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  • How to label a cuboid?

    - by usha
    Hi this is how my 3dcuboid looks, I have attached the complete code. I want to label this cuboid using different names across sides, how is this possible using opengl on android? public class MyGLRenderer implements Renderer { Context context; Cuboid rect; private float mCubeRotation; // private static float angleCube = 0; // Rotational angle in degree for cube (NEW) // private static float speedCube = -1.5f; // Rotational speed for cube (NEW) public MyGLRenderer(Context context) { rect = new Cuboid(); this.context = context; } public void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClear(GL10.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL10.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset the model-view matrix gl.glTranslatef(0.2f, 0.0f, -8.0f); // Translate right and into the screen gl.glScalef(0.8f, 0.8f, 0.8f); // Scale down (NEW) gl.glRotatef(mCubeRotation, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // gl.glRotatef(angleCube, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // rotate about the axis (1,1,1) (NEW) rect.draw(gl); mCubeRotation -= 0.15f; //angleCube += speedCube; } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub if (height == 0) height = 1; // To prevent divide by zero float aspect = (float)width / height; // Set the viewport (display area) to cover the entire window gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); // Setup perspective projection, with aspect ratio matches viewport gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION); // Select projection matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset projection matrix // Use perspective projection GLU.gluPerspective(gl, 45, aspect, 0.1f, 100.f); gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_MODELVIEW); // Select model-view matrix gl.glLoadIdentity(); // Reset } public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub gl.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); // Set color's clear-value to black gl.glClearDepthf(1.0f); // Set depth's clear-value to farthest gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enables depth-buffer for hidden surface removal gl.glDepthFunc(GL10.GL_LEQUAL); // The type of depth testing to do gl.glHint(GL10.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL10.GL_NICEST); // nice perspective view gl.glShadeModel(GL10.GL_SMOOTH); // Enable smooth shading of color gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_DITHER); // Disable dithering for better performance }} public class Cuboid{ private FloatBuffer mVertexBuffer; private FloatBuffer mColorBuffer; private ByteBuffer mIndexBuffer; private float vertices[] = { //width,height,depth -2.5f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, -1.0f, -2.5f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, -2.5f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private float colors[] = { // R,G,B,A COLOR 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f }; private byte indices[] = { // VERTEX 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 REPRESENTATION FOR FACES 0, 4, 5, 0, 5, 1, 1, 5, 6, 1, 6, 2, 2, 6, 7, 2, 7, 3, 3, 7, 4, 3, 4, 0, 4, 7, 6, 4, 6, 5, 3, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2 }; public Cuboid() { ByteBuffer byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(vertices.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mVertexBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mVertexBuffer.put(vertices); mVertexBuffer.position(0); byteBuf = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(colors.length * 4); byteBuf.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); mColorBuffer = byteBuf.asFloatBuffer(); mColorBuffer.put(colors); mColorBuffer.position(0); mIndexBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(indices.length); mIndexBuffer.put(indices); mIndexBuffer.position(0); } public void draw(GL10 gl) { gl.glFrontFace(GL10.GL_CW); gl.glVertexPointer(3, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mVertexBuffer); gl.glColorPointer(4, GL10.GL_FLOAT, 0, mColorBuffer); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); gl.glDrawElements(GL10.GL_TRIANGLES, 36, GL10.GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mIndexBuffer); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); gl.glDisableClientState(GL10.GL_COLOR_ARRAY); } } public class Draw3drect extends Activity { private GLSurfaceView glView; // Use GLSurfaceView // Call back when the activity is started, to initialize the view @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); glView = new GLSurfaceView(this); // Allocate a GLSurfaceView glView.setRenderer(new MyGLRenderer(this)); // Use a custom renderer this.setContentView(glView); // This activity sets to GLSurfaceView } // Call back when the activity is going into the background @Override protected void onPause() { super.onPause(); glView.onPause(); } // Call back after onPause() @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); glView.onResume(); } }

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  • High Jinks, Hi Jacks, Exceptional DBA Awards and PASS

