functional team putting together a new product from the people that run WordPress, the free premiere blogging platform. The result is a new product we call SharePress, a highly extensible blogging and content management platform with the usability of WordPress and the power of SharePoint combined into a single product. SharePress gives you SharePoint sites that are SEO-friendly delivered with a Web 2.0 ease of use, leveraging all of the existing abilities of SharePoint and WordPress that we know today. The Reason Back in December I was approached by the WordPress team about building a new platform that took advantage of the power of SharePoint but the ease of WordPress. I’m no stranger to WordPress and it’s 5 minute no-holds-barred install (I’ve always wanted SharePoint to do this!) and I run my personal blog on WordPress as does my better half, Princess Jenn. There’s always been a pitch by so-called Web 2.0 applications to deliver the power of SharePoint but the ease of [insert product here] over the past year or so. I checked each and every one of them out, but they fell woefully short when it came to SharePoint’s document management, versioning, and customization. They try, but it’s never been up to par in my books. On the flipside, SharePoint has always been tops in collaboration in the Enterprise but it’s painful to develop web parts, UI customization can be tricky, and there’s just no user community for something as simple as themes and designs. The Product Enter SharePress. Is it SharePoint? Is it WordPress? It’s both, and neither. Everything you like about both products are there but this is a bold new product that is positioned to bring SharePoint to the masses while maintaining the fidelity of an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. SharePress delivers on all fronts including: The ability to leverage any WordPress/Joomla/Drupal/DotNetNuke themes and skins inside of SharePoint Run any WordPress/Drupal/Joomla/DotNetNuke/SharePoint plug-in/module/web part/feature works out of the box with SharePress SEO-friendly URLs and pages Permalinks for all content All the features of SharePoint Server 2010 (including InfoPath, Excel, and Access services) included in the price Small deployment footprint. You decide how much to deploy and where. Independent Database Abstraction Layer (iDal) that allows you to deploy to SQL Server 2005/2008, MySQL, and PostgreSQL Portable Rendering Engine Layer (PREL) so you host .NET or PHP on Apache or IIS (version 7 or higher). The install feature is built around WordPress and it’s famous 5-minute install (actually, it’s never taken me more than 1 minute). SharePress installs with two screens after the files are uploaded to your server (which can be done entirely using FTP): After you enter two fields of information click “Install SharePress” and you’ll be done: No mess, no fuss, no complicated dependencies, and no server access required! How simpler could this be? The Technology WordPress plug-ins and themes working with SharePoint? Of course! The answer is IronPython which has now reached a maturity level capable of doing on the fly code language conversions. SharePress is a brand new product not built on top of any previous platform but leverages all the power of each of those applications through a patent pending technique called SharePress Multi-plAtfoRm Technology (SMART). SMART will convert PHP code on the fly into Python (using SWIG as an intermediate processor) which is then compiled to MSIL and then delivered back as an ASP.NET MVC application (output is C# or VB.NET, but you can build your own SMART converter to output a different language). Sound complicated? It is, but it’s all behind the scenes and you don’t have to worry about a thing. This image illustrates the technology stack and process: So users can load up out of the box PHP themes and plug-ins from the WordPress/Joomla/Drupal community into the SMART converter and output MSIL that is used by the SharePress engine and rendered on the fly to the end user. Supported PHP versions are 4.xx and 5.xx with version 6 support to come when it’s released. Similarly you can take any .NET application, DotNetNuke Module, SharePoint Web Part or event handler and feed it into the converter to output the same. Everything is reverse compiled into MSIL so it becomes technology agnostic. No source code access is needed and the SMART converter can handle obfuscated .NET assemblies that were built with .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, and 4.0. With this technology you can also with the flip of a switch have the output create PHP pages for you. This allows you to run SharePress on Unix based systems running PHP and MySQL, allowing you to deliver your SharePoint like experience to your users with a $0 infrastructure footprint. Here’s SharePress with the default WordPress post imported then a stock SharePoint collaboration site was imported. The site was then applied with the default Kubrick theme from WordPress. The Features Deploy any of the freely available 100,000 WordPress/Joomla/Drupal themes instantly to your runtime SharePress environment and preview or activate them right from your browser. Built-in Web 2.0 jQuery Enabled End User and Administrator Web Interface. Never have to remote into a server again! Run any SharePoint Web Part or Event Handler directly without modification or access to source code in SharePress. Use any WordPress/Joomla/Drupal plug-in directly in SharePress, no local admin or access to server. Just upload and activate. Upload and Activate any SharePoint Solution Package to any site remotely. No rebuilding. Changes made to sites require no compiling or rebuilding and are published immediately. Password Protected Content. You can give passwords to individual posts, articles, pages, documents, forms, and list items. A powerful polymorphic Captcha system backs the security interface and vendors can easily tie into smart card readers, fingerprint readers, and retina scanners for authorization and identification. OpenID, Windows Live, and Windows Authentication are supported out of the box. Infinitely customizable and extensible. You can leverage plug-ins from the open source community to do practically anything, all configured and uploaded via the browser. Additionally the developer API (available soon) allows you to build extensions in .NET, PHP, and Python with little effort. Easy Importing. We have importers for Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, and SharePoint so you can populate your site quickly and easily with full metadata modeling and creation. Banner Management. It’s easy to setup banners for your web site complete with impression numbers, special URLs, and more. Menu Manager. The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus as you want, each one can be associated to specific audiences or roles and then be styled across multiple contexts including the same menu delivered as a fly out, rollover, drop down, and just about any navigation you can think of. Collaborative ShareBook. Our exclusive book feature allows you to setup a “book” and then authorize individuals to contribute content. Permalinks. All content in SharePress has a permanent or “perma link” associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links. Apache or IIS, Unix / Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows / Mac OS X support. Deliver SharePress the way *you* want from the platform *you* decide. Database Independence. We know people wanted to run on any database platform so SharePress is built on top of a database abstraction layer that allows you to run on SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL. Other databases can be supported by writing a supporting database script consisting of fourteen function calls. The script can be written in Perl, Python, AWK, PowerShell, Unix Shell scripts, VBA, or simple DOS batch files. The Team SharePress is the work of a lot of people in both the WordPress and SharePoint community. I worked with a lot of SharePoint MVPs to create this new product as we really wanted to deliver the most compatible and feature rich system in a product that we would be proud of. Many thanks go out to Eli Bleeker, Todd Robillard, Scot Larson, Daniel Hillier, Shane Fox, Box Peran, Amanda English, and Bill Murray for doing the heavy lifting and all of their expertise and innovative thinking to get this product out. Licensing and Pricing SharePress is still in the final stages for pricing but we’re looking at a price point somewhere between $99-$100 to make it affordable for everyone. We plan to announce final pricing sometime in the next few weeks. There are no additional charges for Enterprise versions or additional features. Everything you see is what’s available and it’s just a matter of lighting up your site with whatever feature you want to enable. The product will not be open source but source code licenses will be available to ISVs who are interested in interfacing with the API at a low level. Cost will be $25,000 USD per developer and gives you complete access to the source code to the SharePress Foundation System and the .NET 4.0 Framework source code. Conclusion We hope you enjoy the launch of SharePress as the new premium blogging and content management platform for both Intranets and the Internet. We think we’ve build the best of breed solutions here and made it easy for anyone to get started with a minimal of infrastructure but allow the scalability of SharePress to shine through in the Enterprise 2.0 world. We encourage your feedback so please leave comments as to what you’re looking for in this system as we’re always evolving it to make it a better product for everyone.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, February 18, 2010New ProjectsASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Open source Content management system based on ASP.NET MVC platform.AutoFolders: AutoFolders package for Umbraco CMS This package auto creates folder structures for new and existing pages. The folders structures can be date bas...AutoPex: This project combines CCI with Pex by allowing the developer to run Pex on methods based on differences between two assemblies. Canvas VSDOC Intellisense: JavaScript VSDOC documentation for HTML5 Canvas element and 2d Context interface.CSUDH: California State University, Domguiez Hills Game projectsD-AMPS: System for Analysis of Microelectronic and Photonic StructuresDispX: Disease PredictorEmployee Info Starter Kit: This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a com...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Provide later... publishing project to share with Malaysians firstFlowPad: Flowpad is a light, fast and easy to use flow diagram editor. It helps you quickly pour your algorithms from your mind to 'paper'. It is written us...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D is a 3D physics library written in C# for XNA. It is implemented entirely in managed code and is compatible with the XBOX 360.Hybrid Windows Service: Abstracted design pattern for running a windows service interactively. Implemented as a base class to replace ServiceBase it will automatically pro...Image Cropper datatype for Umbraco: Stand alone version of the Image Cropper datatype in Umbraco. Listinator: A social wishlist application done in asp.net MVCMicrosoft Dynamics Ax User Group (AXUG) Code Repository: The goal of this project is to make it easier for customers of Microsoft Dynamics Ax to be able to share relevant source code. Code base should inc...Mobil Trials: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Demo : http://gameagam.co.cc/default.html Mirror link...NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NExtLib: NExtLib is a general-purpose extension library for .NET, which adds some useful features and addresses some alleged omissions.Nom - .NET object-mapper: Nom is a light-weight, storage-type agnostic persistence framework which is intended to provide an abstraction over both relational and non-relatio...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods, Silverlight, Math Parser, Simple, EulerOpenGLViewController for Visual Basic .NET 2008: A single class in pure VB.NET code to create and control an OpenGL window by calling opengl32.dll directly without use of additional wrapper librar...RestaurantMIS: RestaurantMIS is a simple Restaurant management system developed in Visual C# 2008 with Chinese language.SmartKonnect: <project name>A WPF application for windows with shoutcast, twitter, facebook and etc.SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: SSRS wont support renaming excel reports sheet rename. This program support to generate the report and change the excel sheet nameSWENTRIZ.NET: SWENTRIZ.NET allows to build graphics of implicit functions via .NET functionality.TFT: Tropical forecast tracker is a web application. It will measure the error of the National Hurricane Center's forecast as compared to the actual tr...WCF Dynamic Client Proxy: A WCF Dynamic Client Proxy so you don't have to inherit from ClientBase all the time. The proxy also has fault tolerance so you don't have to dispo...Web.Config Role Provider: Stores ASP.NET Roles in web.config. Easy to set up and deploy. Works great for simple websites with authentication. The projects includes support ...WPF Line of Business App: Example WPF patterns for line of business applications. Includes navigation, animation, and visualization.YuBiS Framework: Silverlight and WF based a workflow RAD framework. New ReleasesASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): AtomicCms 1.0: This is the first public release of AtomicCms. To get more information about this content management system, visit website http://atomiccms.com/Blogsprajeesh.Blogspot samples: Designing Modular Smart Clients using CAL: This whitepaper provides architectural guidance for designing and implementing enterprise WPF/ silverlight client applications based on the Composi...DB Ghost Build Tools: 1.0.2: Made a change to the datetime format per dewee.