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• Silverlight Cream for May 27, 2010 -- #871

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Phil Middlemiss, Max Paulousky, Jeff Wilcox, David Anson, René Schulte, Xianzhong Zhu, Jeff Handley, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, and Marlon Grech. Shoutouts: SilverLaw has a great demo at the Expression Gallery, and we're all going to look forward to the blog post explaining it: Flexible Surface Effect SilverLaw> has another use for the above in this text morphing Effect: Morphing Text Effect Matthias Shapiro contributed a chapter for a book on Visualization and it's available as a free download: Free Chapter From Beautiful Visualization Andy Beaulieu has a demo up as almost a spoiler for a future Coding4Fun app... and how cool is this: Shuffleboard: A Windows Phone 7 Sample Game From SilverlightCream.com: Separating Content and Presentation with the ContentControl Phil Middlemiss' latest is out on SilverlightShow and is all about the ContentControl and separating layout and content ... demo project source included Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Silverlight Applications. Part 1 Max Paulousky has part one of a long series he's starting on a demo project to explain a bunch of MEF, MVVM, and WCF RIA concepts. This first one contains the overview and also discusses SEO. There is a link to the app and material in the post if you read Russian :) Updated Silverlight Unit Test Framework bits for Windows Phone and Silverlight 3 Jeff Wilcox has available updated Unit Test bits for Silverlight 3 -- read that as WP7... read the rest of the information on his post. Easily animate orientation changes for any Windows Phone application with this handy source code David Anson has some code up that you're going to want if you're programming WP7 ... just watch the video ... you'll be downloading the code just like I did :) SilverShader – Introduction to Silverlight and WPF Pixel Shaders René Schulte has a post up at Coding4Fun about PixelShaders... how to write them and an application that uses them... this is a great long tutorial... a must read. Developing Freecell Game Using Silverlight 3 Part 2 Xianzhong Zhu has part 2 of his FreeCell game development posted ... lots of detailed descriptions and code, plus all the code of course! Async Validation with RIA Services Jeff Handley has a post up that is sort of a follow-on to a year-old post on async validation with RIA services and DataForm and how it's all much easier now in SL4. Learning Blend with .toolbox (Silverlight TV #29) John Papa and Arturo Toledo discuss .toolbox in Silverlight TV #29 -- have you made yourself an avatar yet? ... well go get on-board with this great learning tool! Silverlight Out of Browser Dynamic Modules in Offline Mode OOB isn't difficult, dynamic modules can become a bit more, but what if you're OOB... ok what if you're OOB and offline? ... Jeremy Likness has a possible solution for this with an OfflineCatalog. MEFedMVVM v1.0 Explained Marlon Grech has a great into to MEFedMVVM in this post. If you're trying to get your head around MEF and MVVM in either WPF or Silverlight, here's a good starting point. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Five Key Trends in Enterprise 2.0 for 2011

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  We recently sat down with Andy MacMillan, an industry veteran and vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle, to get his take on the year ahead in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). He offered us his five predictions about the ways he believes E2.0 technologies will transform business in 2011. 1. Forward-thinking organizations will achieve an unprecedented level of organizational awareness. Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. But this year we are anticipating that organizations will go to the next step and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver rich contextual "activity streams." Activity streams are a new way for enterprise users to get relevant information as quickly as it happens, by navigating to that information in context directly from their portal. We don't mean syndicating social activities limited to a single application. Instead, we believe back-office systems will be combined with social media tools to drive how users make informed business decisions in brand new ways. For example, an account manager might log into the company portal and automatically receive notification that colleagues are closing business around a certain product in his market segment. With a single click, he can reach out instantly to these colleagues via social media and learn from their successes to drive new business opportunities in his own area. 2. Online customer engagement will become a high priority for CMOs. A growing number of chief marketing officers (CMOs) have created a new direct report called "head of online"--a senior marketing executive responsible for all engagements with customers and prospects via the Web, mobile, and social media. This new field has been dubbed "Web experience management" or "online customer engagement" by firms and analyst organizations. It is likely to rapidly increase demand for a host of new business objectives and metrics from Web content management solutions. As companies interface with customers more and more over the Web, Web experience management solutions will help deliver more targeted interactions to ensure increased customer loyalty while meeting sales and business objectives. 3. Real composite applications will be widely adopted. We expect organizations to move from the concept of a single "uber-portal" that encompasses all the necessary features to a more modular, component-based concept for composite applications. This approach is now possible as IT and power users are empowered to assemble new, purpose-built composite applications quickly from existing components. 4. Records management will drive ECM consolidation. We continue to see a significant shift in the approach to records management. Several years ago initiatives were focused on overlaying records management across a set of electronic repositories and physical storage locations. We believe federated records management will continue, but we also expect to see records management driving conversations around single-platform content management consolidation. 5. Organizations will demand ECM at extreme scale. We have already seen a trend within IT organizations to provide a common, highly scalable infrastructure to consolidate and support content and information needs. But as data sizes grow exponentially, ECM at an extreme scale is likely to spread at unprecedented speeds this year. This makes sense as regulations and transparency requirements rise. The model in which ECM and lightweight CMS systems provide basic content services such as check-in, update, delete, and search has converged around a set of industry best practices and has even been coded into new industry standards such as content management interoperability services. As these services converge and the demand for them accelerates, organizations are beginning to rationalize investments into a single, highly scalable infrastructure. Is your organization ready for Enterprise 2.0 in 2011? Learn more.