    - by Rodney
    The countdown to PASS has counted down.  The day after tomorrow I will board a plane, like many others, on my way for the 4th year in a row to SQL PASS Summit.  The anticipation has been excruciating but luckily I have this little thing called a day job as a DBA that has kept me busy and not thinking too much about the event. Well that is not exactly true since my beautiful wife works for PASS so we get to talk about SQL from the time we wake up until late in the evening. I would not have it any other way and I feel very fortunate to be a part of this great event and to have been chosen as the Exceptional DBA Award judge also for the 4th year in a row.  This year, I will have been again tasked with presenting the award to the winner, Mr. Jeff Moden and it will be a true honor to meet him in person as I have read many of his articles on SSC and have attended his session at PASS previously.  The speech is all ready but one item remains, which will be a surprise to all who attend the party on Tuesday night in Seattle (see links below).  Let's face it, Exceptional DBAs everywhere work very hard protecting our data stores, tuning queries, mentoring, saving money, installing clusters, etc and once in a while there is time to be exceptionally non-professional and have a bit of fun. Once incident that happened this year that falls under the High Jinks category was when my network admin asked if I could Telnet into a SQL instance and see if I could make the connection through the firewall that he had just configured. I was able to establish a connection on port 1433 and it occurred to me that it would be very interesting if I could actually run T-SQL queries via a Telnet session much like you might do with an SMTP server. With that thought, I proceeded to demonstrate this could be possible by convincing my senior DBA Shawn McGehee that I was able to do so. At first he did not believe me. It shook his world view.  It was inconceivable.  What I had done, behind the scenes, of course, was to copy and rename SQLCMD.exe to Telnet.exe and used it to connect and run a simple, "Select * from sys.databases" on the SQL instance. I think if it had been anyone other than Shawn I could have extended this ruse indefinitely but he caught on within 30 seconds. It was a fun thirty seconds though. On the High Jacks side of the house, which is really merged to be SQL HACKS, I finally, after several years of struggling with how to connect to an untrusted domain like in a DMZ with a windows account in SSMS, I stumbled upon a solution that does away with the requirement to use SQL Authentication.  While "Runas" is a great command to use to run an application with a higher privileged account, I had not previously been able to figure out how to connect to the remote domain with SSMS and "Runsas". It never connected and caused a login failure every time for the remote windows domain account. Then I ran across an option for "Runas",   "/netonly".  This option postpones the login until a connection is made and only then passes the remote login you supply when you first launch SSMS with the "Runas" command. So a typical shortcut would look like: "C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /netonly /user:remotedomain.com\rodlandrum "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe" You will want to make sure the passwords are synced between the two domains, your local domain and the remote domain, otherwise you may have account lockout issues, but I have found in weeks of testing this is a stable solution. Now it is time to get ready to head for Seattle. Please, if you see me (@SQLBeat) or my wife (@Karlakay22) please run up and high five me (wait..High Jinks.High Jacks.High Fives.Need to change the title) or give me a big bear hug if you are strong enough to lift me off the ground. And if you do actually do that, I will think you are awesome and will not embarrass you by crying out for help or complaining of a broken back or sciatic nerve damage. And now the links to others who have all of the details. First, for the MVP Deep Dives 2, of which, like John, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in this year. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/johnm/archive/2011/09/29/103577.aspx And the details of the SSC party where the Exceptional DBA of 2011, Jeff Moden, will be awarded. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/rebecca_amos/archive/2011/10/05/103661.aspx   Cheers! Rodney

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  • Guidance: How to layout you files for an Ideal Solution

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Creating a solution and having it maintainable over time is an art and not a science. I like being pedantic and having a place for everything, no matter how small. For setting up the Areas to run Multiple projects under one solution see my post on  When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects and for an explanation of branching see Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams. Update 17th May 2010 – We are currently trialling running a single Sprint branch to improve our history. Whenever I setup a new Team Project I implement the basic version control structure. I put “readme.txt” files in the folder structure explaining the different levels, and a solution file called “[Client].[Product].sln” located at “$/[Client]/[Product]/DEV/Main” within version control. Developers should add any projects you need to create to that solution in the format “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly]” and they will automatically be picked up and built automatically when you setup Automated Builds using Team Foundation Build. All test projects need to be done using MSTest to get proper IDE and Team Foundation Build integration out-of-the-box and be named for the assembly that it is testing with a naming convention of “[Client].[Product].[ProductArea].[Assembly].Tests” Here is a description of the folder layout; this content should be replicated in readme files under version control in the relevant locations so that even developers new to the project can see how to do it. Figure: The Team Project level - at this level there should be a folder for each the products that you are building if you are using Areas correctly in TFS 2010. You should try very hard to avoided spaces as these things always end up in a URL eventually e.g. "Code Auditor" should be "CodeAuditor". Figure: Product Level - At this level there should be only 3 folders (DEV, RELESE and SAFE) all of which should be in capitals. These folders represent the three stages of your application production line. Each of them may contain multiple branches but this format leaves all of your branches at the same level. Figure: The DEV folder is where all of the Development branches reside. The DEV folder will contain the "Main" branch and all feature branches is they are being used. The DEV designation specifies that all code in every branch under this folder has not been released or made ready for release. And feature branches MUST merge (Forward Integrate) from Main and stabilise prior to merging (Reverse Integration) back down into Main and being decommissioned. Figure: In the Feature branching scenario only merges are allowed onto Main, no development can be done there. Once we have a mature product it is important that new features being developed in parallel are kept separate. This would most likely be used if we had more than one Scrum team working on a single product. Figure: when we are ready to do a release of our software we will create a release branch that is then stabilised prior to deployment. This protects the serviceability of of our released code allowing developers to fix bugs and re-release an existing version. Figure: All bugs found on a release are fixed on the release.  All bugs found in a release are fixed on the release and a new deployment is created. After the deployment is created the bug fixes are then merged (Reverse Integration) into the Main branch. We do this so that we separate out our development from our production ready code.  Figure: SAFE or RTM is a read only record of what you actually released. Labels are not immutable so are useless in this circumstance.  When we have completed stabilisation of the release branch and we are ready to deploy to production we create a read-only copy of the code for reference. In some cases this could be a regulatory concern, but in most cases it protects the company building the product from legal entanglements based on what you did or did not release. Figure: This allows us to reference any particular version of our application that was ever shipped.   In addition I am an advocate of having a single solution with all the Project folders directly under the “Trunk”/”Main” folder and using the full name for the project folders.. Figure: The ideal solution If you must have multiple solutions, because you need to use more than one version of Visual Studio, name the solutions “[Client].[Product][VSVersion].sln” and have it reside in the same folder as the other solution. This makes it easier for Automated build and improves the discoverability of your code and its dependencies. Send me your feedback!   Technorati Tags: VS ALM,VSTS Developing,VS 2010,VS 2008,TFS 2010,TFS 2008,TFBS