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.02.03: Major HighlightsFixed the issue where LinkClick.aspx links were incorrect for child portals Fixed the issue with the PayPal URL settings. Fixed...Employee Directory webpart for sharepoint 2007 user profiles: Employee Directory Source V2.0: Features: 1. Displays a complete list of all Active Directory profiles imported by the SSP into SharePoint 2007. 2. Displays the following fields ...Enhanced Discussion Board for SharePoint: Alpha Release: Meant for those who attended my presentation. Not cleaned upESPEHA: Espeha 9 PFR: Some small issues fixedFlowPad: FlowPad 0.1: FlowPad 0.1 build. Run it to get fammiliar with major concepts of easy diagramming :)Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2 Includes: - Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) - Demo Application - Samples - Foundation (Tabs, Groups, Contextu...Henge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D Source (2010-02): This is the initial 2010-02 release.Highlight: Highlight 2.5: This release is primarily a maintenance release of the library and is functionally equivalent to version 2.3 that was released in 2004.Magiq: Magiq 0.3.0: Magiq 0.3.0 contains: Magiq-to-objects: Full support to Linq-to-objects Magiq-to-sql: Full support to Linq-to-sql New features: Plugin model Bu...Microsoft Points Converter: Pre-Alpha ClickOnce Installer v0.03: This release builds on the 0.02 release by adding more thorough validation checks for the amount to convert from as well as adding several currency...Mobil Trials: Mobil Trials Source Code: Sebuah game sederhana yang dibuat di atas Silverlight 3.0 dengan bantuan Physics Helper 3.0 Game ini masih perlu dikembangkan lebih jauh lagi! Si...Numerical Methods on Silverlight: Numerical Methods on Silverlight 1.00: This a new version of Numerical Methods on Silverlight.OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.5.0.0): Changed point is as next. 7037 Fix spell miss of RequestFactoryMedthodSharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.1.0: Now it supports simply attaching SharePoint documents feature.Sharpy: Sharpy 1.1 Alpha: This is the second Sharpy release. Only a single change has been made - the foreach function now uses IEnumerable as a source instead of IList. Th...SkinDroidCreator: SkinDroidCreator ALPHA 1: Primera releaseTan solo carga mapas, ya sea de un zip o de un directorio. Para probarlo se pueden cargar temas Metamorph o temas flasheables, ya se...SkyDrive .Net API Client: SkyDrive .Net API Client 0.8.9: SkyDrive .Net API Client assembly version 0.8.9. Changes/improvements: - Added Web Proxy support - Introduced WebDriveInfo - Introduced DownloadUrl...spikes: Salient.Web.Administration 1.0: WebAdmin is simply the built in ASP.NetWebAdministrationFiles application cleaned up with codebehinds to make customization and refactoring possibl...SSRS Excel file Sheet rename: Change SSRS excel file sheet name: Create stored procedure from the attached file in sql server 2005/2008SWENTRIZ.NET: Approach 1: First approachTortoiseSVN Addin for Visual Studio: TortoiseSVN Addin 1.0.4: Visual Studio 2005 support Custom working root bug fixingTotal Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin (.wfx): Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin 0.8.4: Total Commander SkyDrive File System Plugin version 0.8.4. Bug fixes: - Upgraded SkyDriveWebClient to version 0.8.9 Please do not forget to expres...UnOfficial AW Wrapper dot Net: UAWW.Net 0.1.5.85 Béta 2: Fixed and Added SomethingVr30 OS: Space Brick Break 1.1: A brick breaker. ADD Level 3, 4, 5Web.Config Role Provider: First release: Three downloads are available: A compiled dll ready to use. The schema to enable intellisense The complete source (zipped)WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.1: This release improves the work item selection functionality. These selection methods are now supported (some require at least one item selected): ...WI Assistant: WI Assistant 2.2: Improved error handling and fix for linking several times in a row. DISCLAIMER: While I have tested this app on my TFS Server, by downloading and...ZipStorer - A Pure C# Class to Store Files in Zip: ZipStorer 2.30: Added stream-oriented methods Improved support for ePUB & Open Container Format specification (OCF) Automatic switch from Deflate to Store algo...Most Popular ProjectsRawrDotNetNuke® Community EditionASP.NET Ajax LibraryFacebook Developer ToolkitWindows 7 USB/DVD Download ToolWSPBuilder (SharePoint WSP tool)Virtual Router - Wifi Hot Spot for Windows 7 / 2008 R2Json.NETPerformance Analysis of Logs (PAL) ToolQuickGraph, Graph Data Structures And Algorithms for .NetMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrSharpyBlogEngine.NETSimple SavantjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer Toolkit

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 14, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 14, 2010New ProjectsCampfire#: Campfire# is a campfire client written in .NET 4.0 using WPF, which uses the Campfire API.CHESS: Systematic Concurrency Testing: CHESS is a tool for systematic and disciplined concurrency testing. Given a concurrent test, CHESS systematically enumerates the possible thread sc...cmpp: cmppcycloid: Arcanoid gameDotNetNuke® C#: The DotNetNuke® project is developed and maintained on a Visual Basic codebase, however a C# version has always been a popular request. This is a ...EasyBuildingCMS.NET: EasyBuildingCMS is an easy use content management system.fluidCMS: Provide for flexible management of web content that is not tightly integrated with the layout and rendering of sites that consume the content.Golem: An automation tool oriented to localization engineering environmentHB Batch Encoder Mk 2: HandBrake Batch Encoder Mk II This Program was adapted from an original project downloaded from codeplex by the name of "Handbrake Batch Encoder"...Integrating Social Media Networks: This is part of my pos graduation project.Ketonic: The Ketonic project aims to improve development of websites based on the Kentico CMS. LinkSharp: LinkSharp is a short-URL provider that can be used to generate short static non changing URL's. The web interface allows you to easily add / edit /...PUC NET (C++ Network Library - PUC Minas): This is an Academic Library for an Easy Development of Applications and Games based on Network Communication.Regular Expression Tester: Small utility for testing regular expressionsSharePoint User Management WebPart: SharePoint User Management WebPartSharpBox: SharpBox makes it easier for .NET developers to interact with existing cloud storage service, e.g. DropBox or Amazon S3Snipivit: Snipivit is a snippet manager service and VS2010 plugin that allows small development teams to store all their code snippets on a central database,...Software Factories Applied: Software Factories Applied is a project collecting the companion bits for the eponymous book to be published by Wiley & Sons in 2011. The authors ...The Ping Master: A service that periodically pings network addresses and allows the running of command line type utilities in response to success or failure.Title Safe Region Checker: A simple utility for XNA developers to check screenshots from games intended for release on the LIVE Marketplace for "title safe" region compliance...Trial project: sky is blueUyghur Named Date: Generate Uyghur named date string. ئۇيغۇرچە ئاي ناملىق چىسلا ھاسىل قىلىشWildcard Search Web Part for SharePoint 2010: The Wildcard Search web part for MOSS 2007 was wildly successful. Although, SharePoint 2010 has built-in wildcard searching functionality, the out...在线Office控件 Online Offical Control: 在线Office控件软件作品发布平台: SoftwarePublishPlatform 软件作品发布平台New ReleasesDemina: Demina Binaries version 0.1: Demina binaries are now available. This release (version 0.1) is an alpha version. Please report any bugs for extermination.EasyTFS: EasyTfs 1.0 Beta 2: Added cache refreshing when contents are updated rather than just every 10 minutes. Added window title based on currently-open case. Added attachme...Extending C# editor - Outlining, classification: Initial release: Initial releaseHB Batch Encoder Mk 2: HB Batch Encoder Mk2 v1.01: Binary release files.HB Batch Encoder Mk 2: Source Code: Source CodeHobbyBrew Mobile: Beta 2: Corretti numerosi bug, data un implementazione "approssimativa" del riscaldamento per Infusione. Aggiornamento consigliato!HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls beta 1.0.2.0: HouseFly controls relase 1.0.2.0 betaHtml Reader: Beta 2: I fixed a bug in HtmlElementCollection, Which exposed an integer enumerator, instead of enumerating through HtmlElements. I added a WPF Window tha...Html to OpenXml: HtmlToOpenXml 1.2: Fix some reported bug. See change set for description. The dll library to include in your project. The dll is signed for GAC support. Compiled wi...Infection Protection: Infection Protection 0.1: This is the final version of Infection Protection that was entered into the 2010 OGPC game competition.Jobping Url Shortener: Deploy Code 0.5.1: Deployment code for Version 0.5 This version includes our Jobping style.Jobping Url Shortener: Source Code 0.5.1: Source code for the 0.5 release. This release includes our Jobping style skin.Kooboo HTML form: Kooboo HTML form module 2.1.0.1: HTML form module contributed by member aledelgo. Add SMTP user and password authentication.KooBoo Image Galery: Beta 2: This new version corrects some issues pointed by Guoqi Zheng Some schema and folders were renamed, so it's better to uninstall the module and remo...MFCMAPI: May 2010 Release: If you just want to run the tool, get the executable. If you want to debug it, get the symbol file and the source. Build: 6.0.0.1020 The 64 bit bu...MVC Turbine: Release 2.1 for MVC2: This RTM contains the same features as v2.0 RTM plus these features: Instance Registration to IServiceLocator You can now add an instance of a typ...NazTek.Extension.Clr4: NazTek.Extension.Clr4 Binary: Binary releaseNazTek.Extension.Clr4: NazTek.Extension.Clr4 Source: Cab with source codeNSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.8: This release includes source code, executable binaries and example materials.Ottawa IT Day: 2010 Source Code and Presentations: During the Ottawa IT Day 2010, some of the presenters shared their code (and some presentations). This release is the culmination of all those effo...PHPWord: PHPWord 0.6.1 Beta: Changelog: Fixed Error when adding a JPEG image and opening in office 2007 Issue #1 Fixed Already defined constant PHPWORD_BASE_PATH Issue #2 F...Rapid Dictionary: Rapid Dictionary Alpha 2.0: Release Notes * Try auto updatable version: http://install.rapiddict.com/index.html Rapid Dictionary Alpha 2.0 includes such functionality: ...Shake - C# Make: Shake v0.1.18: Core changes. Process wrapper class, console logger, etc.SharpBox: SharpBox-Trunk: This is the SharpBox build from the trunk source branch!SharpBox: SharpBox-Trunk-Initial-Source: The initial source code, will be updated from time to timeSpackle.NET: 4.0.0.0 Release: This new drop contains the following A CreateBigInteger() method on SecureRandom to create random BigInteger values. An extension method to prop...StreamInsight example queries, input adapters and output adapters: StreamInsight Examples for V1.0 RTM: Zipped source code.The Ping Master: v0.1.0.0: Early release of The Ping Master for test purposes. Configuration tool is unfinished and does not include an installer.Title Safe Region Checker: Title Safe Region Checker v1.0.0.1: Release 1.0 of Title Safe Region Checker. No known bugs or problems. File is a zipped directory containing the necessary installation files.TortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.0.3: This is a bug fix release, we recommend all users upgrade to 1.0.3Usa*Usa Libraly: Smart.Windows.Navigation 0.4: Smart.Windows.Navigation simple navigation library ver 0.4.0. Include Windows Forms & Compact Framework samples. Information - Smart.Windows.Mvc ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30513.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWabbitStudio Z80 Software Tools: Wabbitcode: Wabbitcode is an Z80 Assembly IDE for Windows, OS X, and Linux. Built to take full advantage of the features of SPASM and Wabbitemu, Wabbitcode has...white: Release 0.20: Source Code: https://white-project.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.20 Add few more keyboard keys like windows button and F13-F24. Fixed bugs for keyboar...Wildcard Search Web Part for SharePoint 2010: Version 1.0 Release 1: This is the initial release of the Wildcard Search Web Part for SharePoint 2010. All queries will be issued as wildcards unless disabled with the ...Windows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP Developers: Windows Azure Command-line Tools May 2010 Update: May 2010 Update – May 13, 2010 We are pleased to announced the May 2010 update of Windows Azure Command-Line Tools. In addition to bug fixes and i...WinXmlCook: WinXmlCook 2.1: Version 2.1 released!Xrns2XMod: Xrns2XMod 1.1: some source code optimization在线Office控件 Online Offical Control: SPOffice2.0Release: 该版本在MS Office2003/2007,WPS2009,WPS2010下测试通过Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemRawrBlogEngine.NETPHPExcelMicrosoft Biology FoundationwhiteWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersStyleCopShake - C# Make