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• WCF Manual SOAP POST using HttpWebRequest over https with Usertoken

  - by VonBlender

  Hi, I'm writing a client that calls a number of WCF webservices (written externallyt to my company) that are very similar in structure. The design I was hoping to use is to manually build the SOAP message from XML chunks that are stored in a database and then processed through a generic web service handler class. I have access to the WSDL's for each webservice and example working XML. The design approach is such that we can easily add to the message dynamically, hence the reason for not using the auto generated proxy classes I am basically at the last part now with the entire SOAP message constructed but am getting a SOAP fault security error returned. I have used fiddler to compare the message I'm sending with one that is sent using the normal (far simpler...) WCF generated proxy classes and can't see any difference apart from the id attribute of the Usertoken element in the SOAP header. This is where my lack of experience in this area isn't helping. I think this is because the id is generated automatically (presumably because we're using https). My question is how do I generate this programatically? I have searched for hours online but the majority of solutions are either using the proxy classes or not over https. I have briefly looked at WCE but aware this is replaced by WCF now so don't want to waste time looking into this if it's not the solution. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I can post some code examples when I'm back in work if it will help but the method I'm using is very straightforward and only using XElements and such like at the moment (as we're using linq to sql). thanks, Andy

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• Quartz.NET trigger not firing

  - by billy_bob_the

  i am using Quartz.NET in my ASP.NET web application. i put the following code in a button click handler to make sure that it executes (for testing purposes): Quartz.ISchedulerFactory factory = new Quartz.Impl.StdSchedulerFactory(); Quartz.IScheduler scheduler = factory.GetScheduler(); Quartz.JobDetail job = new Quartz.JobDetail("job", null, typeof(BackupJob)); Quartz.Trigger trigger = Quartz.TriggerUtils.MakeDailyTrigger(8, 30); // i edit this each time before compilation (for testing purposes) trigger.StartTimeUtc = Quartz.TriggerUtils.GetEvenSecondDate(DateTime.UtcNow); trigger.Name = "trigger"; scheduler.ScheduleJob(job, trigger); scheduler.Start(); here's "BackupJob": public class BackupJob : IJob { public BackupJob() { } public void Execute(JobExecutionContext context) { NSG.BackupJobStart(); } } my question: why is "BackupJobStart()" not firing? i've used similar code before and it worked fine. EDIT: @Andy White, i would have it in Application_Start in Global.asax. this doesn't work which is why i moved it to a button click handler to narrow down the problem.

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• incorporate simple vimeo video request with jquery carousel

  - by Andrew Welch

  Hi, I did a tutorial for a jquery carousel that scrolls a ul. At the moment the ul is hardcoded, but I want to use a simple call to vimeo api to bring in the videos for a certain user into the carousel. I have uploaded my code here: http://www.welchcreative.co.uk/wp-content/infinitecarouselvimeo.zip My problem is that I don't know where I should put the code for the simple vimeo call, because at the moment, I think that the problem is that the vimeo videos load after the jquery stuff because it uses window.onload rather than document ready and I can't seem to work out how to put the two and two together. Ideally, 1. the code loads the vimeo videos first and puts them in a ul wiht the correct classes. 2. the carousel code then acts on the list above. in that order. I hope that isn't too vague. It's a pretty simple idea. I'm new to javascript and jquery. Thanks Andy

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• Filtering documents against a dictionary key in MongoDB

  - by Thomas

  I have a collection of articles in MongoDB that has the following structure: { 'category': 'Legislature', 'updated': datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 19, 15, 32, 22, 107000), 'byline': None, 'tags': { 'party': ['Peter Hoekstra', 'Virg Bernero', 'Alma Smith', 'Mike Bouchard', 'Tom George', 'Rick Snyder'], 'geography': ['Michigan', 'United States', 'North America'] }, 'headline': '2 Mich. gubernatorial candidates speak to students', 'text': [ 'BEVERLY HILLS, Mich. (AP) \u2014 Two Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates found common ground while speaking to private school students in suburban Detroit', "Democratic House Speaker state Rep. Andy Dillon and Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra said Friday a more business-friendly government can help reduce Michigan's nation-leading unemployment rate.", "The candidates were invited to Detroit Country Day Upper School in Beverly Hills to offer ideas for Michigan's future.", 'Besides Dillon, the Democratic field includes Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero and state Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith. Other Republicans running are Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, Attorney General Mike Cox, state Sen. Tom George and Ann Arbor business leader Rick Snyder.', 'Former Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz is considering running as an independent.' ], 'dateline': 'BEVERLY HILLS, Mich.', 'published': datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 19, 8, 0, 31), 'keywords': "Governor's Race", '_id': ObjectId('4ba39721e0e16cb25fadbb40'), 'article_id': 'urn:publicid:ap.org:0611e36fb084458aa620c0187999db7e', 'slug': "BC-MI--Governor's Race,2nd Ld-Writethr" } If I wanted to write a query that looked for all articles that had at least 1 geography tag, how would I do that? I have tried writing db.articles.find( {'tags': 'geography'} ), but that doesn't appear to work. I've also thought about changing the search parameter to 'tags.geography', but am having a devil of a time figuring out what the search predicate would be.