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  • Visual Studio &amp; TFS 11 &ndash; List of extensions and upgrades

    - by terje
    This post is a list of the extensions I recommend for use with Visual Studio 11. It’s coming up all the time – what to install, where are the download sites, last version, etc etc, and thus I thought it better to post it here and keep it updated. The basics are Visual Studio 11 connected to a Team Foundation Server 11. Note that we now are at Beta time, and that also many live in a side-by-side environment with Visual Studio 2010.  The side-by-side is supported by VS 11. However, if you installed a component supporting VS11 before you installed VS11, then you need to reinstall it.  The VSIX installer will understand that it is to apply those only for VS11, and will not touch – nor remove – the same for VS2010. A good example here is the Power Commands. The list is more or less in priority order. The focus is to get a setup which can be used for a complete coding experience for the whole ALM process. The list of course reflects what I use for my work , so it is by no means complete, and for some of the tools there are equally useful alternatives. Many components have not yet arrived with VS11 support.  I will add them as they arrive.  The components directly associated with Visual Studio from Microsoft should be common, see the Microsoft column. If you still need the VS2010 extensions, here they are: The extensions for VS 2010.   Components ready for VS 11, both upgrades and new ones Product Notes Latest Version License Applicable to Microsoft TFS Power Tools Beta 111 Side-by-side with TFS 2010 should work, but remove the Shell Extension from the TFS 2010 power tool first. March 2012(11.0.50321.0) Free TFS integration Yes ReSharper EAP for Beta 11 (updates very often, nearly daily) 7.0.3.261 pr. 16/3/2012 Free as EAP, Licensed later Coding & Quality No Power Commands1 Just reinstall, even if you already have it for VS2010. The reinstall will then apply it to VS 11 1.0.2.3 Free Coding Yes Visualization and Modelling SDK for beta Info here and here. Another download site and info here. Also download from MSDN Subscription site. Requires VS 11 Beta SDK 11 Free now, otherwise Part of MSDN Subscription Modeling Yes Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK Published 16.2.2012     Yes Visual Studio 11 Feedback tool1 Use this to really ease the process of sending bugs back to Microsoft. 1.1 Free as prerelase Visual Studio Yes             #1 Get via Visual Studio’s Tools | Extension Manager (or The Code Gallery). (From Adam : All these are auto updated by the Extension Manager in Visual Studio) #2 Works with ultimate only Components we wait for, not yet in a VS 11 version Product Notes Latest Version License Applicable to Microsoft       Coding Yes Inmeta Build Explorer     Free TFS integration No Build Manager Community Build Manager. Info here from Jakob   Free TFS Integration No Code Contracts Coming real soon   Free Coding & Quality Yes Code Contracts Editor Extensions     Free Coding & Quality Yes Web Std Update     Free Coding (Web) Yes (MSFT) Web Essentials     Free Coding (Web) Yes (MSFT) DotPeek It says up to .Net 4.0, but some tests indicates it seems to be able to handle 4.5. 1.0.0.7999 Free Coding/Investigation No Just Decompile Also says up to .net 4.0   Free Coding/Investigation No dotTrace     Licensed Quality No NDepend   Licensed Quality No tangible T4 editor     Lite version Free (Good enough) Coding (T4 templates) No Pex Moles are now integrated and improved in VS 11 as a new library called Fakes.     Coding & Unit Testing Yes Components which are now integrated into VS 11 Product Notes Productivity Power Tools Features integrated into VS11, with a few exceptions, I don’t think you will miss those. Fakes  Was Moles in 2010. Fakes is improved and made into a product.  NuGet Manager Included in the install, but still an extension package. Info here. Product installation, upgrades and patches for VS/TFS 11   Product Notes Date Applicable to Visual Studio 11 & TFS 11 Beta This is the beta release, and you are free to download and try it out. March 2012 Visual Studio and TFS SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Cumulative Update 4 The TFS 11 requires the CU1 at least, but you should go up to at least CU4, since this update solves a ghost record problem that otherwise may cause your TFS database to not release records the way it should when you clean it up, see this post for more information on that issue.  Oct 2011 SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1

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  • Row Count Plus Transformation

    As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work.   All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