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  • Passing multiple simple POST Values to ASP.NET Web API

    - by Rick Strahl
    A few weeks backs I posted a blog post  about what does and doesn't work with ASP.NET Web API when it comes to POSTing data to a Web API controller. One of the features that doesn't work out of the box - somewhat unexpectedly -  is the ability to map POST form variables to simple parameters of a Web API method. For example imagine you have this form and you want to post this data to a Web API end point like this via AJAX: <form> Name: <input type="name" name="name" value="Rick" /> Value: <input type="value" name="value" value="12" /> Entered: <input type="entered" name="entered" value="12/01/2011" /> <input type="button" id="btnSend" value="Send" /> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnSend").click( function() { $.post("samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam", $("form").serialize(), function (result) { alert(result); }); }); </script> or you might do this more explicitly by creating a simple client map and specifying the POST values directly by hand:$.post("samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam", { name: "Rick", value: 1, entered: "12/01/2012" }, $("form").serialize(), function (result) { alert(result); }); On the wire this generates a simple POST request with Url Encoded values in the content:POST /AspNetWebApi/samples/PostMultipleSimpleValues?action=kazam HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1 Accept: application/json Connection: keep-alive Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest Referer: http://localhost/AspNetWebApi/FormPostTest.html Content-Length: 41 Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cachename=Rick&value=12&entered=12%2F10%2F2011 Seems simple enough, right? We are basically posting 3 form variables and 1 query string value to the server. Unfortunately Web API can't handle request out of the box. If I create a method like this:[HttpPost] public string PostMultipleSimpleValues(string name, int value, DateTime entered, string action = null) { return string.Format("Name: {0}, Value: {1}, Date: {2}, Action: {3}", name, value, entered, action); }You'll find that you get an HTTP 404 error and { "Message": "No HTTP resource was found that matches the request URI…"} Yes, it's possible to pass multiple POST parameters of course, but Web API expects you to use Model Binding for this - mapping the post parameters to a strongly typed .NET object, not to single parameters. Alternately you can also accept a FormDataCollection parameter on your API method to get a name value collection of all POSTed values. If you're using JSON only, using the dynamic JObject/JValue objects might also work. ModelBinding is fine in many use cases, but can quickly become overkill if you only need to pass a couple of simple parameters to many methods. Especially in applications with many, many AJAX callbacks the 'parameter mapping type' per method signature can lead to serious class pollution in a project very quickly. Simple POST variables are also commonly used in AJAX applications to pass data to the server, even in many complex public APIs. So this is not an uncommon use case, and - maybe more so a behavior that I would have expected Web API to support natively. The question "Why aren't my POST parameters mapping to Web API method parameters" is already a frequent one… So this is something that I think is fairly important, but unfortunately missing in the base Web API installation. Creating a Custom Parameter Binder Luckily Web API is greatly extensible and there's a way to create a custom Parameter Binding to provide this functionality! Although this solution took me a long while to find and then only with the help of some folks Microsoft (thanks Hong Mei!!!), it's not difficult to hook up in your own projects. It requires one small class and a GlobalConfiguration hookup. Web API parameter bindings allow you to intercept processing of individual parameters - they deal with mapping parameters to the signature as well as converting the parameters to the actual values that are returned. Here's the implementation of the SimplePostVariableParameterBinding class:public class SimplePostVariableParameterBinding : HttpParameterBinding { private const string MultipleBodyParameters = "MultipleBodyParameters"; public SimplePostVariableParameterBinding(HttpParameterDescriptor descriptor) : base(descriptor) { } /// <summary> /// Check for simple binding parameters in POST data. Bind POST /// data as well as query string data /// </summary> public override Task ExecuteBindingAsync(ModelMetadataProvider metadataProvider, HttpActionContext actionContext, CancellationToken cancellationToken) { // Body can only be read once, so read and cache it NameValueCollection col = TryReadBody(actionContext.Request); string stringValue = null; if (col != null) stringValue = col[Descriptor.ParameterName]; // try reading query string if we have no POST/PUT match if (stringValue == null) { var query = actionContext.Request.GetQueryNameValuePairs(); if (query != null) { var matches = query.Where(kv => kv.Key.ToLower() == Descriptor.ParameterName.ToLower()); if (matches.Count() > 0) stringValue = matches.First().Value; } } object value = StringToType(stringValue); // Set the binding result here SetValue(actionContext, value); // now, we can return a completed task with no result TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid> tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<AsyncVoid>(); tcs.SetResult(default(AsyncVoid)); return tcs.Task; } private object StringToType(string stringValue) { object value = null; if (stringValue == null) value = null; else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(string)) value = stringValue; else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(int)) value = int.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(Int32)) value = Int32.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(Int64)) value = Int64.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(decimal)) value = decimal.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(double)) value = double.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(DateTime)) value = DateTime.Parse(stringValue, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture); else if (Descriptor.ParameterType == typeof(bool)) { value = false; if (stringValue == "true" || stringValue == "on" || stringValue == "1") value = true; } else value = stringValue; return value; } /// <summary> /// Read and cache the request body /// </summary> /// <param name="request"></param> /// <returns></returns> private NameValueCollection TryReadBody(HttpRequestMessage request) { object result = null; // try to read out of cache first if (!request.Properties.TryGetValue(MultipleBodyParameters, out result)) { // parsing the string like firstname=Hongmei&lastname=Ge result = request.Content.ReadAsFormDataAsync().Result; request.Properties.Add(MultipleBodyParameters, result); } return result as NameValueCollection; } private struct AsyncVoid { } }   The ExecuteBindingAsync method is fired for each parameter that is mapped and sent for conversion. This custom binding is fired only if the incoming parameter is a simple type (that gets defined later when I hook up the binding), so this binding never fires on complex types or if the first type is not a simple type. For the first parameter of a request the Binding first reads the request body into a NameValueCollection and caches that in the request.Properties collection. The request body can only be read once, so the first parameter request reads it and then caches it. Subsequent parameters then use the cached POST value collection. Once the form collection is available the value of the parameter is read, and the value is translated into the target type requested by the Descriptor. SetValue writes out the value to be mapped. Once you have the ParameterBinding in place, the binding has to be assigned. This is done along with all other Web API configuration tasks at application startup in global.asax's Application_Start:GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.ParameterBindingRules .Insert(0, (HttpParameterDescriptor descriptor) => { var supportedMethods = descriptor.ActionDescriptor.SupportedHttpMethods; // Only apply this binder on POST and PUT operations if (supportedMethods.Contains(HttpMethod.Post) || supportedMethods.Contains(HttpMethod.Put)) { var supportedTypes = new Type[] { typeof(string), typeof(int), typeof(decimal), typeof(double), typeof(bool), typeof(DateTime) }; if (supportedTypes.Where(typ => typ == descriptor.ParameterType).Count() > 0) return new SimplePostVariableParameterBinding(descriptor); } // let the default bindings do their work return null; });   The ParameterBindingRules.Insert method takes a delegate that checks which type of requests it should handle. The logic here checks whether the request is POST or PUT and whether the parameter type is a simple type that is supported. Web API calls this delegate once for each method signature it tries to map and the delegate returns null to indicate it's not handling this parameter, or it returns a new parameter binding instance - in this case the SimplePostVariableParameterBinding. Once the parameter binding and this hook up code is in place, you can now pass simple POST values to methods with simple parameters. The examples I showed above should now work in addition to the standard bindings. Summary Clearly this is not easy to discover. I spent quite a bit of time digging through the Web API source trying to figure this out on my own without much luck. It took Hong Mei at Micrsoft to provide a base example as I asked around so I can't take credit for this solution :-). But once you know where to look, Web API is brilliantly extensible to make it relatively easy to customize the parameter behavior. I'm very stoked that this got resolved  - in the last two months I've had two customers with projects that decided not to use Web API in AJAX heavy SPA applications because this POST variable mapping wasn't available. This might actually change their mind to still switch back and take advantage of the many great features in Web API. I too frequently use plain POST variables for communicating with server AJAX handlers and while I could have worked around this (with untyped JObject or the Form collection mostly), having proper POST to parameter mapping makes things much easier. I said this in my last post on POST data and say it again here: I think POST to method parameter mapping should have been shipped in the box with Web API, because without knowing about this limitation the expectation is that simple POST variables map to parameters just like query string values do. I hope Microsoft considers including this type of functionality natively in the next version of Web API natively or at least as a built-in HttpParameterBinding that can be just added. This is especially true, since this binding doesn't affect existing bindings. Resources SimplePostVariableParameterBinding Source on GitHub Global.asax hookup source Mapping URL Encoded Post Values in  ASP.NET Web API© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  AJAX   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

    - by James Michael Hare
    Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Performance Profiler,Profiler

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  • jQuery Treeview – Expand and Collapse All Without the TreeControl

    - by Ben Griswold