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• How to write to a varchar(max) column using ODBC

  - by andyjohnson

  Summary: I'm trying to write a text string to a column of type varchar(max) using ODBC and SQL Server 2005. It fails if the length of the string is greater than 8000. Help! I have some C++ code that uses ODBC (SQL Native Client) to write a text string to a table. If I change the column from, say, varchar(100) to varchar(max) and try to write a string with length greater than 8000, the write fails with the following error [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]String data, right truncation So, can anyone advise me on if this can be done, and how? Some example (not production) code that shows what I'm trying to do: SQLHENV hEnv = NULL; SQLRETURN iError = SQLAllocEnv(&hEnv); HDBC hDbc = NULL; SQLAllocConnect(hEnv, &hDbc); const char* pszConnStr = "Driver={SQL Server};Server=127.0.0.1;Database=MyTestDB"; UCHAR szConnectOut[SQL_MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH]; SWORD iConnectOutLen = 0; iError = SQLDriverConnect(hDbc, NULL, (unsigned char*)pszConnStr, SQL_NTS, szConnectOut, (SQL_MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH-1), &iConnectOutLen, SQL_DRIVER_COMPLETE); HSTMT hStmt = NULL; iError = SQLAllocStmt(hDbc, &hStmt); const char* pszSQL = "INSERT INTO MyTestTable (LongStr) VALUES (?)"; iError = SQLPrepare(hStmt, (SQLCHAR*)pszSQL, SQL_NTS); char* pszBigString = AllocBigString(8001); iError = SQLSetParam(hStmt, 1, SQL_C_CHAR, SQL_VARCHAR, 0, 0, (SQLPOINTER)pszBigString, NULL); iError = SQLExecute(hStmt); // Returns SQL_ERROR if pszBigString len > 8000 The table MyTestTable contains a single colum defined as varchar(max). The function AllocBigString (not shown) creates a string of arbitrary length. I understand that previous versions of SQL Server had an 8000 character limit to varchars, but not why is this happening in SQL 2005? Thanks, Andy

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• Toggle Blind Effect

  - by flipflopmedia

  Is there a way to alter this script to be used as the blind effect. // Andy Langton's show/hide/mini-accordion - updated 23/11/2009 // Latest version @ http://andylangton.co.uk/jquery-show-hide // this tells jquery to run the function below once the DOM is ready $(document).ready(function() { // choose text for the show/hide link - can contain HTML (e.g. an image) var showText=''; var hideText=''; // initialise the visibility check var is_visible = false; // append show/hide links to the element directly preceding the element with a class of "toggle" $('.toggle').prev().append(' '+showText+''); // hide all of the elements with a class of 'toggle' $('.toggle').hide(); // capture clicks on the toggle links $('a.toggleLink').click(function() { // switch visibility is_visible = !is_visible; // toggle the display - uncomment the next line for a basic "accordion" style //$('.toggle').hide();$('a.toggleLink').html(showText); $(this).parent().next('.toggle').toggle('slow'); // return false so any link destination is not followed return false; }); }); FYI- Where it says: var showText=''; var hideText=''; It was originally: var showText='Show'; var hideText='Hide'; I deleted the Show/Hide Text because I am applying the link to different areas of text. I like the Blind effect, vs. this Toggle effect, and need to know how to apply it, if possible. I cannot find a basic Blind effect script that allows the use of applying the link to ANY text, vs. a button or static text. Thanks! Hope you can help! Tracy

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• Best terminal environment for Cygwin/Windows?

  - by Anders Sandvig

  Today I run Cygwin with rxvt using the following startup line: rxvt -bg black -sl 8192 -fg white -sr -g 150x56 -fn "Fixedsys" -e /usr/bin/bash --login -i This gives me a resizeable native Windows window which is much better than the standard "DOS box" the default cygwin.bat provides. However, the current configuration does have a couple of issues: I am not able to enter non-ASCII characters into the terminal window (i.e. æ, ø, å and Æ, Ø, Å, which I use semi-frequently. In fact, the terminal will not even accept them when I paste them into the window. If I paste a string like "bølle" (Norwegian for "bulley"), all I get is "blle". I am not able to render UTF-8 character, they only show as ?, even if they are supported by the font (i.e. when rendering the same characters in ISO-8859-1 they show just fine.). I am running English Windows Vista with locale and keyboard layout set to Norwegian (ISO-8859-1 character set?), but I've had the exact same issue on Windows 2000 and XP. Anyone knows how to fix this (i.e. a better way to configure rxvt)? Apart from the issues mentioned above, I'm very happy with rxvt, so if I find a way to resolve them I'd like to continue using it. However, if the issues are not (easily) solvable, are the any other good terminal solutions for Cygwin? Update The solution provided by Andy and Mattias (editing the .inputrc file) did solve the input problem, but output rendering is still an issue. Output is fine when I render in ISO-8859-1, but when using UTF-8 I only get ? for non-ASCII characters. This behavior is consistent between rxvt, urxvt (under Cygwin XFree X Server), mintty and PuttyCyg. Is there a similar configuration file where output encoding can be set (i.e. the equivalent of setting output locale on a Linux system)?

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• Android Video Layout and backbutton to activity

  - by Marcjc

  I have an application where you can click on a button, this takes you to a new activity with four new buttons, listen, bio, ringtone, and watch. My watch button kicks off the following code: Button cmd_watchme = (Button)this.findViewById(R.id.watch); cmd_watchme.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View view) { setContentView(R.layout.tvvideo); VideoView video=(VideoView)findViewById(R.id.VideoView); MediaController mediaController = new MediaController(andy.this); mediaController.setAnchorView(video); video.setMediaController(mediaController); video.setVideoURI(videopath); video.start(); } }); After the video is displayed I am trying to get the backbutton on the phone itself to take the user back to the four button selection activity, listen, bio, ringtone, and watch. Question is, how do i do this? I was figuring if there was a way to change the ContentView after the video is displayed back to the main one for the four button page but could not figure it out. When I press the backbutton on the device, it takes me two levels up to the main selection activity not the four button activity. I hope this was somewhat clear. Thanks for any help.

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• Twitter api - no more than 150 requests per hour....