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  • Telerik is First to Announce Support for Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework

    Yesterday at MIX 10 conference Microsoft announced the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework Beta. The Silverlight Analytics Framework (SAF) is a new open-source framework to allow designers and developers to integrate web analytics into Silverlight applications in a consistent manner. Supporting out-of-browser and offline scenarios, Microsoft built this framework in conjunction with a number of web analytics services and control vendors to support multiple analytics services simultaneously without degrading application performance. Because the SAF is enabled as a set of behaviors in Microsoft Expression Blend, designers and developers can visually instrument their designs and configure A/B testing rapidly without writing any code. Telerik is proud to be the first control vendor to support the Silverlight Analytics Framework. RadControls for Silverlight can be used with the framework out of the box. The suite offers Silverlight Analytics Framework handlers and behavior, helping developers to fine tune the values sent to the analytics providers. Because the analytics framework is using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for composition, you don't need to change the way you use the controls to benefit from the Telerik handlers. Just add a reference to the Telerik assemblies that contains the handlers. Here is the code that you need to declare to use RadTreeView: <UserControl x:Class="Telerik.SLAF.MainPage"         xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"         xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"         xmlns:i="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Interactivity;assembly=System.Windows.Interactivity"         xmlns:ga="clr-namespace:Google.WebAnalytics;assembly=Google.WebAnalytics"         xmlns:sa="clr-namespace:Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors;assembly=Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors"         xmlns:ic="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.Core;assembly=Microsoft.Expression.Interactions"         xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"         xmlns:telerikNavigation="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation">        <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">         <i:Interaction.Behaviors>             <ga:GoogleAnalytics ProfileId="--Your GA ProfileId" Category="Demo" />         </i:Interaction.Behaviors>         <telerikNavigation:RadTreeView>             <i:Interaction.Triggers>                 <i:EventTrigger EventName="SelectionChanged">                     <sa:TrackAction />                 </i:EventTrigger>             </i:Interaction.Triggers>             <telerikNavigation:RadTreeViewItem Header="Item1">             </telerikNavigation:RadTreeViewItem>             <telerikNavigation:RadTreeViewItem Header="Item2" />             <telerikNavigation:RadTreeViewItem Header="Item3" />         </telerikNavigation:RadTreeView>     </Grid> </UserControl> Download the Telerik Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework Handlers and the sample project. This is our first Beta release - please drop us a line with any feedback you have or even better if you are at MIX10 - come visit us at the booth in the "Commons" hall so we can discuss it in person. 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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  • Where Facebook Stands Heading Into 2013

    - by Mike Stiles
    In our last blog, we looked at how Twitter is positioned heading into 2013. Now it’s time to take a similar look at Facebook. 2012, for a time at least, seemed to be the era of Facebook-bashing. Between a far-from-smooth IPO, subsequent stock price declines, and anxiety over privacy, the top social network became a target for comedians, politicians, business journalists, and of course those who were prone to Facebook-bash even in the best of times. But amidst the “this is the end of Facebook” headlines, the company kept experimenting, kept testing, kept innovating, and pressing forward, committed as always to the user experience, while concurrently addressing monetization with greater urgency. Facebook enters 2013 with over 1 billion users around the world. Usage grew 41% in Brazil, Russia, Japan, South Korea and India in 2012. In the Middle East and North Africa, an average 21 new signups happen per minute. Engagement and time spent on the site would impress the harshest of critics. Facebook, while not bulletproof, has become such an integrated daily force in users’ lives, it’s getting hard to imagine any future mass rejection. You want to see a company recognizing weaknesses and shoring them up. Mobile was a weakness in 2012 as Facebook was one of many caught by surprise at the speed of user migration to mobile. But new mobile interfaces, better mobile ads, speed upgrades, standalone Messenger and Pages mobile apps, and the big dollar acquisition of Instagram, were a few indicators Facebook won’t play catch-up any more than it has to. As a user, the cool thing about Facebook is, it knows you. The uncool thing about Facebook is, it knows you. The company’s walking a delicate line between the public’s competing desires for customized experiences and privacy. While the company’s working to make privacy options clearer and easier, Facebook’s Paul Adams says data aggregation can move from acting on what a user is engaging with at the moment to a more holistic view of what they’re likely to want at any given time. To help learn about you, there’s Open Graph. Embedded through diverse partnerships, the idea is to surface what you’re doing and what you care about, and help you discover things via your friends’ activities. Facebook’s Director of Engineering, Mike Vernal, says building mobile social apps connected to Facebook in such ways is the next wave of big innovation. Expect to see that fostered in 2013. The Facebook site experience is always evolving. Some users like that about Facebook, others can’t wait to complain about it…on Facebook. The Facebook focal point, the News Feed, is not sacred and is seeing plenty of experimentation with the insertion of modules. From upcoming concerts, events, suggested Pages you might like, to aggregated “most shared” content from social reader apps, plenty could start popping up between those pictures of what your friends had for lunch.  As for which friends’ lunches you see, that’s a function of the mythic EdgeRank…which is also tinkered with. When Facebook changed it in September, Page admins saw reach go down and the high anxiety set in quickly. Engagement, however, held steady. The adjustment was about relevancy over reach. (And oh yeah, reach was something that could be charged for). Facebook wants users to see what they’re most likely to like, based on past usage and interactions. Adding to the “cream must rise to the top” philosophy, they’re now even trying out ordering post comments based on the engagement the comments get. Boy, it’s getting competitive out there for a social engager. Facebook has to make $$$. To do that, they must offer attractive vehicles to marketers. There are a myriad of ad units. But a key Facebook marketing concept is the Sponsored Story. It’s key because it encourages content that’s good, relevant, and performs well organically. If it is, marketing dollars can amplify it and extend its reach. Brands can expect the rollout of a search product and an ad network. That’s a big deal. It takes, as Open Graph does, the power of Facebook’s user data and carries it beyond the Facebook environment into the digital world at large. No one could target like Facebook can, and some analysts think it could double their roughly $5 billion revenue stream. As every potential revenue nook and cranny is explored, there are the users themselves. In addition to Gifts, Facebook thinks users might pay a few bucks to promote their own posts so more of their friends will see them. There’s also word classifieds could be purchased in News Feeds, though they won’t be called classifieds. And that’s where Facebook stands; a wildly popular destination, a part of our culture, with ever increasing functionalities, the biggest of big data, revenue strategies that appeal to marketers without souring the user experience, new challenges as a now public company, ongoing privacy concerns, and innovations that carry Facebook far beyond its own borders. Anyone care to write a “this is the end of Facebook” headline? @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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  • Getting App.config to be configuration specific in VS2010