    The jQuery Treeview Plugin provides collapse all, expand all and toggle all support with very little effort on your part. Simply add a treecontrol with three links, and the treeview, to your page…   <div id="treecontrol">     <a title="Collapse the entire tree below" href="#"><img src="../images/minus.gif" /> Collapse All</a>     <a title="Expand the entire tree below" href="#"><img src="../images/plus.gif" /> Expand All</a>     <a title="Toggle the tree below, opening closed branches, closing open branches" href="#">Toggle All</a> </div> <ul id="treeview" class="treeview-black">     <li>Item 1</li>     <li>         <span>Item 2</span>         <ul>             <li>                 <span>Item 2.1</span>                   <ul>                     <li>Item 2.1.1</li>                     <li>Item 2.1.2</li>                 </ul>             </li>             <li>Item 2.2</li>             <li class="closed">                   <span>Item 2.3 (closed at start)</span>                 <ul>                     <li>Item 2.3.1</li>                     <li>Item 2.3.2</li>                 </ul>             </li>         </ul>     </li> </ul> …and then associate the control to the treeview when defining the treeview settings. $("#treeview").treeview({     control: "#treecontrol",     persist: "cookie",     cookieId: "treeview-black" }); It really couldn’t be easier and it works great! But the plugin doesn’t offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to layout.  For example, the plugin assumes your treecontrol will include links.  If you want buttons or images or whatever, you are out of luck.  The plugin also assumes a set number of links and the collapse all handler is associated with the first link inside of the treecontrol, a:eq(0), the expand all handler is associated with the second link and so on.  So you really can’t incorporate the toggle all link by itself unless you manually hide the other options. Which brings me to the point of this post – making the collapse/expand/toggle layout more flexible without modifying the plugin’s source code. We will continue to use the treecontrol actions but we’re not going to use them directly. In fact, our custom collapse, expand and toggle links will trigger the actions for us.  So, hide the treecontrol links and associate the treecontrol click events with the click events of other controls.  Finally, render the treeview with the same setting definitions as usual. $(document).ready(function() {     // The plugin shows the treecontrol after the     // collapse, expand and toggle events are hooked up     // Just hide the links.     $('#treecontrol a').hide();       // On click of your custom links, button, etc     // Trigger the appropriate treecontrol click     $('#expandAll').click(function() {                 $('#treecontrol a:eq(1)').click();         });          $('#collapseAll').click(function() {         $('#treecontrol a:eq(0)').click();             });       // Render the treeview per usual.         $("#treeview").treeview({         control: "#treecontrol",         persist: "cookie",         cookieId: "treeview-black"     }); }); Since I’m not using the treecontrol directly, I move it to the bottom of the page but it doesn’t really matter where the treecontrol goes. <div>     <a id="collapseAll" href="#">Collapse All Outside of TreeControl</a> </div>   <ul id="treeview" class="treeview-black">     <li>Item 1</li>     <li>         <span>Item 2</span>         <ul>             <li>                 <span>Item 2.1</span>                 <ul>                     <li>Item 2.1.1</li>                     <li>Item 2.1.2</li>                 </ul>             </li>             <li>Item 2.2</li>             <li class="closed">                 <span>Item 2.3 (closed at start)</span>                 <ul>                     <li>Item 2.3.1</li>                     <li>Item 2.3.2</li>                 </ul>             </li>         </ul>     </li> </ul>   <div>     <input type="button" id="expandAll" value="Expand All Outside of TreeControl"/> </div>   <div id="treecontrol">     <a href="#"></a><a href="#"></a><a href="#"></a> </div> The above jQuery and Html snippets generate the following ugly output which shows the separated collapse/expand elements. If you want the toggle all option, I bet you can figure out how to put it in place.  I’ve made the source available below if you’re interested. Download jQuery Treeview Expand and Collapse Super Code

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 10, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 10, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET jQuery MessageBox: The ASP.NET jQuery it's an Web User Control that uses jQuery framework to enable diferent ways to present information to the user, by using these ...CommentRemover: Utility for removing comments from source codes. Support PL/SQL, Delphi, C/C#/C++ Developed in C# Requirement Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5DotNetNuke® RadMenu: DNNRadMenu makes it easy to create skins which use telerik RadMenu functionality. Licensing permits anyone (including designers) to use the compon...DotNetNuke® Skin AlphaBrisk: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Web Standards" category by dnnskin.net. Eight themes using transparent png, div, CSS, ...DotNetNuke® Skin Collaborate: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Cuong Dang of R2Integrated. This package is 100% XHTML an...DotNetNuke® Skin TR: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Tracy Wittenkeller of T-Worx. This package is 100% XHTML, ...Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes is similar to Notes, but uses Triple DES to encrypt text and files. It has a random key generator, and can save the key. It is deve...FalconLobby: FalconLobby is an authorized AddOn for Falcon 4.0 Allied Force which was created to support the multiplayer experience. FalconLobby retrieves the l...INETA Europe WebSite: Website for INETA EuropeInsert a Favorite (Bookmark) plugin for Windows Live Writer: This Windows Live Writer plugin allows you to select a Favorite (Bookmark) and insert it into your blog entry.Javascript Lib: an javascript libraryjqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: A fully integrated ASP.Net MVC (2.0) grid control based on the successfull jqGrid plugin for the jQuery jscript framework. Among the features of...Mosaictor: Mosaictor is a per project of mine that I started halfway my education. It is a photo mosaic creator using locally saved files and files obtained t...Notes: Notes is a simple but fast text editor. It can save in many text formats, and includes many features, such as templates (soon to be customizable), ...notmuchweb: A web frontend for notmuchPervasiveID: The PID is actively involved in Open Source ID community-building and education. PID members frequently travel the world to attend ID conferences a...Proyect Electronica: Proyecto de electronicaRapidshare Downloader 2: Rapidshare Downloader 2ROAD is Rapid Oberon Application Development: A suite of integrated tools for the develpment of Oberon-2 applicationSDNTFSIntegration: TFS Integration.SilverlightImageUpload: SilverlightImageUploadSMIL - SharePoint Map Integration Layer: .Useful SharePoint Site Workflow Utilities: This project aims to make it easy use SharePoint 2010's Site Workflows as "event handlers" for various back end systems by providing ways to start ...Windows Media Autorization: Windows Media Autorizaton PlugIn for windows media 9 WinMo Twitter Widget StarterKit: This project will allow you to quickly create Widgets that run on a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone to allow you to view Tweets designated by a hash tag. ...XNA 3D World Studio Content Pipeline: XNA 3D World Studio Content Pipeline New ReleasesAPSales - CRM Software as a Service: APSales 0.1.2: This version add some interesting features to the project: Implements a Grid Control Custom View Query Use lastest version(2.0.2) of APEnnead.net ...ASP.NET jQuery MessageBox: ASP.NET jQuery MessageBox 0.1: Project Description The ASP.NET jQuery it's an Web User Control que uses jQuery framework to enable diferent ways to present information to the use...BTP Tools: CSBC+CUVC+HCSBC.dict files 2010-03-09: a space character should be only between <Strong Number Pattern> and <Count> like: <Text><Strong Number pattern><space character> <Count> The abov...Citrix HDX MediaStream for Flash System Verifier: HDX Flash Verifier Beta (v1.20): Reduced the number of exceptions that terminate the verification process.Code examples, utilities and misc from Lars Wilhelmsen [MVP]: LarsW.MexEdmxFixer 1.5: Added some missing sub elements from the EDMX file's Designer element; Connection and Output. Without them, some of the properties in the designer ...CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.4 - Beta 2: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 3.5 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars,...Encrypted Notes: Source Code: This has the all the code for Encrypted Notes in a Text file.Hybrid Windows Service: Release Assembly: Main Assembly. Usage: 1. Add reference to this dll in your 'Windows Service' project. 2. Replace references to ServiceBase to HybridServiceBase in...jqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.0.0.0: Initial Versionkdar: KDAR 0.0.16: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - KINTERRUPT object check added - load image notifier check addedlatex2mathml: 1.0 alpha: This is the first public release of Latex2MathML. Lots are left to add and fix. I encourage you to test it. If something goes wrong, send me the lo...MapWindow GIS: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 9): This fixes a bug with saving and opening maps.Microsoft Research Biology Extension for Excel: MSR Biology Extension for Excel - Beta 2 (Update): This is an updated release for the Beta 2 Installer for the MSR Biology Extension for Excel. A couple of identified issues with the installation f...Notes: Notes 5.2: This is the latest version of Notes (5.2). It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My Documents. Once you have extracted the...Notes: Source Code: This has the all the code for Notes in a Text file.RedBulb for XNA Framework: Tree Massacre XMAS Edition (Sample): Tree Massacre XMAS Edition Source Code and Creators Club Package http://bayimg.com/image/jalkiaacb.jpgRoTwee: RoTwee (7.0.2.0): Now color mode is introduced to RoTwee. Push change color button and you can change color mode of RoTwee. Recommended mode is active rainbow mode :)SharePoint Team-Mailer: SharePoint Team-Mailer v1.0: Recommended versionsPWadmin: pwAdmin v0.7_nightly: Nightly Build --------------------- + Target JRE -> 1.5.0_21 + Target ApplicationServer -> Apache Tomcat 5.5.28 + Added xml editor (only working fo...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.1 Production: Release 2.1 re-implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 9 modules with 133 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scri...TMap for VS2010: TMap for VS2010 (MSF Agile) RC Release: Release of the TMap process template for VS2010 combined with the MSF Agile process template basd on the Release Candidate. The references to the g...TS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.19.14.0: Changelog Added property "IsClientRecording" to class "ClientListEntry" which is used in method "GetClientList" of QueryRunner class. (Change of Be...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30309.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWinMo Twitter Widget StarterKit: Tweet Viewer Files: Files necessary to create your own Tweet ViewerWPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.1: This release includes accumulated bug fixes since the initial release. Besides, adds experimental asynchronous support. Sample application gets...XNA 3D World Studio Content Pipeline: XNA 3DWS Content Pipeline: This is an rar file containing the latest content importer codeMost Popular ProjectsMetaSharpWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NET Ajax LibraryMost Active ProjectsUmbraco CMSRawrSDS: Scientific DataSet library and toolsjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETN2 CMSFasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection APIFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight

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  • Queued Loadtest to remove Concurrency issues using Shared Data Service in OpenScript

    - by stefan.thieme(at)oracle.com
