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  • XNA Notes 006

    - by George Clingerman
    If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <text> syntax

    - by ScottGu
    This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss two useful syntactical features of the new Razor view-engine – the @: and <text> syntax support. Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post.  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a list of products: When run, it generates output like:   One of the techniques that Razor uses to implicitly identify when a code block ends is to look for tag/element content to denote the beginning of a content region.  For example, in the code snippet above Razor automatically treated the inner <li></li> block within our foreach loop as an HTML content block because it saw the opening <li> tag sequence and knew that it couldn’t be valid C#.  This particular technique – using tags to identify content blocks within code – is one of the key ingredients that makes Razor so clean and productive with scenarios involving HTML creation. Using @: to explicitly indicate the start of content Not all content container blocks start with a tag element tag, though, and there are scenarios where the Razor parser can’t implicitly detect a content block. Razor addresses this by enabling you to explicitly indicate the beginning of a line of content by using the @: character sequence within a code block.  The @: sequence indicates that the line of content that follows should be treated as a content block: As a more practical example, the below snippet demonstrates how we could output a “(Out of Stock!)” message next to our product name if the product is out of stock: Because I am not wrapping the (Out of Stock!) message in an HTML tag element, Razor can’t implicitly determine that the content within the @if block is the start of a content block.  We are using the @: character sequence to explicitly indicate that this line within our code block should be treated as content. Using Code Nuggets within @: content blocks In addition to outputting static content, you can also have code nuggets embedded within a content block that is initiated using a @: character sequence.  For example, we have two @: sequences in the code snippet below: Notice how within the second @: sequence we are emitting the number of units left within the content block (e.g. - “(Only 3 left!”). We are doing this by embedding a @p.UnitsInStock code nugget within the line of content. Multiple Lines of Content Razor makes it easy to have multiple lines of content wrapped in an HTML element.  For example, below the inner content of our @if container is wrapped in an HTML <p> element – which will cause Razor to treat it as content: For scenarios where the multiple lines of content are not wrapped by an outer HTML element, you can use multiple @: sequences: Alternatively, Razor also allows you to use a <text> element to explicitly identify content: The <text> tag is an element that is treated specially by Razor. It causes Razor to interpret the inner contents of the <text> block as content, and to not render the containing <text> tag element (meaning only the inner contents of the <text> element will be rendered – the tag itself will not).  This makes it convenient when you want to render multi-line content blocks that are not wrapped by an HTML element.  The <text> element can also optionally be used to denote single-lines of content, if you prefer it to the more concise @: sequence: The above code will render the same output as the @: version we looked at earlier.  Razor will automatically omit the <text> wrapping element from the output and just render the content within it.  Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s smart detection of <tag> elements to identify the beginning of content regions is one of the reasons that the Razor approach works so well with HTML generation scenarios, and it enables you to avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/ending of content regions in about 95% of if/else and foreach scenarios. Razor’s @: and <text> syntax can then be used for scenarios where you want to avoid using an HTML element within a code container block, and need to more explicitly denote a content region. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Cryptographic Validation Explained