  - by RenegadeAndy

  Hi. I am writing a twitter app using jtwitter - and its running inside a server inside my work. Anyway - whenever i run it from work it returns the error below and I am only making a couple requests per hour: HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request {"request":"/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?count=6&id=cicsdemo&","error":"Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 150 requests per hour."} ] 2010-06-03 18:44:49 zero.timer.TimerTask::run Thread-3 SEVERE [ CWPZA3100E: Exception during processing for timer task, "twitterTimer". Exception: java.lang.ClassCastException: winterwell.jtwitter.Twitter$Status incompatible with java.lang.String ] I run the same code from home - its fine. So obviously at some point twitter thinks our work is all coming from one direct IP - which is why its hitting a limit which it shouldnt. Do I have any choice or workaround - can i make the limit be counted from my direct machine IP - or to my account instead of IP? Can i use a proxy? Has any body else had this problem and solved it?! Before anyone asks the APP must live inside my work - it cannot run anywhere else! Cheers, Andy

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• Can not make the settings from the sidebar gadget get applied

  - by Daniel

  Hey guys, OK, I am not an expert at Sidebar Gadgets, but I have this project I will have to make for school. Have tried to solve it on my own but I got really stuck. I will have to use the Cirip API (Cirip.ro being a kind of Twitter), and for the use of the API I have to input the username. I do so by means of the Settings, but when closing the settings there is no effect. Here is the code, but it's pretty messy. I am not a web programmer so javascript/html is new to me. http://www.box.net/shared/7yogevhzrr Thank you for your remark, Andy. From gadget.js function setUserName(userNameSet){ userName = userNameSet; } function getUserName(){ return userName; } function settingsClosed(event) { if(event.closeAction == event.Action.commit) { var user = System.Gadget.Settings.read("userName"); if(user != "") { setUserName(user); } } From settings.js document.onreadystatechange = function DoInit() { if(document.readyState=="complete") { var user = System.Gadget.Settings.read("userName"); if(user != "") { userBox.value = user; } } } // -------------------------------------------------------------------- // Handle the Settings dialog closed event. // event = System.Gadget.Settings.ClosingEvent argument. // -------------------------------------------------------------------- System.Gadget.onSettingsClosing = function(event) { if (event.closeAction == event.Action.commit) { var user = userBox.value; if(user != "") { System.Gadget.Settings.write("userName", user); } event.cancel = false; } }

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• Access class instance "name" dynamically in Python

  - by user328317

  In plain english: I am creating class instances dynamically in a for loop, the class then defines a few attributes for the instance. I need to later be able to look up those values in another for loop. Sample code: class A: def init(self, name, attr): self.name=name self.attr=attr names=("a1", "a2", "a3") x=10 for name in names: name=A(name, x) x += 1 ... ... ... for name in names: print name.attr How can I create an identifier for these instances so they can be accessed later on by "name"? I've figured a way to get this by associating "name" with the memory location: class A: instances=[] names=[] def init(self, name, attr): self.name=name self.attr=attr A.instances.append(self) A.names.append(name) names=("a1", "a2", "a3") x=10 for name in names: name=A(name, x) x += 1 ... ... ... for name in names: index=A.names.index(name) print "name: " + name print "att: " + str(A.instances[index].att) This has had me scouring the web for 2 days now, and I have not been able to find an answer. Maybe I don't know how to ask the question properly, or maybe it can't be done (as many other posts seemed to be suggesting). Now this 2nd example works, and for now I will use it. I'm just thinking there has to be an easier way than creating your own makeshift dictionary of index numbers and I'm hoping I didn't waste 2 days looking for an answer that doesn't exist. Anyone have anything? Thanks in advance, Andy Update: A coworker just showed me what he thinks is the simplest way and that is to make an actual dictionary of class instances using the instance "name" as the key.

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• drawRect gets called on UIView subclass but not on UIViewController

  - by HotFudgeSunday

  My code is working so far but I had to create a Class for the UIView. This is a bit inconvenient because I need to interact with the ViewController too. BTW, I did try [self setNeedsDisplay] on the ViewDidLoad of the UIViewController subclass file but it didn't work. Here's the code, which works on UIView Subclass but doesn't get called on a UIViewController one: - (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect { UIColor *currentColor = [UIColor redColor]; CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext(); someNum = 1; CGContextBeginPath(context); CGContextMoveToPoint(context, 30, 40); [self addDotImageX:30 andY:40]; CGContextSetLineWidth(context, 2); CGContextSetStrokeColorWithColor(context, currentColor.CGColor); CGContextStrokePath(context); } Any ideas on what to try? BTW, this is a TabBar App. I know those can somehow block the calls to drawRect. The Tabs where created programatically, not through a Nib. Eg: NSMutableArray *listOfViewControllers = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; UIViewController *vc; vc = [[Education alloc] init]; vc.title = @"Education"; [listOfViewControllers addObject:vc]; vc.tabBarItem.image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"info.png"]; [vc release]; I would appreciate any ideas. I've been through the answers on this site related to setNeedsDisplay not calling drawRect and haven't found an answer for my particular case. Thanks.