    Queued Processing to remove Concurrency issues in Loadtest ScriptsSome scripts act on information returned by the server, e.g. act on first item in the returned list of pending tasks/actions. This may lead to concurrency issues if the virtual users simulated in a load test scenario are not synchronized in some way.As the load test cases should be carried out in a comparable and straight forward manner simply cancel a transaction in case a collision occurs is clearly not an option. In case you increase the number of virtual users this approach would lead to a high number of requests for the early steps in your transaction (e.g. login, retrieve list of action points, assign an action point to the virtual user) but later steps would be rarely visited successfully or at all, depending on the application logic.A way to tackle this problem is to enqueue the virtual users in a Shared Data Service queue. Only the first virtual user in this queue will be allowed to carry out the critical steps (retrieve list of action points, assign an action point to the virtual user) in your transaction at any one time.Once a virtual user has passed the critical path it will dequeue himself from the head of the queue and continue with his actions. This does theoretically allow virtual users to run in parallel all steps of the transaction which are not part of the critical path.In practice it has been seen this is rarely the case, though it does not allow adding more than N users to perform a transaction without causing delays due to virtual users waiting in the queue. N being the time of the total transaction divided by the sum of the time of all critical steps in this transaction.While this problem can be circumvented by allowing multiple queues to act on individual segments of the list of actions, e.g. per country filter, ends with 0..9 filter, etc.This would require additional handling of these additional queues of slots for the virtual users at the head of the queue in order to maintain the mutually exclusive access to the first element in the list returned by the server at any one time of the load test. Such an improved handling of multiple queues and/or multiple slots is above the subject of this paper.Shared Data Services Pre-RequisitesStart WebLogic Server to host Shared Data ServicesYou will have to make sure that your WebLogic server is installed and started. Shared Data Services may not work if you installed only the minimal installation package for OpenScript. If however you installed the default package including OLT and OTM, you may follow the instructions below to start and verify WebLogic installation.To start the WebLogic Server deployed underneath of Oracle Load Testing and/or Oracle Test Manager you can go to your Start menu, Oracle Application Testing Suite and select the Restart Oracle Application Testing Suite Application Service entry from the Tools submenu.To verify the service has been started you can run the Microsoft Management Console for Services by Selecting Run from the Start Menu and entering services.msc. Look for the entry that reads Oracle Application Testing Suite Application Service, once it has changed it status from Starting to Started you can proceed to verify the login. Please note that this may take several minutes, I would say up to 10 minutes depending on the strength of your CPU horse-power.Verify WebLogic Server user credentialsYou will have to make sure that your WebLogic Server is installed and started. Next open the Oracle WebLogic Server Adminstration Console on http://localhost:8088/console.It may take a while until the application is deployed and started. It may display the following until the Administration Console has been deployed on the fly.Afterwards you can login using the username oats and the password that you selected during install time for your Application Testing Suite administrative purposes.This will bring up the Home page of you WebLogic Server. You have actually verified that you are able to login with these credentials already. However if you want to check the details, navigate to Security Realms, myrealm, Users and Groups tab.Here you could add users to your WebLogic Server which could be used in the later steps. Details on the Groups required for such a custom user to work are exceeding this quick overview and have to be selected with the WebLogic Server Adminstration Guide in mind.Shared Data Services pre-requisites for Load testingOpenScript Preferences have to be set to enable Encryption and provide a default Shared Data Service Connection for Playback.These are pre-requisites you want to use for load testing with Shared Data Services.Please note that the usage of the Connection Parameters (individual directive in the script) for Shared Data Services did not playback reliably in the current version 9.20.0370 of Oracle Load Testing (OLT) and encryption of credentials still seemed to be mandatory as well.General Encryption settingsSelect OpenScript Preferences from the View menu and navigate to the General, Encryption entry in the tree on the left. Select the Encrypt script data option from the list and enter the same password that you used for securing your WebLogic Server Administration Console.Enable global shared data access credentialsSelect OpenScript Preferences from the View menu and navigate to the Playback, Shared Data entry in the tree on the left. Enable the global shared data access credentials and enter the Address, User name and Password determined for your WebLogic Server to host Shared Data Services.Please note, that you may want to replace the localhost in Address with the hosts realname in case you plan to run load tests with Loadtest Agents running on remote systems.Queued Processing of TransactionsEnable Shared Data Services Module in Script PropertiesThe Shared Data Services Module has to be enabled for each Script that wants to employ the Shared Data Service Queue functionality in OpenScript. It can be enabled under the Script menu selecting Script Properties. On the Script Properties Dialog select the Modules section and check Shared Data to enable Shared Data Service Module for your script. Checking the Shared Data Services option will effectively add a line to your script code that adds the sharedData ScriptService to your script class of IteratingVUserScript.@ScriptService oracle.oats.scripting.modules.sharedData.api.SharedDataService sharedData;Record your scriptRecord your script as usual and then add the following things for Queue handling in the Initialize code block, before the first step and after the last step of your critical path and in the Finalize code block.The java code to be added at individual locations is explained in the following sections in full detail.Create a Shared Data Queue in InitializeTo create a Shared Data Queue go to the Java view of your script and enter the following statements to the initialize() code block.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);This will create an instantiation of the Shared Data Queue object named queueA which is maintained for upto 120 minutes.If you want to use the code for multiple scripts, make sure to use a different queue name for each one here and in the subsequent steps. You may even consider to use a dynamic queueName based on filters of your result list being concurrently accessed.Prepare a unique id for each IterationIn order to keep track of individual virtual users in our queue we need to create a unique identifier from the virtual user id and the used username right after retrieving the next record from our databank file.getDatabank("Usernames").getNextDatabankRecord();getVariables().set("usernameValue1","VU_{{@vuid}}_{{@iterationnum}}_{{db.Usernames.Username}}_{{@timestamp}}_{{@random(10000)}}");String usernameValue = getVariables().get("usernameValue1");info("Now running virtual user " + usernameValue);As you can see from the above code block, we have set the OpenScript variable usernameValue1 to VU_{{@vuid}}_{{@iterationnum}}_{{db.Usernames.Username}}_{{@timestamp}}_{{@random(10000)}} which is a concatenation of the virtual user id and the iterationnumber for general uniqueness; as well as the username from our databank, the timestamp and a random number for making it further unique and ease spotting of errors.Not all of these fields are actually required to make it really unique, but adding the queue name may also be considered to help troubleshoot multiple queues.The value is then retrieved with the getVariables.get() method call and assigned to the usernameValue String used throughout the script.Please note that moving the getDatabank("Usernames").getNextDatabankRecord(); call to the initialize block was later considered to remove concurrency of multiple virtual users running with the same userid and therefor accessing the same "My Inbox" in step 6. This will effectively give each virtual user a userid from the databank file. Make sure you have enough userids to remove this second hurdle.Enqueue and attend Queue before Critical PathTo maintain the right order of virtual users being allowed into the critical path of the transaction the following pseudo step has to be added in front of the first critical step. In the case of this example this is right in front of the step where we retrieve the list of actions from which we select the first to be assigned to us.beginStep("[0] Waiting in the Queue", 0);{info("Enqueued virtual user " + usernameValue + " at the end of queueA");sharedData.offerLast("queueA", usernameValue);info("Wait until the user is the first in queueA");String queueValue1 = null;do {// we wait for at least 0.7 seconds before we check the head of the// queue. This is the time it takes one user to move through the// critical path, i.e. pass steps [5] Enter country and [6] Assign// to meThread.sleep(700);queueValue1 = (String) sharedData.peekFirst("queueA");info("The first user in queueA is currently: '" + queueValue1 + "' " + queueValue1.getClass() + " length " + queueValue1.length() );info("The current user is '"+ usernameValue + "' " + usernameValue.getClass() + " length " + usernameValue.length() + ": indexOf " + usernameValue.indexOf(queueValue1) + " equals " + usernameValue.equals(queueValue1) );} while ( queueValue1.indexOf(usernameValue) < 0 );info("Now the user is the first in queueA");}endStep();This will enqueue the username to the tail of our Queue. It will will wait for at least 700 milliseconds, the time it takes for one user to exit the critical path and then compare the head of our queue with it's username. This last step will be repeated while the two are not equal (indexOf less than zero). If they are equal the indexOf will yield a value of zero or larger and we will perform the critical steps.Dequeue after Critical PathAfter the virtual user has left the critical path and complete its last step the following code block needs to dequeue the virtual user. In the case of our example this is right after the action has been actually assigned to the virtual user. This will allow the next virtual user to retrieve the list of actions still available and in turn let him make his selection/assignment.info("Get and remove the current user from the head of queueA");String pollValue1 = (String) sharedData.pollFirst("queueA");The current user is removed from the head of the queue. The next one will now be able to match his username against the head of the queue.Clear and Destroy Queue for FinishWhen the script has completed, it should clear and destroy the queue. This code block can be put in the finish block of your script and/or in a separate script in order to clear and remove the queue in case you have spotted an error or want to reset the queue for some reason.info("Clear queueA");sharedData.clearQueue("queueA");info("Destroy queueA");sharedData.destroyQueue("queueA");The users waiting in queueA are cleared and the queue is destroyed. If you have scripts still executing they will be caught in a loop.I found it better to maintain a separate Reset Queue script which contained only the following code in the initialize() block. I use to call this script to make sure the queue is cleared in between multiple Loadtest runs. This script could also even be added as the first in a larger scenario, which would execute it only once at very start of the Loadtest and make sure the queues do not contain any stale entries.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);info("Clear queueA");sharedData.clearQueue("queueA");This will create a Shared Data Queue instance of queueA and clear all entries from this queue.Monitoring QueueWhile creating the scripts it was useful to monitor the contents, i.e. the current first user in the Queue. The following code block will make sure the Shared Data Queue is accessible in the initialize() block.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);In the run() block the following code will continuously monitor the first element of the Queue and write an informational message with the current username Value to the Result window.info("Monitor the first users in queueA");String queueValue1 = null;do {queueValue1 = (String) sharedData.peekFirst("queueA");if (queueValue1 != null)info("The first user in queueA is currently: '" + queueValue1 + "' " + queueValue1.getClass() + " length " + queueValue1.length() );} while ( true );This script can be run from OpenScript parallel to a loadtest performed by the Oracle Load Test.However it is not recommend to run this in a production loadtest as the performance impact is unknown. Accessing the Queue's head with the peekFirst() method has been reported with about 2 seconds response time by both OpenScript and OTL. It is advised to log a Service Request to see if this could be lowered in future releases of Application Testing Suite, as the pollFirst() and even offerLast() writing to the tail of the Queue usually returned after an average 0.1 seconds.Debugging QueueWhile debugging the scripts the following was useful to remove single entries from its head, i.e. the current first user in the Queue. The following code block will make sure the Shared Data Queue is accessible in the initialize() block.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);In the run() block the following code will remove the first element of the Queue and write an informational message with the current username Value to the Result window.info("Get and remove the current user from the head of queueA");String pollValue1 = (String) sharedData.pollFirst("queueA");info("The first user in queueA was currently: '" + pollValue1 + "' " + pollValue1.getClass() + " length " + pollValue1.length() );ReferencesOracle Functional Testing OpenScript User's Guide Version 9.20 [E15488-05]Chapter 17 Using the Shared Data Modulehttp://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/apptesting/oats-docs-9.21.0030.zipOracle Fusion Middleware Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console Online Help 11g Release 1 (10.3.4) [E13952-04]Administration Console Online Help - Manage users and groupshttp://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e13952/taskhelp/security/ManageUsersAndGroups.htm