    - by MarkPearl
    We have been using LogicNP’s CryptoLicensing for some of our software and I was battling to understand how exactly the whole process worked. I was sent the following document which really helped explain it – so if you ever use the same tool it is well worth a read. Licensing Basics LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net is the most advanced and state-of-the art licensing and copy protection system you can use for your software. LogicNP CryptoLicensing System uses the latest cryptographic technology to generate and validate licenses. The cryptographic algorithm used is the RSA algorithm which consists of a pair of keys called as the generation key and the validation key. Data encrypted using the generation key can only be decrypted using the corresponding validation key. How does cryptographic validation work? When a new license project is created, a unique validation-generation key pair is created for the project. When LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net generates licenses, it encrypts the license settings using the generation key. The validation key can be safely distributed with your software and is used during validation. During license validation, LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net attempts to decrypt the encrypted license code using the validation key. If the decryption is successful, this means that the data was encrypted using the generation key, since only the corresponding validation key can decrypt data encrypted with the generation key. This further means that not only is the license valid but that it was generated by you and only you since nobody else has access to the generation key. Generation Key This key is used by CryptoLicensing Generator to generate encrypted license codes. This key is stored in the license project file, so the license project file must be kept secure and confidential and must be accorded the same care as any other critical asset such as source code. Validation Key This key is used for validating generated license codes. It is the same key displayed in the 'Get Validation Key And Code' dialog (Ctrl+K) and is used by your software when validating license codes (using LogicNP.CryptoLicensing.dll). Unlike the generation key, it is not necessary to keep this key secure and confidential. Note that the generation key pair is stored in the project file created by LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net, so it is very important to backup this file and to keep it secure. Once the file is lost, it is not possible to retrieve the key pair. FAQ Do I use the same validation key to validate all license codes? Yes, the validation key (and generation key) for the project remains the same; you use the same key to validate all license codes generated using the project. You can retrieve the validation key using the "Project" menu --> "Get Validation Key & Code" menu item. Can license codes generated using generation key from one project be validated using validation key of another project? No! Q. Is every generated license code unique? A. Yes, every license code generated by CryptoLicensing is guaranteed to be unique, even if you generate thousands of codes at a time. Q. What makes CryptoLicensing so secure? A. CryptoLicensing uses the latest cryptographic technology to generate and validate licenses. The cryptographic algorithm used is the RSA asymmetric key algorithm which can use upto 3072-bit keys. Given current computing power, it takes years to break a 3072-bit key. Q. Is is possible for a hacker to develop a keygen for my software? A. Impossible. The cryptographic algorithm used by CryptoLicensing consists of a pair of keys called as the generation key and the validation key. Data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted by the other key and vice versa. Licenses are generated using the generation key and validated using the validation key. Without the generation key, it is impossible to generate valid licenses. Q. What is the difference between validation key and generation key? Generation Key This key is used by CryptoLicensing Generator to generate encrypted license codes. This key is stored in the license project file, so the license project file must be kept secure and confidential and must be accorded the same care as any other critical asset such as source code. Validation Key This key is used for validating generated license codes. It is the same key displayed in the 'Get Validation Key And Code' dialog (Ctrl+K) and is used by your software when validating license codes (using LogicNP.CryptoLicensing.dll). Unlike the generation key, it is not necessary to keep this key secure and confidential. Q. Do I have to include the license project file (.licproj) with my software? A. No!!! This goes against the very essence of the security of the asymmetric cryptographic scheme because the project file contains both the validation and generation key. With your software, you only need to include the validation key which will be used to validate licenses generated by CryptoLicensing using the generation key. The license project file should be treated as any other valuable and confidential asset such as your source code. Q. Does the license service need the license project file? A. Yes. The license project file is needed whenever new licenses are generated (via the UI, via the API or via the license service). As just one example, the license service generates new machine-locked licenses when activated licenses are presented to it for activation, therefore the license service needs the license project file. Q. Is it possible to embed my own data in the generated licenses? A. Yes. You can embed any amount of additional data in the licenses. This data will have the same amount of security as the license code itself and will be tamper-proof. The embedded user data can be retrieved from your software. Q. What additional steps can I take to ensure that my software does not get cracked? A. There are many methods and techniques which can make it extremely difficult for a hacker to crack your software. See Writing Effective License Checking Code And Designing Effective Licenses for more information. Q. Why is the license service not working? A. The most common cause is not setting the CryptoLicense.LicenseServiceURL property before trying to validate a license. Make sure that this property is set to the correct URL where your license service is hosted. The most common cause after this is that the license project file on the web server where your license service is hosted is not the latest. This happens if you make changes to the license project (for example, set the 'Enable With Serials' setting for a profile), but don't upload the updated project file to your web server. Q. Why are my serials not working? Serial codes require the user of a license service. See Using Serial Codes for more details. Also see the earlier question 'Why is the license service not working?' Q. Is the same validation key used to validate license codes generated from different profiles. A. Yes. Profiles are just pre specified license settings for quickly generating licenses having those settings. The actual license code is still generated using the license project's cryptographic generation key and thus, can be validated using the project's validation key. Q. Why are changes made to a profile not getting saved? A. Simply changing license settings via UI and saving the license project does not save those license settings to the active profile. You must first save the license settings to a profile using the Save/Save As command from the Profiles menu (see above). Q. Why is validation of activated licenses failing from CryptoLicensing Generator, but works from my software? A. Make sure that you have specified the URL of the license service using the Project Properties Dialog. Also see the earlier question 'Why is the license service not working?' Q. How can I extend the trial period of my customer? A. To extend the evaluation period of the customer, simply send him a new license code specifying the desired evaluation limits. Evaluation information such as the current used days, executions, etc are stored in garbled form in a registry location which is derived from the license code. Therefore, when a new license code is used, the old evaluation information will not be used and a new evaluation period will be started.

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  • Posting from ASP.NET WebForms page to another URL