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• OpenGL 3.3 different colours with fragment shader [solved]

  - by Andrew Seymour

  I'm an OpenGL newbie. I'm trying to colour 3 circles but only 3 white circles are appearing. n is 3 in this example. Each vertice has 5 points, 2 for position and 3 for color Here is where I think a problem may lie: glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexbuffer); glVertexAttribPointer( 0, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 5*sizeof(float), (void*)0 ); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer( 1, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 5*sizeof(float), (void*)(2*sizeof(float)) ); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, 20 * 3 * n, GL_UNSIGNED_INT, 0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); My shaders: #version 330 core in vec3 Color; out vec4 outColor; void main() { outColor = vec4(Color, 1.0); } #version 330 core layout(location = 0) in vec2 position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 color out vec3 Color void main(){ gl_Position = vec4(position, 0.0, 1.0); Color = color; } Thanks for taking a look Andy EDIT: layout(location = 1) in vec3 color out vec3 Color layout(location = 1) in vec3 color; out vec3 Color;

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• XNA Notes 009

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic! But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA team several of these very cool happenings while I had their ears). Time Critical XNA News: The XNA team wants you to know that Dream Build Play registration is now open! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/28/registration-now-open-for-dream-build-play-2011-challenge.aspx Join the XNA-UK create on March 24, 2011 at the Microsoft Tech Days Conference http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/27/join-the-xna-uk-crew-at-the-microsoft-tech-days-conference-on-24th-march-2011.aspx XNA Team: Shawn Hargreaves shares one of the coolest things that’s happened in the XNA community http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/03/02/xbox-indies-pivot-view.aspx Nick Gravelyn continues his unique marketing/work prioritization strategy as he tries to get to 5,000 Pixel Man users before he makes Pixel Man 2 (and he’s almost there!) http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: A lot of the XNA MVPs were at the Microsoft MVP Summit 2011. Due to NDAs, most things can’t be shared, but I’m sure if you’re curious you could ask them about the general vibe and feeling they got from the team and the future of XNA/XBLIG and more. Catalin Zima and team release the free WP7 game Chickens Can Dream http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/41174062923390976 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/chickens-can-dream-is-live/ Charles Humphrey (NemoKrad) posts his March talk source and PowerPoint http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/03/04/march-2011-talk-post-processing-framework.aspx XNA Developers: Michael B. McLaughlin posts about ANTS Memory Profile and creates a CheckMemoryAllocationGame sample (extremely useful if you’re looking to see how much memory some operation allocates!) http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/28/ants-memory-profiler-7.0-review.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/01/checkmemoryallocationgame-sample.aspx Andy Schatz (2009 IGF winner for Monaco) talking XNA at GDC 2011 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33313/GDC_2011_Andy_Schatz_Ill_Make_My_Last_Game_When_I_Die.php Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Clover: A Curious Tale by BinaryTweed is coming as a Deal of the Week during St. Patricks Day http://majornelson.com/archive/2011/03/03/comingsoontothexboxlivemarketplacemarchthird.aspx Ska Studios away at GDC but still very post happy as always http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/02/swamped-picture-pack/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/28/the-february-showcase/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/25/good-morning-gato-51-smelling-the-roses/ Just Press Start interviews Matthew Mikuszewski of Darkwind Media about Blocks Indie http://justpressstart.net/?p=516 Gamergeddon Xbox Indie Game Round Up - February 27th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/27/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-27th/ http://www.gamergeddon.com/category/xbox-360/indie-games/ GameMarx does a round up of all the Xbox Live Indie Game podcasts that are currently available http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/27/xbox-live-indie-game-podcasts.aspx GameMarx episode 11 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/26/ep-11-february-25-2011.aspx In perhaps what I feel is the most exciting news I’ve heard all week, Michael C. Neel (ViNull of GameMarx fame) re-launch XboxIndies.com! http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/03/01/the-relaunch-of-xboxindies-com.aspx http://xboxindies.com/ Armless Octopus shares a little of what they heard from Luke Schneider of Radiangames during his GDC 2011 talk http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/02/gdc-2011-luke-schneider-offers-insight-into-radiangames-success/ VVGindiecast Episode 1 with guests Derek Strickland(Mr_Deeke), Kris Steele(Kriswd40 from FunInfused Games) and Dave Voyles(From armlessoctopus.com) http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/25/vvgindiecast-xblig-podcast/ If you’re doing Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews get in touch with XboxIndies.com to get into their aggregated feed http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76931/467189.aspx#467189 B.U.T.T.O.N and Flotilla represented XNA very well at the Independent Games Festival (are there any more games entered that were created using XNA? Stand up and be heard!) http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2011.php?id=374 Armless Ocotopus interview at GDC 2011 with Soulcaster creator Ian Stocker http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/04/gdc-2011-interview-with-soulcaster-creator-ian-stocker/ MommysBestGames gets a nod in the DarkBasic newsletter where it features the Explosionade Editor (just do a search for Explosionade to get to the interesting bits!) http://www.thegamecreators.com/pages/newsletters/newsletter_issue_98.html You may be hearing the cries of FortressCraft (coming soon to XBLIG) being so wrong for stealing the idea from MineCraft. But did you know the the game MineCraft started from was an XNA game called Infiniminer? XNA is getting it’s fingers into EVERYTHING! http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Infiniminer XNA Development: TorqueX is NOT dead thanks to the tremendous efforts of the XNA Community working on the CEV (special thanks to @PinoEire for all his hard work on making that happen!) http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20878 http://torquecev.com/ Dave Henry has posted XNA 3.x adding platformer start kit to the network game state management on his new site http://twitter.com/#!/mort8088/status/43407715908853760 http://mort8088.com/2011/03/03/xna-3-x-adding-platformer-starter-kit-to-network-game-state-management/ Mark Bamford releases XNAViewer 4.0, great for running XNA games inside of a Windows Form (for building level editors, etc.) http://twitter.com/#!/xzodia04/status/43466830412660736 http://xnaviewer.codeplex.com/ Unit testing an XNA game with Resharper and NUnit http://smnbss.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/planetx-unit-testing-an-xna-game-with-resharper-and-nunit-wp7-xbox-xna/ XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures) http://ht.ly/1bxwUE Mike McLaughlin shares a link he stumbled across for those looking to understand vector and matrix math http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/42587074725036032 http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html DigitalRune Resources Pooling in XNA (Part 1) http://www.digitalrune.com/Support/Blog/tabid/719/EntryId/84/DigitalRune-Helper-Library-Resource-Pooling-in-XNA-Part-1.aspx JohnK “bobthecbuilder” released a new SunBurn Update that lowers the requirements for Windows Games http://twitter.com/#!/bobthecbuilder/status/43457306578522112 http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2011/03/03/sunburn-update-windows-redistributable.aspx Quick update on the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.4 development status http://indiefreaks.com/2011/03/04/quick-update-on-igf-v0-4-development/