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  • Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to Update Solaris via Live Upgrade

    - by LeonShaner
    Introduction: This Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center blog entry provides tips for using Ops Center to update Solaris using Live Upgrade on Solaris 10 and Boot Environments on Solaris 11. Why use Live Upgrade? Live Upgrade (LU) can significantly reduce downtime associated with patching Live Upgrade avoids dropping to single-user mode for long periods of time during patching Live Upgrade relies on an Alternate Boot Environment (ABE)/(BE), which is patched while in multi-user mode; thereby allowing normal system operations to continue with the active BE, while the alternate BE is being patched Activating an newly patched (A)BE is essentially a reboot; therefore the downtime is ~= reboot Admins can easily revert to the prior Boot Environment (BE) as a safeguard / fallback. Why use Ops Center to patch via Live Upgrade, Alternate Boot Environments, and Solaris 11 equivalents? All the benefits of Ops Center's extensive patch and package knowledge base can be leveraged on top of Live Upgrade Ops Center can orchestrate patching based on Live Upgrade and Solaris 11 features, which all works together to minimize downtime Ops Centers advanced inventory and reporting features assurance that each OS is updated to a verifiable, consistent standard, rather than relying on ad-hoc (error prone) procedures and scripts Ops Center gives admins control over the boot environment specifications or they can let Ops Center decide when a BE is necessary, thereby reducing complexity and lowering the opportunity for user error Preparing to use Live Upgrade-like features in Solaris 11 Requirements and information you should know: Global Zone Root file-systems must be separate from Solaris Container / Zone filesystems Solaris 11 has features which are similar in concept to Live Upgrade on Solaris 10, but differ greatly in implementationImportant distinctions: Solaris 11 assumes ZFS root Solaris 11 adds Boot Environments (BE's) as an integrated feature (see beadm) Solaris 11 BE's avoid single-user patching (vs. Solaris 10 w/ ZFS snapshot=ABE). Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) has hooks for BE creation, as needed Solaris 11 allows pkgs to be installed + upgraded in alternate BE (e.g. instead of the live system) but it is controlled on a per-pkg basis Boot Environments are activated across a reboot; instead of spending long periods installing + upgrading packages in single user mode. Fallback to a prior BE is a function of the BE infrastructure (a la beadm). (Generally) Reboot + BE activation can be much much faster on Solaris 11 Preparing to use Live Upgrade on Solaris 10 Requirements and information you should know: Global Zone Root file-systems must be separate from Solaris Container / Zone filesystems Live Upgrade Pre-requisite patches must be applied before the first Live Upgrade Alternate Boot Environments are created (see "Pre-requisite Patches" section, below...) Solaris 10 Update 6 or newer on ZFS root is the practical starting point for Live Upgrade Live Upgrade with ZFS root is far more straight-forward than any scheme based on Alternative Boot Environments in slices or temporarily breaking mirrors Use Solaris best practices to upgrade the OS to at least Solaris 10 Update 4 (outside of Ops Center) UFS root can (technically) be used, but it is significantly more involved (e.g. discouraged) -- there are many reasons to move to ZFS while going through the process to update to Solaris 10 Update 6 or newer (out side of Ops Center) Recommendation: Start with Solaris 10 Update 6 or newer on ZFS root Recommendation: Start with Ops Center 12c or newer Ops Center 12c can automatically create your ABE's for you, without the need for custom scripts Ops Center 12c Update 2 avoids kernel panic on unpatched Solaris 10 update 9 (and older) -- unrelated to Live Upgrade, but more on the issue, below. NOTE: There is no magic!  If you have systems running Solaris 10 Update 5 or older on UFS root, and you don't know how to get them updated to Solaris 10 on ZFS root, then there are services available from Oracle Advanced Customer Support (ACS), which specialize in this area. Live Upgrade Pre-requisite Patches (Solaris 10) Certain Live Upgrade related patches must be present before the first Live Upgrade ABE's are created on Solaris 10.Use the following MOS Search String to find the “living document” that outlines the required patch minimums, which are necessary before using any Live Upgrade features: Solaris Live Upgrade Software Patch Requirements(Click above – the link is valid as of this writing, but search in MOS for the same "Solaris Live Upgrade Software Patch Requirements" string if necessary) It is a very good idea to check the document periodically and adapt to its contents, accordingly.IMPORTANT:  In case it wasn't clear in the above document, some direct patching of the active OS, including a reboot, may be required before Live Upgrade can be successfully used the first time.HINT: You can use Ops Center to determine what to expect for a given system, and to schedule the “pre-patching” during a maintenance window if necessary. Preparing to use Ops Center Discover + Manage (Install + Configure the Ops Center agent in) each Global Zone Recommendation:  Begin by using OCDoctor --agent-prereq to determine whether OS meets OC prerequisites (resolve any issues) See prior requirements and recommendations w.r.t. starting with Solaris 10 Update 6 or newer on ZFS (or at least Solaris 10 Update 4 on UFS, with caveats) WARNING: Systems running unpatched Solaris 10 update 9 (or older) should run the Ops Center 12c Update 2 agent to avoid a potential kernel panic The 12c Update 2 agent will check patch minimums and disable certain process accounting features if the kernel is not sufficiently patched to avoid the panic SPARC: 142900-05 Obsoleted by: 142900-06 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch 10 Oracle Solaris on SPARC (32-bit) X64: 142901-05 Obsoleted by: 142901-06 SunOS 5.10_x86: kernel patch 10 Oracle Solaris on x86 (32-bit) OR SPARC: 142909-17 SunOS 5.10: kernel patch 10 Oracle Solaris on SPARC (32-bit) X64: 142910-17 SunOS 5.10_x86: kernel patch 10 Oracle Solaris on x86 (32-bit) Ops Center 12c (initial release) and 12c Update 1 agent can also be safely used with a workaround (to be performed BEFORE installing the agent): # mkdir -p /etc/opt/sun/oc # echo "zstat_exacct_allowed=false" > /etc/opt/sun/oc/zstat.conf # chmod 755 /etc/opt/sun /etc/opt/sun/oc # chmod 644 /etc/opt/sun/oc/zstat.conf # chown -Rh root:sys /etc/opt/sun/oc NOTE: Remove the above after patching the OS sufficiently, or after upgrading to the 12c Update 2 agent Using Ops Center to apply Live Upgrade-related Pre-Patches (Solaris 10)Overview: Create an OS Update Profile containing the minimum LU-related pre-patches, based on the Solaris Live Upgrade Software Patch Requirements, previously mentioned. SIMULATE the deployment of the LU-related pre-patches Observe whether any of the LU-related pre-patches will require a reboot The job details for each Global Zone will advise whether a reboot step will be required ACTUALLY deploy the LU-related pre-patches, according to your change control process (e.g. if no reboot, maybe okay to do now; vs. must do later because of the reboot). You can schedule the job to occur later, during a maintenance window Check the job status for each node, resolving any issues found Once the LU-related pre-patches are applied, you can Ops Center to patch using Live Upgrade on Solaris 10 Using Ops Center to patch Solaris 10 with LU/ABE's -- the GOODS!(this is the heart of the tip): Create an OS Update Profile containing the patches that make up your standard build Use Solaris Baselines when possible Add other individual patches as needed ACTUALLY deploy the OS Update Profile Specify the appropriate Live Upgrade options, e.g. Synchronize the active BE to the alternate BE before patching Do not activate the BE after patching Check the job status for each node, resolving any issues found Activate the newly patched BE according to your change control process Activate = Reboot to the ABE, making the ABE the new active BE Ops Center does not separate LU activate from reboot, so expect a reboot! Check the job status for each node, resolving any issues found Examples (w/Screenshots) Solaris 10 and Live Upgrade: Auto-Create the Alternate Boot Environment (ZFS root only) ABE to be created on ZFS with name S10_12_07REC (Example) Uses built in feature to call “lucreate -n S10_12_07REC” behind scenes if not already present NOTE: Leave “lucreate” params blank (if you do specify options, the will be appended after -n $ABEName) Solaris 10 and Live Upgrade: Alternate Boot Environment Creation via Operational Profile (script) The Alternate Boot Environment is to be created via custom, user-supplied script, which does whatever is needed for the system where Live Upgrade will be used. Operational Profile, which provides the script to create an ABE: Very similar to the automatic case, but with a Script (Operational Profile), which is used to create the ABE Relies on user-supplied script in the form of an Operational Profile Could be used to prepare an ABE based on a UFS root in a slice, or on a separate device (e.g. by breaking a mirror first) – it is up to the script author to do the right thing! EXAMPLE: Same result as the ZFS case, but illustrating the Operational Profile (e.g. script) approach to call: # lucreate -n S10_1207REC NOTE: OC special variable is $ABEName Boot Environment Profile, which references the Operational Profile Script = Operational Profile on this screen Refers to Operational Profile shown in the previous section The user-supplied S10_Create_BE Operational Profile will be run The Operational Profile must send a non-zero exit code if there is a problem (so that the OS Update job will not proceed) Solaris 10 OS Update Profile (to provide the actual patch specifications) Solaris 10 Baseline “Recommended” chosen for “Install” Solaris 10 OS Update Plan (two-steps in this case) “Create a Boot Environment” + “Update OS” are chosen. Using Ops Center to patch Solaris 11 with Boot Environments (as needed) Create a Solaris 11 OS Update Profile containing the packages that make up your standard build ACTUALLY deploy the Solaris 11 OS Update Profile BE will be created if needed (or you can stipulate no BE) BE name will be auto-generated (if needed), or you may specify a BE name Check the job status for each node, resolving any issues found Check if a BE was created; if so, activate the new BE Activate = Reboot to the BE, making the new BE the active BE Ops Center does not separate BE activate from reboot NOTE: Not every Solaris 11 OS Update will require a new BE, so a reboot may not be necessary. Solaris 11: Auto BE Create (as Needed -- let Ops Center decide) BE to be created as needed BE to be named automatically Reboot (if necessary) deferred to separate step Solaris 11: OS Profile Solaris 11 “entire” chosen for a particular SRU Solaris 11: OS Update Plan (w/BE)  “Create a Boot Environment” + “Update OS” are chosen. Summary: Solaris 10 Live Upgrade, Alternate Boot Environments, and their equivalents on Solaris 11 can be very powerful tools to help minimize the downtime associated with updating your servers.  For very old Solaris, there are some important prerequisites to adhere to, but once the initial preparation is complete, Live Upgrade can be used going forward.  For Solaris 11, the built-in Boot Environment handling is leveraged directly by the Image Packaging System, and the result is a much more straight forward way to patch, and far fewer prerequisites to satisfy in getting there.  Ops Center simplifies using either approach, and helps you improve consistency from system to system, which ultimately helps you improve the overall up-time across all the Solaris systems in your environment. Please let us know what you think?  Until next time...\Leon-- Leon Shaner | Senior IT/Product ArchitectSystems Management | Ops Center Engineering @ Oracle The views expressed on this [blog; Web site] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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  • Node.js Adventure - Node.js on Windows