    - by hajan
    Few days ago I had a case when I needed to make FORM POST from my ASP.NET WebForms page to an external site URL. More specifically, I was working on implementing Simple Payment System (like Amazon, PayPal, MoneyBookers). The operator asks to make FORM POST request to a given URL in their website, sending parameters together with the post which are computed on my application level (access keys, secret keys, signature, return-URL… etc). So, since we are not allowed nesting another form inside the <form runat=”server”> … </form>, which is required because other controls in my ASPX code work on server-side, I thought to inject the HTML and create FORM with method=”POST”. After making some proof of concept and testing some scenarios, I’ve concluded that I can do this very fast in two ways: Using jQuery to create form on fly with the needed parameters and make submit() Using HttpContext.Current.Response.Write to write the form on server-side (code-behind) and embed JavaScript code that will do the post Both ways seemed fine. 1. Using jQuery to create FORM html code and Submit it. Let’s say we have ‘PAY NOW’ button in our ASPX code: <asp:Button ID="btnPayNow" runat="server" Text="Pay Now" /> Now, if we want to make this button submit a FORM using POST method to another website, the jQuery way should be as follows: <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.5.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript">     $(function () {         $("#btnPayNow").click(function (event) {             event.preventDefault();             //construct htmlForm string             var htmlForm = "<form id='myform' method='POST' action='http://www.microsoft.com'>" +                 "<input type='hidden' id='name' value='hajan' />" +             "</form>";             //Submit the form             $(htmlForm).appendTo("body").submit();         });     }); </script> Yes, as you see, the code fires on btnPayNow click. It removes the default button behavior, then creates htmlForm string. After that using jQuery we append the form to the body and submit it. Inside the form, you can see I have set the htttp://www.microsoft.com URL, so after clicking the button you should be automatically redirected to the Microsoft website (just for test, of course for Payment I’m using Operator's URL). 2. Using HttpContext.Current.Response.Write to write the form on server-side (code-behind) and embed JavaScript code that will do the post The C# code behind should be something like this: public void btnPayNow_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {     string Url = "http://www.microsoft.com";     string formId = "myForm1";     StringBuilder htmlForm = new StringBuilder();     htmlForm.AppendLine("<html>");     htmlForm.AppendLine(String.Format("<body onload='document.forms[\"{0}\"].submit()'>",formId));     htmlForm.AppendLine(String.Format("<form id='{0}' method='POST' action='{1}'>", formId, Url));     htmlForm.AppendLine("<input type='hidden' id='name' value='hajan' />");     htmlForm.AppendLine("</form>");     htmlForm.AppendLine("</body>");     htmlForm.AppendLine("</html>");     HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();     HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(htmlForm.ToString());     HttpContext.Current.Response.End();             } So, with this code we create htmlForm string using StringBuilder class and then just write the html to the page using HttpContext.Current.Response.Write. The interesting part here is that we submit the form using JavaScript code: document.forms["myForm1"].submit() This code runs on body load event, which means once the body is loaded the form is automatically submitted. Note: In order to test both solutions, create two applications on your web server and post the form from first to the second website, then get the values in the second website using Request.Form[“input-field-id”] I hope this was useful post for you. Regards, Hajan

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  • SEO effect of “You are leaving this site” page for outbound links?

    - by Timo Huovinen
    The problem I am working on an aggregation website that collects reviews about specific products from various websites. The site has many thousands of outbound links (with "nofollow" attributes) to the content source websites where the reviews were collected from. The site has far more outbound links than inbound links and I have read that this is bad for SEO. The question Would adding an intermediate «You are leaving this site» disclaimer/warning page like this hurt search engine rankings? And can you provide any links about this topic? p.s. The exit page would be a POST form instead of a script, that notifies the user that he/she is leaving this site and provides a button to continue to the other website. p.p.s This kind of idea is implemented on many forums, aggregation websites with the purpose of warning the user that he/she is leaving this site and to block search engine bots from following those links because search bots do not submit forms.