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• March 21st Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET URL Routing in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that talks about the new URL routing features coming to Web Forms applications with ASP.NET 4.  Also check out my previous blog post on this topic. Control of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how it is now easy to control the client “id” value emitted by server controls with ASP.NET 4. Web Deployment Made Awesome: Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4.  Makes deploying web applications much, much easier. ASP.NET 4’s Browser Capabilities Support: Nice blog post by Stephen Walther that talks about the new browser definition capabilities support coming with ASP.NET 4. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to call and integrate Twitter from within your ASP.NET applications. Improving CSS with .LESS: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to optimize CSS using .LESS – a free, open source library. ASP.NET MVC Upgrading ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2: Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET team has a nice post that describes how to easily upgrade your ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.  He has an automated tool that makes this easy. Note that automated MVC upgrade support is also built-into VS 2010.  Use the tool in this blog post for updating existing MVC projects using VS 2008. Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2: Nice video talk by Brad Wilson of the ASP.NET MVC team.  In it he describes some of the more advanced features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and how to maximize your productivity with them. Dynamic Select Lists with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery: Michael Ceranski has a nice blog post that describes how to dynamically populate dropdownlists on the client using AJAX. AJAX Microsoft AJAX Minifier: We recently shipped an updated minifier utility that allows you to shrink/minify both JavaScript and CSS files – which can improve the performance of your web applications.  You can run this either manually as a command-line tool or now automatically integrate it using a Visual Studio build task.  You can download it for free here. Visual Studio VS 2010 Tip: Quickly Closing Documents: Nice blog post that describes some techniques for optimizing how windows are closed with the new VS 2010 IDE. Collpase to Definitions with Outlining: Nice tip from Zain on how to collapse your code editor to outline mode using Ctrl + M, Ctrl + O.  Also check out his post on copy/paste with outlining here. $299 VS 2010 Upgrade Offer for VS 2005/2008 Standard Users: Soma blogs about a nice VS 2010 upgrade offer you can take advantage of if you have VS 2005 or VS 2008 Standard editions.  For $299 you can upgrade to VS 2010 Professional edition. Dependency Graphics: Jason Zander (who runs the VS team) has a nice blog post that covers the new dependency graph support within VS 2010.  This makes it easier to visualize the dependencies within your application.  Also check out this video here. Layer Validation: Jason Zander has a nice blog post that talks about the new layer validation features in VS 2010.  This enables you to enforce cleaner layering within your projects and solutions.  VS 2010 Profiler Blog: The VS 2010 Profiler Team has their own blog and on it you can find a bunch of nice posts from the last few months that talk about a lot of the new features coming with VS 2010’s Profiler support.  Some really nice features coming. Silverlight Silverlight 4 Training Course: Nice free set of training courses from Microsoft that can help bring you up to speed on all of the new Silverlight 4 features and how to build applications with them.  Updated and current with the recently released Silverlight 4 RC build and tools. Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development: Nice blog post by Tim Heuer that summarizes how to get started building Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight.  Also check out my blog post from last week on how to build a Windows Phone 7 Twitter application using Silverlight. A Guide to What Has Changed with the Silverlight 4 RC: Nice summary post by Tim Heuer that describes all of the things that have changed between the Silverlight 4 Beta and the Silverlight 4 RC. Path Based Layout - Part 1 and Part 2: Christian Schormann has a nice blog post about a really cool new feature in Expression Blend 4 and Silverlight 4 called Path Layout. Also check out Andy Beaulieu’s blog post on this. Hope this helps, Scott

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• SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

  What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!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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• SQL SERVER – Parsing SSIS Catalog Messages – Notes from the Field #030