    - by Shaun
    Two weeks ago I had had a talk with Wang Tao, a C# MVP in China who is currently running his startup company and product named worktile. He asked me to figure out a synchronization solution which helps his product in the future. And he preferred me implementing the service in Node.js, since his worktile is written in Node.js. Even though I have some experience in ASP.NET MVC, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I don’t think I’m an expert of JavaScript. In fact I’m very new to it. So it scared me a bit when he asked me to use Node.js. But after about one week investigate I have to say Node.js is very easy to learn, use and deploy, even if you have very limited JavaScript skill. And I think I became love Node.js. Hence I decided to have a series named “Node.js Adventure”, where I will demonstrate my story of learning and using Node.js in Windows and Windows Azure. And this is the first one.   (Brief) Introduction of Node.js I don’t want to have a fully detailed introduction of Node.js. There are many resource on the internet we can find. But the best one is its homepage. Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl, sponsored by Joyent. It’s consist of about 80% C/C++ for core and 20% JavaScript for API. It utilizes CommonJS as the module system which we will explain later. The official definition of Node.js is Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. First of all, Node.js utilizes JavaScript as its development language and runs on top of V8 engine, which is being used by Chrome. It brings JavaScript, a client-side language into the backend service world. So many people said, even though not that actually, “Node.js is a server side JavaScript”. Additionally, Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking IO model. This means in Node.js there’s no way to block currently working thread. Every operation in Node.js executed asynchronously. This is a huge benefit especially if our code needs IO operations such as reading disks, connect to database, consuming web service, etc.. Unlike IIS or Apache, Node.js doesn’t utilize the multi-thread model. In Node.js there’s only one working thread serves all users requests and resources response, as the ST star in the figure below. And there is a POSIX async threads pool in Node.js which contains many async threads (AT stars) for IO operations. When a user have an IO request, the ST serves it but it will not do the IO operation. Instead the ST will go to the POSIX async threads pool to pick up an AT, pass this operation to it, and then back to serve any other requests. The AT will actually do the IO operation asynchronously. Assuming before the AT complete the IO operation there is another user comes. The ST will serve this new user request, pick up another AT from the POSIX and then back. If the previous AT finished the IO operation it will take the result back and wait for the ST to serve. ST will take the response and return the AT to POSIX, and then response to the user. And if the second AT finished its job, the ST will response back to the second user in the same way. As you can see, in Node.js there’s only one thread serve clients’ requests and POSIX results. This thread looping between the users and POSIX and pass the data back and forth. The async jobs will be handled by POSIX. This is the event-driven non-blocking IO model. The performance of is model is much better than the multi-threaded blocking model. For example, Apache is built in multi-threaded blocking model while Nginx is in event-driven non-blocking mode. Below is the performance comparison between them. And below is the memory usage comparison between them. These charts are captured from the video NodeJS Basics: An Introductory Training, which presented at Cloud Foundry Developer Advocate.   Node.js on Windows To execute Node.js application on windows is very simple. First of you we need to download the latest Node.js platform from its website. After installed, it will register its folder into system path variant so that we can execute Node.js at anywhere. To confirm the Node.js installation, just open up a command windows and type “node”, then it will show the Node.js console. As you can see this is a JavaScript interactive console. We can type some simple JavaScript code and command here. To run a Node.js JavaScript application, just specify the source code file name as the argument of the “node” command. For example, let’s create a Node.js source code file named “helloworld.js”. Then copy a sample code from Node.js website. 1: var http = require("http"); 2:  3: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 4: res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"}); 5: res.end("Hello World\n"); 6: }).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1"); 7:  8: console.log("Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/"); This code will create a web server, listening on 1337 port and return “Hello World” when any requests come. Run it in the command windows. Then open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:1337/. As you can see, when using Node.js we are not creating a web application. In fact we are likely creating a web server. We need to deal with request, response and the related headers, status code, etc.. And this is one of the benefit of using Node.js, lightweight and straightforward. But creating a website from scratch again and again is not acceptable. The good news is that, Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system, so that we can leverage some modules to simplify our job. And furthermore, there are about ten thousand of modules available n the internet, which covers almost all areas in server side application development.   NPM and Node.js Modules Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system. A module is a set of JavaScript files. In Node.js if we have an entry file named “index.js”, then all modules it needs will be located at the “node_modules” folder. And in the “index.js” we can import modules by specifying the module name. For example, in the code we’ve just created, we imported a module named “http”, which is a build-in module installed alone with Node.js. So that we can use the code in this “http” module. Besides the build-in modules there are many modules available at the NPM website. Thousands of developers are contributing and downloading modules at this website. Hence this is another benefit of using Node.js. There are many modules we can use, and the numbers of modules increased very fast, and also we can publish our modules to the community. When I wrote this post, there are totally 14,608 modules at NPN and about 10 thousand downloads per day. Install a module is very simple. Let’s back to our command windows and input the command “npm install express”. This command will install a module named “express”, which is a MVC framework on top of Node.js. And let’s create another JavaScript file named “helloweb.js” and copy the code below in it. I imported the “express” module. And then when the user browse the home page it will response a text. If the incoming URL matches “/Echo/:value” which the “value” is what the user specified, it will pass it back with the current date time in JSON format. And finally my website was listening at 12345 port. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7:  8: app.get("/Echo/:value", function(req, res) { 9: var value = req.params.value; 10: res.json({ 11: "Value" : value, 12: "Time" : new Date() 13: }); 14: }); 15:  16: console.log("Web application opened."); 17: app.listen(12345); For more information and API about the “express”, please have a look here. Start our application from the command window by command “node helloweb.js”, and then navigate to the home page we can see the response in the browser. And if we go to, for example http://localhost:12345/Echo/Hello Shaun, we can see the JSON result. The “express” module is very populate in NPM. It makes the job simple when we need to build a MVC website. There are many modules very useful in NPM. - underscore: A utility module covers many common functionalities such as for each, map, reduce, select, etc.. - request: A very simple HTT request client. - async: Library for coordinate async operations. - wind: Library which enable us to control flow with plain JavaScript for asynchronous programming (and more) without additional pre-compiling steps.   Node.js and IIS I demonstrated how to run the Node.js application from console. Since we are in Windows another common requirement would be, “can I host Node.js in IIS?” The answer is “Yes”. Tomasz Janczuk created a project IISNode at his GitHub space we can find here. And Scott Hanselman had published a blog post introduced about it.   Summary In this post I provided a very brief introduction of Node.js, includes it official definition, architecture and how it implement the event-driven non-blocking model. And then I described how to install and run a Node.js application on windows console. I also described the Node.js module system and NPM command. At the end I referred some links about IISNode, an IIS extension that allows Node.js application runs on IIS. Node.js became a very popular server side application platform especially in this year. By leveraging its non-blocking IO model and async feature it’s very useful for us to build a highly scalable, asynchronously service. I think Node.js will be used widely in the cloud application development in the near future.   In the next post I will explain how to use SQL Server from Node.js.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Add collison detection to enemy sprites?

    - by xBroak
    i'd like to add the same collision detection used by the player sprite to the enemy sprites or 'creeps' ive added all the relevant code I can see yet collisons are still not being detected and handled, please find below the class, I have no idea what is wrong currently, the list of walls to collide with is 'wall_list' import pygame import pauseScreen as dm import re from pygame.sprite import Sprite from pygame import Rect, Color from random import randint, choice from vec2d import vec2d from simpleanimation import SimpleAnimation import displattxt black = (0,0,0) white = (255,255,255) blue = (0,0,255) green = (101,194,151) global currentEditTool currentEditTool = "Tree" global editMap editMap = False open('MapMaker.txt', 'w').close() def draw_background(screen, tile_img): screen.fill(black) img_rect = tile_img.get_rect() global rect rect = img_rect nrows = int(screen.get_height() / img_rect.height) + 1 ncols = int(screen.get_width() / img_rect.width) + 1 for y in range(nrows): for x in range(ncols): img_rect.topleft = (x * img_rect.width, y * img_rect.height) screen.blit(tile_img, img_rect) def changeTool(): if currentEditTool == "Tree": None elif currentEditTool == "Rock": None def pauseGame(): red = 255, 0, 0 green = 0,255, 0 blue = 0, 0,255 screen.fill(black) pygame.display.update() if editMap == False: choose = dm.dumbmenu(screen, [ 'Resume', 'Enable Map Editor', 'Quit Game'], 64,64,None,32,1.4,green,red) if choose == 0: print("hi") elif choose ==1: global editMap editMap = True elif choose ==2: print("bob") elif choose ==3: print("bob") elif choose ==4: print("bob") else: None else: choose = dm.dumbmenu(screen, [ 'Resume', 'Disable Map Editor', 'Quit Game'], 64,64,None,32,1.4,green,red) if choose == 0: print("Resume") elif choose ==1: print("Dis ME") global editMap editMap = False elif choose ==2: print("bob") elif choose ==3: print("bob") elif choose ==4: print("bob") else: None class Wall(pygame.sprite.Sprite): # Constructor function def __init__(self,x,y,width,height): pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self) self.image = pygame.Surface([width, height]) self.image.fill(green) self.rect = self.image.get_rect() self.rect.y = y self.rect.x = x class insertTree(pygame.sprite.Sprite): def __init__(self,x,y,width,height, typ): pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self) self.image = pygame.image.load("images/map/tree.png").convert() self.image.set_colorkey(white) self.rect = self.image.get_rect() self.rect.y = y self.rect.x = x class insertRock(pygame.sprite.Sprite): def __init__(self,x,y,width,height, typ): pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self) self.image = pygame.image.load("images/map/rock.png").convert() self.image.set_colorkey(white) self.rect = self.image.get_rect() self.rect.y = y self.rect.x = x class Creep(pygame.sprite.Sprite): """ A creep sprite that bounces off walls and changes its direction from time to time. """ change_x=0 change_y=0 def __init__( self, screen, creep_image, explosion_images, field, init_position, init_direction, speed): """ Create a new Creep. screen: The screen on which the creep lives (must be a pygame Surface object, such as pygame.display) creep_image: Image (surface) object for the creep explosion_images: A list of image objects for the explosion animation. field: A Rect specifying the 'playing field' boundaries. The Creep will bounce off the 'walls' of this field. init_position: A vec2d or a pair specifying the initial position of the creep on the screen. init_direction: A vec2d or a pair specifying the initial direction of the creep. Must have an angle that is a multiple of 45 degres. speed: Creep speed, in pixels/millisecond (px/ms) """ Sprite.