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  • XNA Notes 005

    - by George Clingerman
    Another week and another crazy amount of activity going on in the XNA community. I’m fairly certain I missed over half of it. In fact, if I am missing things, make sure to email me and I’ll try and make sure I catch it next week! ([email protected]). Also, if you’ve got any advice, things you like/don’t like about the way these XNA Notes are going let me know. I always appreciate feedback (currently spammers are leaving me the nicest comments so you guys have work to do!) Without further ado, here’s this week’s notes! Time Critical XNA News The XNA Team Blob reminds us that February 7th is the last day to submit XNA 3.1 games to peer review! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/31/7-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx XNA MVPS Chris Williams kicks off the marketing campaign for our book http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/01/28/143680.aspx Catalin Zima posts the comparison cheat sheet for why Angry Birds is different than Chickens Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/comparison-cheat-sheet-for-chickens-cant-fly-and-angry-birds/ Jim Perry congratulates the developers selected by Game Developer Magazine for Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://machxgames.com/blog/?p=24 @NemoKrad posts his XNAKUUG talks for all to enjoy http://twitter.com/NemoKrad/statuses/33142362502864896 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/02/03/xblig-uk-2011-january-amp-february-talk.aspx George  (that’s me!) preps for his XNA talk coming up on the 8th http://twitter.com/clingermangw/statuses/32669550554124288 http://www.portlandsilverlight.net/Meetings/Details/15 XNA Developers FireFly posts the last tutorial in his XNA Tower Defense tutorial series http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/26442/451460.aspx#451460 http://xnatd.blogspot.com/2011/01/tutorial-14-polishing-game.html @fredericmy posts the main difference when porting a game from Windows Phone 7 to Xbox 360 http://fairyengine.blogspot.com/2011/01/main-differences-when-porting-game-from.html @ElementCy creates a pretty rad video of a MineCraft type terrain created using XNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waw1f7wnl9I Andrew Russel gets the first XNA badge on gamedev.stackexchange http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/32322877004972032 http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/badges?tab=tags And his funding for ExEn has passed $7000 only $3000 to go http://twitter.com/_AndrewRussell/statuses/33042412804771840 Subodh Pushpak blogs about his Windows Phone 7 XNA talk http://geekswithblogs.net/subodhnpushpak/archive/2011/02/01/windows-phone-7-silverlight--xna-development-talk.aspx Slyprid releases the latest version of Transmute and needs more people to test http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/32452488418299904 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ SpynDoctorGames celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Your Doodles Are Bugged! Congrats! http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/32511689068908544 Noogy (creator of Dust the Elysian Tail) prepares his conversion to XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/NoogyTweet/statuses/32522008449253376 @philippedasilva posts about the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.2.0.0 Input management system http://twitter.com/philippedasilva/statuses/32763393957957632 http://indiefreaks.com/2011/02/02/behind-smart-input-system-feature/ Mommy’s Best Games debates what to do about High Scores with their new update http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/02/high-score-shake-up.html @BinaryTweedDeej want to know if there’s anything the community needs to make XNA games for the PC. Give him some feedback! http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/status/32895453863354368 @mikebmcl promises to write us all a book (I can’t wait to read it!) http://twitter.com/mikebmcl/statuses/33206499102687233 @werezompire is going to live, LIVE, thanks to all the generosity and support from the community! http://twitter.com/werezompire/statuses/32840147644977153 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG) Making money in Xbox 360 indie game development. Is it possible? http://www.bitmob.com/articles/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible @AlejandroDaJ posts some thoughts abut the bitmob article http://twitter.com/AlejandroDaJ/statuses/31068552165330944 http://www.apathyworks.com/blog/view.php?id=00215 Kobun gets my respect as an XBLIG champion. I’m not sure who Kobun is, but if you’ve every read through the comment sections any time Kotaku writes about XBLIGs you’ll see a lot of confusion, disinformation in there. Kobun has been waging a secret war battling that lack of knowledge and he does it well. Also he’s running a pretty kick ass site for Xbox LIVE Indie Game reviews http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/ @radiangames releases his last Xbox LIVE Indie Game...for now http://bit.ly/gMK6lE Playing Avaglide with the Kinect controller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqAYbHww53o http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/30/kinect-hacks-take-to-the-skies-with-avaglide/ Luke Schneider of Radiangames interviewed in Edge magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/features/radiangames-venture Digital Quarters posts thoughts on why XBLIG’s online requirement kills certain genres http://digitalquarters.blogspot.com/2011/02/thoughts-why-xbligs-online-requirement.html Mommy’s Best Games shares the news that several XBLIGs were featured in the March 2011 issue of Famitsu 360 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/33455/451487.aspx#451487 NaviFairy continues with his Indie-Game-A-Day http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_epic_dungeon.html http://gaygamer.net/2011/02/indie_game_a_day_break_limit_r.html and more every day...that’s kind of the point! Keep your eye on this series! VVGTV continues with it’s awesome reviews/promotions for XBLIGs http://vvgtv.com/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/03/iredia-atrams-secret-xblig-review-2/ http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/02/poopocalypse-coming-soon-to-xblig/ ….and even more, you get the point. Magicka is an Indie Game doing really well on Steam AND it’s made using XNA http://www.magickagame.com/ http://twitter.com/Magickagame/statuses/32712762580799488 GameMarx reviews Antipole http://www.gamemarx.com/reviews/73/antipole-is-vvvvvvery-good.aspx Armless Octopus review Alpha Squad http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/28/xbox-indie-review-alpha-squad/ An interesting article about Kodu that Jim Perry found http://twitter.com/MachXGames/statuses/32848044105924608 http://www.develop-online.net/news/36915/10-year-old-Jordan-makes-games-The-UK-needs-more-like-her XNA Game Development Sgt. Conker posts about the Natur beta, a new book and whether you can make money with XBLIG http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/a-new-book-on-the-block-and-a-new-natur-beta/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/making-money-in-xbox-360-indie-game-development-is-it-possible/ Tips for setting up SVN http://bit.ly/fKxgFh @bsimser found tons of royalty free music and soundfx for your XNA Games http://twitter.com/bsimser/statuses/31426632933711872 Post on the new features in the next Sunburn Editor http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/01/28/new-editor-features-prefabs-components-and-more.aspx @jasons_novaleaf posts source code for light pre-pass optimizations for #xna http://twitter.com/jasons_novaleaf/statuses/33348855403642880 http://jcoluna.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-optimization-round-one/ I’ve been learning about doing an A.I. for turn based games and this article was a great resource. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1535/designing_ai_algorithms_for_.php?print=1

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  • Is it a good idea to add robots "noindex" m tags deep, low content pages, e.g. product model data

    - by Cognize
    I'm considering adding robots "noindex, follow" tags to the very numerous product data pages that are linked from the product style pages in our online store. For example, each product style has a page with full text content on the product: http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE Then many data pages with technical data for each model code is linked from the product style page. http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE-1 http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE-2 http://www.shop.example/Product/Category/Style/SOME-STYLE-CODE-3 It is these technical data pages that I intend to add the no index code to, as I imagine that this might stop these pages from cannibalizing keyword authority for more important content rich pages on the site. Any advice appreciated.

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  • Making a Case For The Command Line