    - by MarkPearl
    I recently wanted to have a console application that had configuration specific settings. For instance, if I had two configurations “Debug” and “Release”, depending on the currently selected configuration I wanted it to use a specific configuration file (either debug or config). If you are wanting to do something similar, here is a potential solution that worked for me. Setting up a demo app to illustrate the point First, let’s set up an application that will demonstrate the most basic concept. using System; using System.Configuration; namespace ConsoleSpecificConfiguration { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Config"); Console.WriteLine(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Example Config"]); Console.ReadLine(); } } }   This does a really simple thing. Display a config when run. To do this, you also need a config file set up. My default looks as follows… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Example Config" value="Default"/> </appSettings> </configuration>   Your entire solution will look as follows… Running the project you will get the following amazing output…   Let’s now say instead of having one config file we want depending on whether we are running in “Debug” or “Release” for the solution configuration we want different config settings to be propagated across you can do the following… Step 1 – Create alternate config Files First add additional config files to your solution. You should have some form of naming convention for these config files, I have decided to follow a similar convention to the one used for web.config, so in my instance I am going to add a App.Debug.config and a App.Release.config file BUT you can follow any naming convention you want provided you wire up the rest of the approach to use this convention. My files look as follows.. App.Debug.config <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Example Config" value="Debug"/> </appSettings> </configuration>   App.Release.config <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Example Config" value="Release"/> </appSettings> </configuration>   Your solution will now look as follows… Step 2 – Create a bat file that will overwrite files The next step is to create a bat file that will overwrite one file with another. If you right click on the solution in the solution explorer there will be a menu option to add new items to the solution. Create a text file called “copyifnewer.bat” which will be our copy script. It’s contents should look as follows… @echo off echo Comparing two files: %1 with %2 if not exist %1 goto File1NotFound if not exist %2 goto File2NotFound fc %1 %2 /A if %ERRORLEVEL%==0 GOTO NoCopy echo Files are not the same. Copying %1 over %2 copy %1 %2 /y & goto END :NoCopy echo Files are the same. Did nothing goto END :File1NotFound echo %1 not found. goto END :File2NotFound copy %1 %2 /y goto END :END echo Done. Your solution should now look as follows…   Step 3 – Customize the Post Build event command line We now need to wire up everything – which we will do using the post build event command line in VS2010. Right click on your project and go to it’s properties We are now going to wire up the script so that when we build our project it will overwrite the default App.config with whatever file we want. The syntax goes as follows… call "$(SolutionDir)copyifnewer.bat" "$(ProjectDir)App.$(ConfigurationName).config" "$(ProjectDir)$(OutDir)\$(TargetFileName).config" Testing it If I now change my project configuration to Release   And then run my application I get the following output… Toggling between Release and Debug mode will show that the config file is changing each time. And that is it!