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Field series. SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) is one of the most key essential part of the entire Business Intelligence (BI) story. It is a platform for data integration and workflow applications. The tool may also be used to automate maintenance of SQL Server databases and updates to multidimensional cube data. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series I requested SSIS Expert Andy Leonard to discuss one of the most interesting concepts of SSIS Catalog Messages. There are plenty of interesting and useful information captured in the SSIS catalog and we will learn together how to explore the same. The SSIS Catalog captures a lot of cool information by default. Here’s a query I use to parse messages from the catalog.operation_messages table in the SSISDB database, where the logged messages are stored. This query is set up to parse a default message transmitted by the Lookup Transformation. It’s one of my favorite messages in the SSIS log because it gives me excellent information when I’m tuning SSIS data flows. The message reads similar to: Data Flow Task:Information: The Lookup processed 4485 rows in the cache. The processing time was 0.015 seconds. The cache used 1376895 bytes of memory. The query: USE SSISDB GO DECLARE @MessageSourceType INT = 60 DECLARE @StartOfIDString VARCHAR(100) = 'The Lookup processed ' DECLARE @ProcessingTimeString VARCHAR(100) = 'The processing time was ' DECLARE @CacheUsedString VARCHAR(100) = 'The cache used ' DECLARE @StartOfIDSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @StartOfIDString + '%' DECLARE @ProcessingTimeSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @ProcessingTimeString + '%' DECLARE @CacheUsedSearchString VARCHAR(100) = '%' + @CacheUsedString + '%' SELECT operation_id , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1))) AS LookupRowsCount , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1))) AS LookupProcessingTime , CASE WHEN (CONVERT(numeric(3,3),SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1))))) = 0 THEN 0 ELSE CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))) / CONVERT(numeric(3,3),SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@ProcessingTimeSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@ProcessingTimeString) + 1)))) END AS LookupRowsPerSecond , SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1))) AS LookupBytesUsed ,CASE WHEN (CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))))= 0 THEN 0 ELSE CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@CacheUsedSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@CacheUsedString) + 1)))) / CONVERT(bigint,SUBSTRING(MESSAGE, (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1), ((CHARINDEX(' ', MESSAGE, PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString,MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)) - (PATINDEX(@StartOfIDSearchString, MESSAGE) + LEN(@StartOfIDString) + 1)))) END AS LookupBytesPerRow FROM [catalog].[operation_messages] WHERE message_source_type = @MessageSourceType AND MESSAGE LIKE @StartOfIDSearchString GO Note that you have to set some parameter values: @MessageSourceType [int] – represents the message source type value from the following results: Value     Description 10           Entry APIs, such as T-SQL and CLR Stored procedures 20           External process used to run package (ISServerExec.exe) 30           Package-level objects 40           Control Flow tasks 50           Control Flow containers 60           Data Flow task 70           Custom execution message Note: Taken from Reza Rad’s (excellent!) helper.MessageSourceType table found here. @StartOfIDString [VarChar(100)] – use this to uniquely identify the message field value you wish to parse. In this case, the string ‘The Lookup processed ‘ identifies all the Lookup Transformation messages I desire to parse. @ProcessingTimeString [VarChar(100)] – this parameter is message-specific. I use this parameter to specifically search the message field value for the beginning of the Lookup Processing Time value. For this execution, I use the string ‘The processing time was ‘. @CacheUsedString [VarChar(100)] – this parameter is also message-specific. I use this parameter to specifically search the message field value for the beginning of the Lookup Cache  Used value. It returns the memory used, in bytes. For this execution, I use the string ‘The cache used ‘. The other parameters are built from variations of the parameters listed above. The query parses the values into text. The string values are converted to numeric values for ratio calculations; LookupRowsPerSecond and LookupBytesPerRow. Since ratios involve division, CASE statements check for denominators that equal 0. Here are the results in an SSMS grid: This is not the only way to retrieve this information. And much of the code lends itself to conversion to functions. If there is interest, I will share the functions in an upcoming post. If you want to get started with SSIS with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SSIS

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• XNA Notes 002

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Wildcards!

  - by Tim Dexter

  Yes, its been a while, Im sorry, mumble, mumble ... no excuses. Well other than its been, as my son would say 'hecka busy.' On a brighter note I see Kan has been posting some cool stuff in my absence, long may he continue! I received a question today asking about using a wildcard in a template, something like: <?if:INVOICE = 'MLP*'?> where * is the wildcard Well that particular try does not work but you can do it without building your own wildcard function. XSL, the underpinning language of the RTF templates, has some useful string functions - you can find them listed here. I used the starts-with function to achieve a simple wildcard scenario but the contains can be used in conjunction with some of the others to build something more sophisticated. Assume I have a a list of friends and the amounts of money they owe me ... Im very generous and my interest rates a pretty competitive :0) <ROWSET> <ROW> <NAME>Andy</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Andrew</NAME> <AMT>60</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Aaron</NAME> <AMT>50</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Alice</NAME> <AMT>40</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bob</NAME> <AMT>10</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bill</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> Now, listing my friends is easy enough <for-each:ROW> <NAME> <AMT> <end for-each> but lets say I just want to see all my friends beginning with 'A'. To do that I can use an XPATH expression to filter the data and tack it on to the for-each expression. This is more efficient that using an 'if' statement just inside the for-each. <?for-each:ROW[starts-with(NAME,'A')]?> will find me all the A's. The square braces denote the start of the XPATH expression. starts-with is the function Im calling and Im passing the value I want to check i.e. NAME and the string Im looking for. Just substitute in the characters you are looking for. You can of course use the function in a if statement too. <?if:starts-with(NAME,'A')?><?attribute@incontext:color;'red'?><?end if?> Notice I removed the square braces, this will highlight text red if the name begins with an 'A' You can even use the function to do conditional calculations: <?sum (AMT[starts-with(../NAME,'A')])?> Sum only the amounts where the name begins with an 'A' Notice the square braces are back, its a function we want to apply to the AMT field. Also notice that we need to use ../NAME. The AMT and NAME elements are at the same level in the tree, so when we are at the AMT level we need the ../ to go up a level to then come back down to test the NAME value. I have built out the above functions in a sample template here. Huge prizes for the first person to come up with a 'true' wildcard solution i.e. if NAME like '*im*exter* demand cash now!

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• VB Myth - Case Insensitivity is Awesome!