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/06/30/making-a-case-for-the-command-line.aspxI have had an idea percolating in the back of my mind for over a year now that I’ve just recently started to implement. This idea relates to building out “internal tools” to ease the maintenance and on-going support of a software system. The system that I currently work on is (mostly) web-based, so we traditionally we have built these internal tools in the form of pages within the app that are only accessible by our developers and support personnel. These pages allow us to perform tasks within the system that, for one reason or another, we don’t want to let our end users perform (e.g. mass create/update/delete operations on data, flipping switches that turn paid modules of the system on or off, etc). When we try to build new tools like this we often struggle with the level of effort required to build them. Effort Required Creating a whole new page in an existing web application can be a fairly large undertaking. You need to create the page and ensure it will have a layout that is consistent with the other pages in the app. You need to decide what types of input controls need to go onto the page. You need to ensure that everything uses the same style as the rest of the site. You need to figure out what the text on the page should say. Then, when you figure out that you forgot about an input that should really be present you might have to go back and re-work the entire thing. Oh, and in addition to all of that, you still have to, you know, write the code that actually performs the task. Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application! Plumbing Problems A former co-worker of mine, John Sonmez, always advocated the Unix philosophy for building internal tools: start with something that runs at the command line, and then build a UI on top of that if you need to. John’s idea has a lot of merit, and we tried building out some internal tools as simple Console applications. Unfortunately, this was often easier said that done. Doing a “File –> New Project” to build out a tool for a mature system can be pretty daunting because that new project is totally empty.  In our case, the web application code had a lot of of “plumbing” built in: it managed authentication and authorization, it handled database connection management for our multi-tenanted architecture, it managed all of the context that needs to follow a user around the application such as their timezone and regional/language settings. In addition, the configuration file for the web application  (a web.config in our case because this is an ASP .NET application) is large and would need to be reproduced into a similar configuration file for a Console application. While most of these problems are could be solved pretty easily with some refactoring of the codebase, building Console applications for internal tools still potentially suffers from one pretty big drawback: you’d have to execute them on a machine with network access to all of the needed resources. Obviously, our web servers can easily communicate the the database servers and can publish messages to our service bus, but the same is not true for all of our developer and support personnel workstations. We could have everyone run these tools remotely via RDP or SSH, but that’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a lot less convenient than having the tools built into the web application that is so easily accessible. Mix and Match So we need a way to build tools that are easily accessible via the web application but also don’t require the overhead of creating a user interface. This is where my idea comes into play: why not just build a command line interface into the web application? If it’s part of the web application we get all of the plumbing that comes along with that code, and we’re executing everything on the web servers which means we’ll have access to any external resources that we might need. Rather than having to incur the overhead of creating a brand new page for each tool that we want to build, we can create one new page that simply accepts a command in text form and executes it as a request on the web server. In this way, we can focus on writing the code to accomplish the task. If the tool ends up being heavily used, then (and only then) should we consider spending the time to build a better user experience around it. To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of building great user experiences into your system; we should all strive to provide the best UX possible to our end users. I’m only advocating this sort of bare-bones interface for internal consumption by the technical staff that builds and supports the software. This command line interface should be the “back end” to a highly polished and eye-pleasing public face. Implementation As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is an idea that I’ve had for awhile but have only recently started building out. I’ve outlined some general guidelines and design goals for this effort as follows: Text in, text out: In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible, I want this interface to be purely text-based. Users will submit commands as plain text, and the application will provide responses in plain text. Obviously this text will be “wrapped” within the context of HTTP requests and responses, but I don’t want to have to think about HTML or CSS when taking input from the user or displaying responses back to the user. Task-oriented code only: After building the initial “harness” for this interface, the only code that should need to be written to create a new internal tool should be code that is expressly needed to accomplish the task that the tool is intended to support. If we want to encourage and enable ourselves to build good tooling, we need to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. Built-in documentation: One of the great things about most command line utilities is the ‘help’ switch that provides usage guidelines and details about the arguments that the utility accepts. Our web-based command line utility should allow us to build the documentation for these tools directly into the code of the tools themselves. I finally started trying to implement this idea when I heard about a fantastic open-source library called CLAP (Command Line Auto Parser) that lets me meet the guidelines outlined above. CLAP lets you define classes with public methods that can be easily invoked from the command line. Here’s a quick example of the code that would be needed to create a new tool to do something within your system: 1: public class CustomerTools 2: { 3: [Verb] 4: public void UpdateName(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName) 5: { 6: //invoke internal services/domain objects/hwatever to perform update 7: } 8: } This is just a regular class with a single public method (though you could have as many methods as you want). The method is decorated with the ‘Verb’ attribute that tells the CLAP library that it is a method that can be invoked from the command line. Here is how you would invoke that code: Parser.Run(args, new CustomerTools()); Note that ‘args’ is just a string[] that would normally be passed passed in from the static Main method of a Console application. Also, CLAP allows you to pass in multiple classes that define [Verb] methods so you can opt to organize the code that CLAP will invoke in any way that you like. You can invoke this code from a command line application like this: SomeExe UpdateName -customerId:123 -firstName:Jesse -lastName:Taber ‘SomeExe’ in this example just represents the name of .exe that is would be created from our Console application. CLAP then interprets the arguments passed in order to find the method that should be invoked and automatically parses out the parameters that need to be passed in. After a quick spike, I’ve found that invoking the ‘Parser’ class can be done from within the context of a web application just as easily as it can from within the ‘Main’ method entry point of a Console application. There are, however, a few sticking points that I’m working around: Splitting arguments into the ‘args’ array like the command line: When you invoke a standard .NET console application you get the arguments that were passed in by the user split into a handy array (this is the ‘args’ parameter referenced above). Generally speaking they get split by whitespace, but it’s also clever enough to handle things like ignoring whitespace in a phrase that is surrounded by quotes. We’ll need to re-create this logic within our web application so that we can give the ‘args’ value to CLAP just like a console application would. Providing a response to the user: If you were writing a console application, you might just use Console.WriteLine to provide responses to the user as to the progress and eventual outcome of the command. We can’t use Console.WriteLine within a web application, so I’ll need to find another way to provide feedback to the user. Preferably this approach would allow me to use the same handler classes from both a Console application and a web application, so some kind of strategy pattern will likely emerge from this effort. Submitting files: Often an internal tool needs to support doing some kind of operation in bulk, and the easiest way to submit the data needed to support the bulk operation is in a file. Getting the file uploaded and available to the CLAP handler classes will take a little bit of effort. Mimicking the console experience: This isn’t really a requirement so much as a “nice to have”. To start out, the command-line interface in the web application will probably be a single ‘textarea’ control with a button to submit the contents to a handler that will pass it along to CLAP to be parsed and run. I think it would be interesting to use some javascript and CSS trickery to change that page into something with more of a “shell” interface look and feel. I’ll be blogging more about this effort in the future and will include some code snippets (or maybe even a full blown example app) as I progress. I also think that I’ll probably end up either submitting some pull requests to the CLAP project or possibly forking/wrapping it into a more web-friendly package and open sourcing that.