__init__(self) self.screen = screen self.speed = speed self.field = field self.rect = creep_image.get_rect() # base_image holds the original image, positioned to # angle 0. # image will be rotated. # self.base_image = creep_image self.image = self.base_image self.explosion_images = explosion_images # A vector specifying the creep's position on the screen # self.pos = vec2d(init_position) # The direction is a normalized vector # self.direction = vec2d(init_direction).normalized() self.state = Creep.ALIVE self.health = 15 def is_alive(self): return self.state in (Creep.ALIVE, Creep.EXPLODING) def changespeed(self,x,y): self.change_x+=x self.change_y+=y def update(self, time_passed, walls): """ Update the creep. time_passed: The time passed (in ms) since the previous update. """ if self.state == Creep.ALIVE: # Maybe it's time to change the direction ? # self._change_direction(time_passed) # Make the creep point in the correct direction. # Since our direction vector is in screen coordinates # (i.e. right bottom is 1, 1), and rotate() rotates # counter-clockwise, the angle must be inverted to # work correctly. # self.image = pygame.transform.rotate( self.base_image, -self.direction.angle) # Compute and apply the displacement to the position # vector. The displacement is a vector, having the angle # of self.direction (which is normalized to not affect # the magnitude of the displacement) # displacement = vec2d( self.direction.x * self.speed * time_passed, self.direction.y * self.speed * time_passed) self.pos += displacement # When the image is rotated, its size is changed. # We must take the size into account for detecting # collisions with the walls. # self.image_w, self.image_h = self.image.get_size() bounds_rect = self.field.inflate( -self.image_w, -self.image_h) if self.pos.x < bounds_rect.left: self.pos.x = bounds_rect.left self.direction.x *= -1 elif self.pos.x > bounds_rect.right: self.pos.x = bounds_rect.right self.direction.x *= -1 elif self.pos.y < bounds_rect.top: self.pos.y = bounds_rect.top self.direction.y *= -1 elif self.pos.y > bounds_rect.bottom: self.pos.y = bounds_rect.bottom self.direction.y *= -1 # collision detection old_x=bounds_rect.left new_x=old_x+self.direction.x bounds_rect.left = new_x # hit a wall? collide = pygame.sprite.spritecollide(self, walls, False) if collide: # yes bounds_rect.left=old_x old_y=self.pos.y new_y=old_y+self.direction.y self.pos.y = new_y collide = pygame.sprite.spritecollide(self, walls, False) if collide: # yes self.pos.y=old_y elif self.state == Creep.EXPLODING: if self.explode_animation.active: self.explode_animation.update(time_passed) else: self.state = Creep.DEAD self.kill() elif self.state == Creep.DEAD: pass #------------------ PRIVATE PARTS ------------------# # States the creep can be in. # # ALIVE: The creep is roaming around the screen # EXPLODING: # The creep is now exploding, just a moment before dying. # DEAD: The creep is dead and inactive # (ALIVE, EXPLODING, DEAD) = range(3) _counter = 0 def _change_direction(self, time_passed): """ Turn by 45 degrees in a random direction once per 0.4 to 0.5 seconds. """ self._counter += time_passed if self._counter > randint(400, 500): self.direction.rotate(45 * randint(-1, 1)) self._counter = 0 def _point_is_inside(self, point): """ Is the point (given as a vec2d) inside our creep's body? """ img_point = point - vec2d( int(self.pos.x - self.image_w / 2), int(self.pos.y - self.image_h / 2)) try: pix = self.image.get_at(img_point) return pix[3] > 0 except IndexError: return False def _decrease_health(self, n): """ Decrease my health by n (or to 0, if it's currently less than n) """ self.health = max(0, self.health - n) if self.health == 0: self._explode() def _explode(self): """ Starts the explosion animation that ends the Creep's life. """ self.state = Creep.EXPLODING pos = ( self.pos.x - self.explosion_images[0].get_width() / 2, self.pos.y - self.explosion_images[0].get_height() / 2) self.explode_animation = SimpleAnimation( self.screen, pos, self.explosion_images, 100, 300) global remainingCreeps remainingCreeps-=1 if remainingCreeps == 0: print("all dead") def draw(self): """ Blit the creep onto the screen that was provided in the constructor. """ if self.state == Creep.ALIVE: # The creep image is placed at self.pos. To allow for # smooth movement even when the creep rotates and the # image size changes, its placement is always # centered. # self.draw_rect = self.image.get_rect().move( self.pos.x - self.image_w / 2, self.pos.y - self.image_h / 2) self.screen.blit(self.image, self.draw_rect) # The health bar is 15x4 px. # health_bar_x = self.pos.x - 7 health_bar_y = self.pos.y - self.image_h / 2 - 6 self.screen.fill( Color('red'), (health_bar_x, health_bar_y, 15, 4)) self.screen.fill( Color('green'), ( health_bar_x, health_bar_y, self.health, 4)) elif self.state == Creep.EXPLODING: self.explode_animation.draw() elif self.state == Creep.DEAD: pass def mouse_click_event(self, pos): """ The mouse was clicked in pos. """ if self._point_is_inside(vec2d(pos)): self._decrease_health(3) #begin new player class Player(pygame.sprite.Sprite): change_x=0 change_y=0 frame = 0 def __init__(self,x,y): pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self) # LOAD PLATER IMAGES # Set height, width self.images = [] for i in range(1,17): img = pygame.image.load("images/player/" + str(i)+".png").convert() #player images img.set_colorkey(white) self.images.append(img) self.image = self.images[0] self.rect = self.image.get_rect() self.rect.y = y self.rect.x = x self.health = 15 self.image_w, self.image_h = self.image.get_size() health_bar_x = self.rect.x - 7 health_bar_y = self.rect.y - self.image_h / 2 - 6 screen.fill( Color('red'), (health_bar_x, health_bar_y, 15, 4)) screen.fill( Color('green'), ( health_bar_x, health_bar_y, self.health, 4)) def changespeed(self,x,y): self.change_x+=x self.change_y+=y def _decrease_health(self, n): """ Decrease my health by n (or to 0, if it's currently less than n) """ self.health = max(0, self.health - n) if self.health == 0: self._explode() def update(self,walls): # collision detection old_x=self.rect.x new_x=old_x+self.change_x self.rect.x = new_x # hit a wall? collide = pygame.sprite.spritecollide(self, walls, False) if collide: # yes self.rect.x=old_x old_y=self.rect.y new_y=old_y+self.change_y self.rect.y = new_y collide = pygame.sprite.spritecollide(self, walls, False) if collide: # yes self.rect.y=old_y # right to left if self.change_x < 0: self.frame += 1 if self.frame > 3*4: self.frame = 0 # Grab the image, divide by 4 # every 4 frames. self.image = self.images[self.frame//4] # Move left to right. # images 4...7 instead of 0...3. if self.change_x > 0: self.frame += 1 if self.frame > 3*4: self.frame = 0 self.image = self.images[self.frame//4+4] if self.change_y > 0: self.frame += 1 if self.frame > 3*4: self.frame = 0 self.image = self.images[self.frame//4+4+4] if self.change_y < 0: self.frame += 1 if self.frame > 3*4: self.frame = 0 self.image = self.images[self.frame//4+4+4+4] score = 0 # initialize pyGame pygame.init() # 800x600 sized screen global screen screen = pygame.display.set_mode([800, 600]) screen.fill(black) #bg_tile_img = pygame.image.load('images/map/grass.png').convert_alpha() #draw_background(screen, bg_tile_img) #pygame.display.flip() # Set title pygame.display.set_caption('Test') #background = pygame.Surface(screen.get_size()) #background = background.convert() #background.fill(black) # Create the player player = Player( 50,50 ) player.rect.x=50 player.rect.y=50 movingsprites = pygame.sprite.RenderPlain() movingsprites.add(player) # Make the walls. (x_pos, y_pos, width, height) global wall_list wall_list=pygame.sprite.RenderPlain() wall=Wall(0,0,10,600) # left wall wall_list.add(wall) wall=Wall(10,0,790,10) # top wall wall_list.add(wall) #wall=Wall(10,200,100,10) # poke wall wall_list.add(wall) wall=Wall(790,0,10,600) #(x,y,thickness, height) wall_list.add(wall) wall=Wall(10,590,790,10) #(x,y,thickness, height) wall_list.add(wall) f = open('MapMaker.txt') num_lines = sum(1 for line in f) print(num_lines) lineCount = 0 with open("MapMaker.txt") as infile: for line in infile: f = open('MapMaker.txt') print(line) coords = line.split(',') #print(coords[0]) #print(coords[1]) #print(coords[2]) #print(coords[3]) #print(coords[4]) if "tree" in line: print("tree in") wall=insertTree(int(coords[0]),int(coords[1]), int(coords[2]),int(coords[3]),coords[4]) wall_list.add(wall) elif "rock" in line: print("rock in") wall=insertRock(int(coords[0]),int(coords[1]), int(coords[2]),int(coords[3]),coords[4] ) wall_list.add(wall) width = 20 height = 540 height = height - 48 for i in range(0,23): width = width + 32 name = insertTree(width,540,790,10,"tree") #wall_list.add(name) name = insertTree(width,height,690,10,"tree") #wall_list.add(name) CREEP_SPAWN_TIME = 200 # frames creep_spawn = CREEP_SPAWN_TIME clock = pygame.time.Clock() bg_tile_img = pygame.image.load('images/map/grass.png').convert() img_rect = bg_tile_img FIELD_RECT = Rect(50, 50, 700, 500) CREEP_FILENAMES = [ 'images/player/1.png', 'images/player/1.png', 'images/player/1.png'] N_CREEPS = 3 creep_images = [ pygame.image.load(filename).convert_alpha() for filename in CREEP_FILENAMES] explosion_img = pygame.image.load('images/map/tree.png').convert_alpha() explosion_images = [ explosion_img, pygame.transform.rotate(explosion_img, 90)] creeps = pygame.sprite.RenderPlain() done = False #bg_tile_img = pygame.image.load('images/map/grass.png').convert() #draw_background(screen, bg_tile_img) totalCreeps = 0 remainingCreeps = 3 while done == False: creep_images = pygame.image.load("images/player/1.png").convert() creep_images.set_colorkey(white) draw_background(screen, bg_tile_img) if len(creeps) != N_CREEPS: if totalCreeps < N_CREEPS: totalCreeps = totalCreeps + 1 print(totalCreeps) creeps.add( Creep( screen=screen, creep_image=creep_images, explosion_images=explosion_images, field=FIELD_RECT, init_position=( randint(FIELD_RECT.left, FIELD_RECT.right), randint(FIELD_RECT.top, FIELD_RECT.bottom)), init_direction=(choice([-1, 1]), choice([-1, 1])), speed=0.01)) for creep in creeps: creep.update(60,wall_list) creep.draw() for event in pygame.event.get(): if event.type == pygame.QUIT: done=True if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN: if event.key == pygame.K_LEFT: player.changespeed(-2,0) creep.changespeed(-2,0) if event.key == pygame.K_RIGHT: player.changespeed(2,0) creep.changespeed(2,0) if event.key == pygame.K_UP: player.changespeed(0,-2) creep.changespeed(0,-2) if event.key == pygame.K_DOWN: player.changespeed(0,2) creep.changespeed(0,2) if event.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE: pauseGame() if event.key == pygame.K_1: global currentEditTool currentEditTool = "Tree" changeTool() if event.key == pygame.K_2: global currentEditTool currentEditTool = "Rock" changeTool() if event.type == pygame.KEYUP: if event.key == pygame.K_LEFT: player.changespeed(2,0) creep.changespeed(2,0) if event.key == pygame.K_RIGHT: player.changespeed(-2,0) creep.changespeed(-2,0) if event.key == pygame.K_UP: player.changespeed(0,2) creep.changespeed(0,2) if event.key == pygame.K_DOWN: player.changespeed(0,-2) creep.changespeed(0,-2) if event.type == pygame.MOUSEBUTTONDOWN and pygame.mouse.get_pressed()[0]: for creep in creeps: creep.mouse_click_event(pygame.mouse.get_pos()) if editMap == True: x,y = pygame.mouse.get_pos() if currentEditTool == "Tree": name = insertTree(x-10,y-25, 10 , 10, "tree") wall_list.add(name) wall_list.draw(screen) f = open('MapMaker.txt', "a+") image = pygame.image.load("images/map/tree.png").convert() screen.blit(image, (30,10)) pygame.display.flip() f.write(str(x) + "," + str(y) + ",790,10, tree\n") #f.write("wall=insertTree(" + str(x) + "," + str(y) + ",790,10)\nwall_list.add(wall)\n") elif currentEditTool == "Rock": name = insertRock(x-10,y-25, 10 , 10,"rock") wall_list.add(name) wall_list.draw(screen) f = open('MapMaker.txt', "a+") f.write(str(x) + "," + str(y) + ",790,10,rock\n") #f.write("wall=insertRock(" + str(x) + "," + str(y) + ",790,10)\nwall_list.add(wall)\n") else: None #pygame.display.flip() player.update(wall_list) movingsprites.draw(screen) wall_list.draw(screen) pygame.display.flip() clock.tick(60) pygame.quit()

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