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  • Clean way to use mutable implementation of Immutable interfaces for encapsulation

    - by dsollen
    My code is working on some compost relationship which creates a tree structure, class A has many children of type B, which has many children of type C etc. The lowest level class, call it bar, also points to a connected bar class. This effectively makes nearly every object in my domain inter-connected. Immutable objects would be problematic due to the expense of rebuilding almost all of my domain to make a single change to one class. I chose to go with an interface approach. Every object has an Immutable interface which only publishes the getter methods. I have controller objects which constructs the domain objects and thus has reference to the full objects, thus capable of calling the setter methods; but only ever publishes the immutable interface. Any change requested will go through the controller. So something like this: public interface ImmutableFoo{ public Bar getBar(); public Location getLocation(); } public class Foo implements ImmutableFoo{ private Bar bar; private Location location; @Override public Bar getBar(){ return Bar; } public void setBar(Bar bar){ this.bar=bar; } @Override public Location getLocation(){ return Location; } } public class Controller{ Private Map<Location, Foo> fooMap; public ImmutableFoo addBar(Bar bar){ Foo foo=fooMap.get(bar.getLocation()); if(foo!=null) foo.addBar(bar); return foo; } } I felt the basic approach seems sensible, however, when I speak to others they always seem to have trouble envisioning what I'm describing, which leaves me concerned that I may have a larger design issue then I'm aware of. Is it problematic to have domain objects so tightly coupled, or to use the quasi-mutable approach to modifying them? Assuming that the design approach itself isn't inherently flawed the particular discussion which left me wondering about my approach had to do with the presence of business logic in the domain objects. Currently I have my setter methods in the mutable objects do error checking and all other logic required to verify and make a change to the object. It was suggested that this should be pulled out into a service class, which applies all the business logic, to simplify my domain objects. I understand the advantage in mocking/testing and general separation of logic into two classes. However, with a service method/object It seems I loose some of the advantage of polymorphism, I can't override a base class to add in new error checking or business logic. It seems, if my polymorphic classes were complicated enough, I would end up with a service method that has to check a dozen flags to decide what error checking and business logic applies. So, for example, if I wanted to have a childFoo which also had a size field which should be compared to bar before adding par my current approach would look something like this. public class Foo implements ImmutableFoo{ public void addBar(Bar bar){ if(!getLocation().equals(bar.getLocation()) throw new LocationException(); this.bar=bar; } } public interface ImmutableChildFoo extends ImmutableFoo{ public int getSize(); } public ChildFoo extends Foo implements ImmutableChildFoo{ private int size; @Override public int getSize(){ return size; } @Override public void addBar(Bar bar){ if(getSize()<bar.getSize()){ throw new LocationException(); super.addBar(bar); } My colleague was suggesting instead having a service object that looks something like this (over simplified, the 'service' object would likely be more complex). public interface ImmutableFoo{ ///original interface, presumably used in other methods public Location getLocation(); public boolean isChildFoo(); } public interface ImmutableSizedFoo implements ImmutableFoo{ public int getSize(); } public class Foo implements ImmutableSizedFoo{ public Bar bar; @Override public void addBar(Bar bar){ this.bar=bar; } @Override public int getSize(){ //default size if no size is known return 0; } @Override public boolean isChildFoo return false; } } public ChildFoo extends Foo{ private int size; @Override public int getSize(){ return size; } @Override public boolean isChildFoo(); return true; } } public class Controller{ Private Map<Location, Foo> fooMap; public ImmutableSizedFoo addBar(Bar bar){ Foo foo=fooMap.get(bar.getLocation()); service.addBarToFoo(foo, bar); returned foo; } public class Service{ public static void addBarToFoo(Foo foo, Bar bar){ if(foo==null) return; if(!foo.getLocation().equals(bar.getLocation())) throw new LocationException(); if(foo.isChildFoo() && foo.getSize()<bar.getSize()) throw new LocationException(); foo.setBar(bar); } } } Is the recommended approach of using services and inversion of control inherently superior, or superior in certain cases, to overriding methods directly? If so is there a good way to go with the service approach while not loosing the power of polymorphism to override some of the behavior?

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  • My Codemash 2011 Retrospective