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  • SharePoint, HTTP Modules, and Page Validation

    - by Damon Armstrong
    Sometimes I really believe that SharePoint actively thwarts my attempts to get it to do what I want.  First you look at something and say, wow, that should work.  Then you realize it doesn’t.  Then you have an epiphany and see a workaround.  And when you almost have that work around working… well then SharePoint says no again.  Then it’s off on another whirl-wind adventure to find a work around for the workaround.  I had one of those issues today, but I think I finally got past the last roadblock. So, I was writing an HTTP module as a workaround for another problem.  Everything looked like it was working great because I had been slowly adding code into the HTTP module bit by bit in a prototyping effort.  Finally I put in the last bit of code in place… and I started to get an error: “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” This is not an uncommon error – it normally occurs when you are updating an item on a GET request and you have not marked the web containing the item with AllowUnsafeUpdates.  One issue, however, is that I wasn’t updating anything in my code.  I was, however, getting an SPWeb object so I decided to set the AllowUnsafeUpdates property on it to true for good measure. Once that was in place, I ran it again… “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” WTF?!?!  I really expected that setting the AllowUnsafeUpdates property on the SPWeb would fix the issue, but clearly that was not the case.  I have had occasion to disassemble some SharePoint code with .NET Reflector in the past, and one of the things SharePoint abuses a bit more than it should is the HttpContext.  One way to avoid this abuse is to clear out the HttpContext while your code runs and then set it back once you are done.  I tried this next, and everything worked out just like I had expected.  So, if you are building an HTTP Module for SharePoint and some code that you are running ends up giving you a security validation error, remember to try running that code with AllowUnsafeUpdates turned on and try running the code with the HttpContext nulled out (just remember to set it back after your code runs or else you’ll really jack things up).

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  • Book Review: Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett

    - by Sam Abraham
    In the next few lines, I will be providing a brief review of Wrox’s Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett. Design patterns have been a hot topic for many years as developers looked to do more with less, re-use as much code as possible by creating common libraries, as well as make their code easier to understand, extend and collaborate on. Scott Millett’s book covered classic and emerging patterns in a practical presentation that demonstrated with thorough examples how to put each pattern to use in the context of multi-tiered ASP.NET applications. The author’s unique approach and content earned him much kudos in the foreword by Scott Hanselman as well as online reviews. The book has 14 chapters of which 5 are dedicated to a comprehensive case study. Patterns covered therein include S.O.L.I.D, Gang of Four (GoF) as well as Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Applications. Many thanks to the Wiley/Wrox User Group Program for their support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group. Best regards, --Sam You can access my reviews of books I recently read: Professional WCF 4.0 Inside Windows Communication Foundation Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008 series

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  • Testing loses its effectiveness if all programmers don't use them

    - by Jeff O
    Let's assume you are convinced that the extra time spent unit testing has merit and improves production. Does that still hold up when everyone working on the same code doesn't use them? This question makes me wonder if fixing tests that everyone doesn't use is a waste of time. If you correct a test so the new code will pass, you're assuming the new code is correct. The person updating the test better have a firm understanding of the reasoning behind the code change and decide if the test or the new code needs to be fixed. This much inconsistency in a team when it comes to testing is probably an indication of other problems as well. There is a certain amount of risk involved that someone else on the team will alter code that is covered by testing. Is this the point where testing becomes counter-productive?

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  • Multiple vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox

    - by chandan
    CVE DescriptionCVSSv2 Base ScoreComponentProduct and Resolution CVE-2011-2372 Permissions, Privileges, and Access Controls vulnerability 3.5 Firefox web browser Solaris 11 11/11 SRU 3 Solaris 10 Contact Support CVE-2011-2995 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 10.0 CVE-2011-2997 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 10.0 CVE-2011-3000 Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability 4.3 CVE-2011-3001 Permissions, Privileges, and Access Controls vulnerability 4.3 CVE-2011-3002 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 9.3 CVE-2011-3003 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 10.0 CVE-2011-3004 Improper Input Validation vulnerability 4.3 CVE-2011-3005 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 9.3 CVE-2011-3232 Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability 9.3 CVE-2011-3648 Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability 4.3 CVE-2011-3650 Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer vulnerability 9.3 CVE-2011-3651 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 10.0 CVE-2011-3652 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 10.0 CVE-2011-3654 Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability 10.0 CVE-2011-3655 Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability 9.3 This notification describes vulnerabilities fixed in third-party components that are included in Sun's product distribution.Information about vulnerabilities affecting Oracle Sun products can be found on Oracle Critical Patch Updates and Security Alerts page.