  - by Damon

  I was reading Andy Brown's article 10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better than C# and the first claim is that VB is superior because of case insensitivity.  I think the reasons he outlines are basically as follows: Your fingers get tired finding the shift key (e.g. typing PascalCase and camelCase members) You are much more likely to make mistakes while typing names When you accidentally leave caps lock on, it really matters These three arguments culminate in the conclusion: "It doesn't matter if you disagree with everything else in this article: case-sensitivity alone is sufficient reason to ditch C#!" Righto.  I've been using Visual Basic since version 5.0, I wrote a book about ASP.NET in Visual Basic, so I want everyone to know I'm definitely not a VB.NET hater.  I had to converted to C# because it was the language of preference at the places I've worked, so I'm used to both languages.  I love me some case sensitivity.  So first, let's debunk the claims. First, your fingers do not get tired of finding the shift key unless you are writing code in notepad and compiling everything on the command line.  Visual Studio pretty much takes away the need to use the shift key at all. For the most part, any programmer worth a damn doesn't have to type more than about 3-5 characters of any variable or method name before IntelliSense kicks in to help.  VB or C#, if you are not using the tab key for autocomplete then you are typing too much anyway, regardless of whether the shift key is involved or not.  Also, you've got to be a pretty hard-core candy ass if you're complaining at the end of the day that your little fingers are hurting from hitting the shift key. Second, I cannot logically refute the fact that if there are more stringent rules about case sensitivity it will lead to more mistakes.  As such, know that you will be more prone to mistakes in C#.  However, lets talk about the magnitude of the problem.  If you are using IntelliSense then you have auto-correction built in so you probably won't have much of a problem in the first place.  If you manage to bypass IntelliSense and type something wrong you normally are immediately presented with a red-squiggly to let you know something is amiss.  Normally, a person would look at the problem, figure out what the heck went wrong, and then avoid that problem again in the future.  Granted, I have met people who seem to lack this capability, but their problem is deeper than a decision between VB.NET and C#.  So let's make sure that we're all on the same page about this problem.  If you have two teams of developers, one that uses VB.NET and one that uses C#, do not expect to see the VB.NET team drinking beer at the end of the project in festive revelry while the C# team is crying over what the hell to do because their code is riddled with case-sensitivity problems that nobody can resolve. Lastly, if you leave your caps lock key on, turn it off.  Really, what kind of ass-hat would write an entire VB.NET application ENTIRELY IN CAPS?  I happen to be a fan of case sensitivity because it encourages precision and uniformity.  The last thing I need is a code base that looks like it was ransacked by LeEt HacKors wHo Can uSe wHateVer cASe tHey wanT.  I mean really, if you saw someone write this: PuBLIc Sub MyMethod . End Sub And upon asking them why BL was upper case, they responded "Oh, I accidentally hit the shift key there.  Fortunately for me VB.NET is a case insensitive language so I saved a couple of keystrokes by leaving it in there."  Or if you saw: PUBLIC SUB ANOTHERMETHOD . END SUB And the response to why it was uppercased was "Yeah, I accidentally had caps locks on, fortunately for me VB.NET doesn't care.  Really dodged a bullet there, glad I wasn't using C#."  Would you not think that a bit ridiculous?  If you want to convince C# developers that C# sucks, go for it.  But the case insensitivity argument is crap.

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• Event not bubbling in some Browsers when clicked on Flash

  - by 166_MMX

  Environment: Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, Flash ActiveX 10.1.53.64, wmode=transparent Just wrote a small test page that you can load in IE and Firefox or any other Browser. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Event bubbling test</title> </head> <body onclick="alert('body');" style="margin:0;border-width:0;padding:0;background-color:#00FF00;"> <div onclick="alert('div');" style="margin:0;border-width:0;padding:0;background-color:#FF0000;"> <span onclick="alert('span');" style="margin:0;border-width:0;padding:0;background-color:#0000FF;"> <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="159" height="91" id="flashAbout_small" align="absmiddle"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.adobe.com/swf/software/flash/about/flashAbout_info_small.swf"/> <param name="quality" value="high"/> <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"/> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/> <embed src="http://www.adobe.com/swf/software/flash/about/flashAbout_info_small.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" width="159" height="91" wmode="transparent" name="flashAbout_small" align="absmiddle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"/> </object> </span> </div> </body> </html> So clicking any colored shape should produce an alert (except for the green one in IE, not sure why but I hope that's off topic and not related to my issue). Clicking the Flash container in Firefox will work Perfectly fine. You should get alert boxes in this order containing: span, div and body. Flash bubbles the event to the HTML. But this is not happening in IE. So why is Flash in IE not bubbling events to HTML? Edit: As mentioned by Andy E this behavior can also bee seen in Google Chrome which to my knowledge is not using ActiveX to embed the flash movie into the page.

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• PHP Associative array sort

  - by Mithun

  I have an array like one below. Currently it is sorted alphabetically by the OwnerNickName field. Now i want to brig the array entry with OwnerNickName 'My House' as the first entry of the array and rest sorted alphabetically by OwnerNickName. Any idea? Array ( [0318B69D-5DEB-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364] => Array ( [OwnerNickName] => andy [Rooms] => Array ( [0] => Array ( [Label] => Living Room [RoomKey] => FC795A73-695E-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) ) ) [286C29DE-A9BE-102D-9C16-00163EEDFCFC] => Array ( [OwnerNickName] => anton [Rooms] => Array ( [0] => Array ( [Label] => KidsRoom [RoomKey] => E79D7991-64DC-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) [1] => Array ( [Label] => Basement [RoomKey] => CC12C0C4-68AA-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) [2] => Array ( [Label] => Family Room [RoomKey] => 67A280D4-64D9-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) ) ) [8BE18F84-AC22-102D-9C16-00163EEDFCFC] => Array ( [OwnerNickName] => mike [Rooms] => Array ( [0] => Array ( [Label] => Family Room [RoomKey] => 1C6AFB39-6835-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) ) ) [29B455DE-A9BC-102D-9C16-00163EEDFCFC] => Array ( [OwnerNickName] => My House [Rooms] => Array ( [0] => Array ( [Label] => Basement [RoomKey] => 61ECFAB2-6376-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) [1] => Array ( [Label] => Rec Room [RoomKey] => 52B8B781-6376-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) [2] => Array ( [Label] => Deck [RoomKey] => FFEB4102-64DE-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) [3] => Array ( [Label] => My Room2 [RoomKey] => 112473E4-64DF-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) [4] => Array ( [Label] => Bar Room [RoomKey] => F82C47A8-64DE-11DF-9D7E-0026B9481364 ) ) ) )

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