    - by Greg Malcolm
    I just got back from Codemash yesterday, and still on an adrenaline buzz. Here's my take on this years encounter: The Awesome Nearly everybody in one place Codemash is the ultimate place to catch up with community friends. This is my 3rd year visiting and I've got to know a great number of very cool people through various conferences, Give Camps and other community events. I'm finding more and more that Codemash is the best place to catch up with everybody regardless of technology interest or location. Of course I always make a whole bunch more friends while I'm there! Yay! Open Spaced I found the open spaces didn't work so well last year. This year things went a lot smoother and the topics were engaging and fresh. While I miss Alan Steven's approach of running it like an agile project, it was very cool to see that it evolving. Laptops were often cracked open, not just once but frequently! For example: Jasmine - Paired on a javascript kata using the Jasmine javascript test runner J - Sat in on a J demo from local J enthusiast, Tracy Harms Watir - More pairing, this time using Ruby with the watir-webdriver through cucumber. I'd mostly forgotten that Cucumber runs just fine without Rails. It made a change to do without. The other spaces were engaging too, but I think that's enough for that topic. Javascript Shenanigans I've already mentioned that I attended a Jasmine kata session. Jasmine is close to my heart right now every since I discovered it while on the hunt for a decent Javascript testing framework for a javascript koans project earlier this year. Well, it also got covered in the Java Precompiler and Pillar's vendor session, which was great to see. Node.js was also a reoccurring theme. Node.js in a nutshell? It's an extremely scalable Event based I/O server which runs on Javascript. I'd already encountered through a Startup Weekend project and have been noticing increasing interest of late. After encountering more node.js driven excitement from my peers at codemash I absolutely had to attend the open space on it. At least 20 people turned up and by the end we had some answers, a whole ton of new questions and an impromptu user group in the form of a twitter channel (#nodemash). I have no idea where this is going to go or how big it is going to become, but if it can cross the chasm into the enterprise it could become huge... Scala Koans I'm a bit of a Koans addict, and I really need more exposure to functional languages so I gave the Scala Koans precompiler a try. Great fun! I'm really glad I attended because I found I had a whole ton of questions. Currently the koans are available here, and the answers are here. Opportunities While we're on the subject can we change the subject now? Hai Gregory, You really need to keep the drinking for later in the day. I mean seriously, you're 34 and you still do this every single time! Sure, you made it to Chad Fowler keynote ok, but you looking a rather pale weren't you? Also might have been nice to attend 'Netflicks in the Cloud' instead of 'Sleeping It Off For People Who Should Know Better'. Kthxbye PS: Stop talking to yourself Not that I entirely regret it, I've had some of my greatest insights through late night drunken conversations at the CodeMash bar. Just might be nice to reign it in a little and get something out of the next morning too. Diversity This is something that is in the back of my mind because of conversations at Codemash as well as throughout the year; I'm realizing more and more how discouraging the IT profession is for women. I notice in the community there has been a lot of attention paid to stamping out harrasment, which is good, but there also seems to be a massive PR issue. I really don't have any solutions, but I figure it can't hurt to pay more attention to whats going on... And in Other News I now have a picture of Chad Fowler giving me more cowbell! Sadly I managed to lose the cowbell later on. Hopefully it's gone to a Better Place. The Womack Family Band joined in with the musicians jam this year. There's my cowbell again! Why must you hide from me? I also finally went in the water for the first time in all the I've been coming to codemash. Why did I wait so long?!?

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  • Agile Development Requires Agile Support

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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  • When does "proper" programming no longer matter?

    - by Kai Qing
    I've been a full time programmer for about 8 years now. Web based mostly, ranging in weird jobs for clients. Never anything I "want" to do. So my experience is limited to what I've been contracted to do, having no real incentive to master anything in particular. So here's my scenario and ultimately what I wonder about... I've been building an android game in my spare time. It's using the libgdx library so quite a bit of the heavy lifting is done for me. I don't read much of the docs cause unless it's in tutorial format I will just not care, and ultimately most of my questions have already been asked on stackoverflow. I get along fine and my game works as expected... Suspiciously well, even. So much so that I wonder why one should bother to be "proper" when coding if the end result is ultimately the same. To be more specific, I used a hashtable because I wanted something close to an associative array. Human readable key values. In other places to achieve similar things, I use a vector. I know libgdx has vector2 and vector3 classes, but I've never used them. When I come across weird problems and search stackoverflow for help, I see a lot of people just reaming the questions that use a certain datatype when another one is technically "proper." Like using an ArrayList because it does not require defined bounds versus re-defining an int[] with new known boundaries. Or even something trivial like this: for(int i = 0; i < items.length; i ++) { // do something } I know it evaluates item.length on every iteration. I just don't care. I know items will never be more than 15 to 20 items. So why bother caring if I evaluate items.length on every iteration? So I wonder - why does everyone get all up in arms over this? Who cares if I use a less efficient datatype to get the job done? I ran some tests to see how the app performs using the lazy, get it done fast and don't look back method I just described versus the proper, follow the tutorial and use the exact data types suggested by the community. The results: Same thing. Average 45 fps. I opened every app on the phone and galaxy tab. Same deal. No difference. My game is pretty graphic intensive. It's not like it's just a simple thing. I expected it to perform kind of badly since I don't care to optimize image assets or... well, you probably get the idea. I'm making the game for fun. As a joke, really. But in doing so I'm working outside the normal scope of my job, which is to always follow the rules and do it the right way. So to say, I am without bounds here and this has caused me to wonder why I ever really care to be "proper" So I guess my question to you is this: Is there a threshold when it no longer matters to be proper? Is there a lasting, longer term consequence to the lazy, get it done and don't look back route? Is it ok to say - "so long as it gets the job done, I don't care?" Disclaimer: When I program my game, I am almost always drunk. I do it to remember why I got into this stuff to begin with because the monotony of client based web work will make you hate being a programmer. I'm having a blast and my game is not crashing, tests well, performs well, looks good on all devices so far and has no noticeable negative impact on any of my testing devices. I expected failure because I was being so drunkenly careless with my code, but to my surprise, it had no noticeable impact. I am now starting to question the need to be careful. Help me regain the ability to care! ... or explain why it's not a bad thing to not care. Secondary disclaimer: I am aware of the benefits of maintainability. For myself and others. Agreed. But it's not like someone happening across my inefficient int[] loop won't know what it does. As an experienced programmer those kinds of things are just clear on sight. I document the complex stuff for myself knowing I was drunk and will probably need a reminder. Those notes would clarify any confusion for someone who might ever gaze upon my ridiculous game - though the reality is that either I maintain it myself or it fades into time. I'm ok with that. But if it doesn't slow the device down, or crash, then crossing the t's and dotting the i's might actually require more time than it's worth.