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  • How to credit other authors in an open source project

    - by erik
    I have a pet project that I am planning to release as open source at some point in the not-too-distant future. A couple of the files use or are mostly code that was taken from a project released under the New BSD License. While I have changed it to fit my needs and added some small stuff, the algorithm and the functionality is basically exactly the same. I want to make sure that the author of the code gets credit and that the license is not broken, but I also want to make the reader aware that this is not the code as it was orignally released. How should I approach this? Should I isolate the code as much as possible and just retain the original license? Maybe put all the files that contain foreign code in their own folder and add a readme explaining what has been added/removed? There must have been tons of projects using other open source code. What is the standard approach to this?

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  • No Apologies

    I think the hardest part of writing a book, is having to accept the negative reviews on Amazon. I expect my latest book, Building Websites with DotNetNuke 5, to get about 2 stars due to the negative reviews I am expecting. Now, this book has a lot of things to offer. Ian Lackey wrote most of the book and it covers the latest version of DotNetNuke 5, inside and out. I wrote the module development chapters that cover: Creating modules using Silverlight Creating modules using Linq to SQL ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • how to write good programming logic?

    - by user106616
    recently I got job as a java developer, and now I have assigned project too. I want to know what is a good logic? when I check in the code my team lead is saying that its a good code. But when it comes to my project manager he is saying that its a bad code. And he is changing my code, after his changes if I see his code its really very very good and even simple. can you please tell me how to develop the good program, good logic? what is the best way to structure a problem in terms of code?

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  • Unit testing - getting started

    - by higgenkreuz
    I am just getting started with unit testing but I am not sure if I really understand the point of it all. I read tutorials and books on it all, but I just have two quick questions: I thought the purpose of unit testing is to test code we actually wrote. However, to me it seems that in order to just be able to run the test, we have to alter the original code, at which point we are not really testing the code we wrote but rather the code we wrote for testing. Most of our codes rely on external sources. Upon refactoring our code however, even it would break the original code, our tests still would run just fine, since the external sources are just muck-ups inside our test cases. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of unit testing? Sorry if I sound dumb here, but I thought someone could enlighten me a bit. Thanks in advance.

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  • Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

    - by Jeff
    (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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  • Architecture for subscription based application

    - by John
    This is about the architecture of my application I think. I have a Rails application where companies can administrate all things related to clients. Companies can buy a subscription and their users can access the application online. Hopefully I will get multiple companies subscribing to my appplication/service. Thing is, what should I do with my code and database? Seperate app code base and database per company One app code base but seperate database per company One app code base and one database The decision I am to make involves security (e.g. user from company X should not see any data from company Y) performance (let's suppose it becomes successful, it should have a good performance) and scalability (again, if successful, it should have a good performance but also easy for me to handle all the companies, code changes, etc) For sake of maintainability, I tend to opt for the one code base. For the database I really don't know at this moment. So what do you think is the best option?

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  • Efficient inline templates and C++

    - by Darryl Gove
    I've talked before about calling inline templates from C++, I've also talked about calling inline templates efficiently. This time I want to talk about efficiently calling inline templates from C++. The obvious starting point is that I need to declare the inline templates as being extern "C": extern "C" { int mytemplate(int); } This enables us to call it, but the call may not be very efficient because the compiler will treat it as a function call, and may produce suboptimal code based on that premise. So we need to add the no_side_effect pragma: extern "C" { int mytemplate(int); #pragma no_side_effect(mytemplate) } However, this may still not produce optimal code. We've discussed how the no_side_effect pragma cannot be combined with exceptions, well we know that the code cannot produce exceptions, but the compiler doesn't know that. If we tell the compiler that information it may be able to produce even better code. We can do this by adding the "throw()" keyword to the template declaration: extern "C" { int mytemplate(int) throw(); #pragma no_side_effect(mytemplate) } The following is an example of how these changes might improve performance. We can take our previous example code and migrate it to C++, adding the use of a try...catch construct: #include <iostream extern "C" { int lzd(int); #pragma no_side_effect(lzd) } int a; int c=0; class myclass { int routine(); }; int myclass::routine() { try { for(a=0; a<1000; a++) { c=lzd(c); } } catch(...) { std::cout << "Something happened" << std::endl; } return 0; } Compiling this produces a slightly suboptimal code sequence in the hot loop: $ CC -O -xtarget=T4 -S t.cpp t.il ... /* 0x0014 23 */ lzd %o0,%o0 /* 0x0018 21 */ add %l6,1,%l6 /* 0x001c */ cmp %l6,1000 /* 0x0020 */ bl,pt %icc,.L77000033 /* 0x0024 23 */ st %o0,[%l7] There's a store in the delay slot of the branch, so we're repeatedly storing data back to memory. If we change the function declaration to include "throw()", we get better code: $ CC -O -xtarget=T4 -S t.cpp t.il ... /* 0x0014 21 */ add %i1,1,%i1 /* 0x0018 23 */ lzd %o0,%o0 /* 0x001c 21 */ cmp %i1,999 /* 0x0020 */ ble,pt %icc,.L77000019 /* 0x0024 */ nop The store has gone, but the code is still suboptimal - there's a nop in the delay slot rather than useful work. However, it's good enough for this example. The point I'm making is that the compiler produces the better code with both the "throw()" and the no side effect pragma.

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  • Should I put an app I wrote on my résumé even if it has low ratings?

    - by charliehorse55
    Last summer I wrote an iPhone app for the Toronto Film Festival. The development was pretty rushed, and the design goals were changed multiple times. In particular, the central film list view controller was redesigned three times in the week before launch. I forgot to update one of my functions to match the changed design, and the app shipped with a serious bug. While the app was fairly popular, this bug crippled the app and it got a lot of poor reviews. I fixed the bug as soon as I got a crash report, but it got stuck in the iTunes review process for the duration of the film festival. Should I put this app on my résumé? The app has poor ratings and most of the reviews mention crashes, but it's also the only work experience I have. Additionally, how should I approach this topic in an interview? Here is the iTunes link for the app: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/official-tiff/id550151899?mt=8

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  • A Knights Tale

    - by Phil Factor
    There are so many lessons to be learned from the story of Knight Capital losing nearly half a billion dollars as a result of a deployment gone wrong. The Knight Capital Group (KCG N) was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. According to the recent order (File No.3.15570) against Knight Capital by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission?, Knight had, for many years used some software which broke up incoming “parent” orders into smaller “child” orders that were then transmitted to various exchanges or trading venues for execution. A tracking ‘cumulative quantity’ function counted the number of ‘child’ orders and stopped the process once the total of child orders matched the ‘parent’ and so the parent order had been completed. Back in the mists of time, some code had been added to it  which was excuted if a particular flag was set. It was called ‘power peg’ and seems to have had a similar design and purpose, but, one guesses, would have shared the same tracking function. This code had been abandoned in 2003, but never deleted. In 2005, The tracking function was moved to an earlier point in the main process. It would seem from the account that, from that point, had that flag ever been set, the old ‘Power Peg’ would have been executed like Godzilla bursting from the ice, making child orders without limit without any tracking function. It wasn’t, presumably because the software that set the flag was removed. In 2012, nearly a decade after ‘Power Peg’ was abandoned, Knight prepared a new module to their software to cope with the imminent Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) for the New York Stock Exchange. By this time, the flag had remained unused and someone made the fateful decision to reuse it, and replace the old ‘power peg’ code with this new RLP code. Had the two actions been done together in a single automated deployment, and the new deployment tested, all would have been well. It wasn’t. To quote… “Beginning on July 27, 2012, Knight deployed the new RLP code in SMARS in stages by placing it on a limited number of servers in SMARS on successive days. During the deployment of the new code, however, one of Knight’s technicians did not copy the new code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers. Knight did not have a second technician review this deployment and no one at Knight realized that the Power Peg code had not been removed from the eighth server, nor the new RLP code added. Knight had no written procedures that required such a review.” (para 15) “On August 1, Knight received orders from broker-dealers whose customers were eligible to participate in the RLP. The seven servers that received the new code processed these orders correctly. However, orders sent with the repurposed flag to the eighth server triggered the defective Power Peg code still present on that server. As a result, this server began sending child orders to certain trading centers for execution. Because the cumulative quantity function had been moved, this server continuously sent child orders, in rapid sequence, for each incoming parent order without regard to the number of share executions Knight had already received from trading centers. Although one part of Knight’s order handling system recognized that the parent orders had been filled, this information was not communicated to SMARS.” (para 16) SMARS routed millions of orders into the market over a 45-minute period, and obtained over 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares. By the time that Knight stopped sending the orders, Knight had assumed a net long position in 80 stocks of approximately $3.5 billion and a net short position in 74 stocks of approximately $3.15 billion. Knight’s shares dropped more than 20% after traders saw extreme volume spikes in a number of stocks, including preferred shares of Wells Fargo (JWF) and semiconductor company Spansion (CODE). Both stocks, which see roughly 100,000 trade per day, had changed hands more than 4 million times by late morning. Ultimately, Knight lost over $460 million from this wild 45 minutes of trading. Obviously, I’m interested in all this because, at one time, I used to write trading systems for the City of London. Obviously, the US SEC is in a far better position than any of us to work out the failings of Knight’s IT department, and the report makes for painful reading. I can’t help observing, though, that even with the breathtaking mistakes all along the way, that a robust automated deployment process that was ‘all-or-nothing’, and tested from soup to nuts would have prevented the disaster. The report reads like a Greek Tragedy. All the way along one wants to shout ‘No! not that way!’ and ‘Aargh! Don’t do it!’. As the tragedy unfolds, the audience weeps for the players, trapped by a cruel fate. All application development and deployment requires defense in depth. All IT goes wrong occasionally, but if there is a culture of defensive programming throughout, the consequences are usually containable. For financial systems, these defenses are required by statute, and ignored only by the foolish. Knight’s mistakes weren’t made by just one hapless sysadmin, but were progressive errors by an  IT culture spanning at least ten years.  One can spell these out, but I think they’re obvious. One can only hope that the industry studies what happened in detail, learns from the mistakes, and draws the right conclusions.

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