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  • Extending Database-as-a-Service to Provision Databases with Application Data

    - by Nilesh A
    Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Database as a Service (DBaaS) empowers Self Service/SSA Users to rapidly spawn databases on demand in cloud. The configuration and structure of provisioned databases depends on respective service template selected by Self Service user while requesting for database. In EM12c, the DBaaS Self Service/SSA Administrator has the option of hosting various service templates in service catalog and based on underlying DBCA templates.Many times provisioned databases require production scale data either for UAT, testing or development purpose and managing DBCA templates with data can be unwieldy. So, we need to populate the database using post deployment script option and without any additional work for the SSA Users. The SSA Administrator can automate this task in few easy steps. For details on how to setup DBaaS Self Service Portal refer to the DBaaS CookbookIn this article, I will list steps required to enable EM 12c DBaaS to provision databases with application data in two distinct ways using: 1) Data pump 2) Transportable tablespaces (TTS). The steps listed below are just examples of how to extend EM 12c DBaaS and you can even have your own method plugged in part of post deployment script option. Using Data Pump to populate databases These are the steps to be followed to implement extending DBaaS using Data Pump methodolgy: Production DBA should run data pump export on the production database and make the dump file available to all the servers participating in the database zone [sample shown in Fig.1] -- Full exportexpdp FULL=y DUMPFILE=data_pump_dir:dpfull1%U.dmp, data_pump_dir:dpfull2%U.dmp PARALLEL=4 LOGFILE=data_pump_dir:dpexpfull.log JOB_NAME=dpexpfull Figure-1:  Full export of database using data pump Create a post deployment SQL script [sample shown in Fig. 2] and this script can either be uploaded into the software library by SSA Administrator or made available on a shared location accessible from servers where databases are likely to be provisioned Normal 0 -- Full importdeclare    h1   NUMBER;begin-- Creating the directory object where source database dump is backed up.    execute immediate 'create directory DEST_LOC as''/scratch/nagrawal/OracleHomes/oradata/INITCHNG/datafile''';-- Running import    h1 := dbms_datapump.open (operation => 'IMPORT', job_mode => 'FULL', job_name => 'DB_IMPORT10');    dbms_datapump.set_parallel(handle => h1, degree => 1);    dbms_datapump.add_file(handle => h1, filename => 'IMP_GRIDDB_FULL.LOG', directory => 'DATA_PUMP_DIR', filetype => 3);    dbms_datapump.add_file(handle => h1, filename => 'EXP_GRIDDB_FULL_%U.DMP', directory => 'DEST_LOC', filetype => 1);    dbms_datapump.start_job(handle => h1);    dbms_datapump.detach(handle => h1);end;/ Figure-2: Importing using data pump pl/sql procedures Using DBCA, create a template for the production database – include all the init.ora parameters, tablespaces, datafiles & their sizes SSA Administrator should customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” and provide DBCA template created in the previous step. In “Additional Configuration Options” step of Customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” flow, provide the name of the SQL script in the Custom Script section and lock the input (shown in Fig. 3). Continue saving the deployment procedure. Figure-3: Using Custom script option for calling Import SQL Now, an SSA user can login to Self Service Portal and use the flow to provision a database that will also  populate the data using the post deployment step. Using Transportable tablespaces to populate databases Copy of all user/application tablespaces will enable this method of populating databases. These are the required steps to extend DBaaS using transportable tablespaces: Production DBA needs to create a backup of tablespaces. Datafiles may need conversion [such as from Big Endian to Little Endian or vice versa] based on the platform of production and destination where DBaaS created the test database. Here is sample backup script shows how to find out if any conversion is required, describes the steps required to convert datafiles and backup tablespace. SSA Administrator should copy the database (tablespaces) backup datafiles and export dumps to the backup location accessible from the hosts participating in the database zone(s). Create a post deployment SQL script and this script can either be uploaded into the software library by SSA Administrator or made available on a shared location accessible from servers where databases are likely to be provisioned. Here is sample post deployment SQL script using transportable tablespaces. Using DBCA, create a template for the production database – all the init.ora parameters should be included. NOTE: DO NOT choose to bring tablespace data into this template as they will be created SSA Administrator should customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” and provide DBCA template created in the previous step. In the “Additional Configuration Options” step of the flow, provide the name of the SQL script in the Custom Script section and lock the input. Continue saving the deployment procedure. Now, an SSA user can login to Self Service Portal and use the flow to provision a database that will also populate the data using the post deployment step. More Information: Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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  • Lighting get darker when texture is aplied

    - by noah
    Im using OpenGL ES 1.1 for iPhone. I'm attempting to implement a skybox in my 3d world and started out by following one of Jeff Lamarches tutorials on creating textures. Heres the tutorial: iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-part-6_25.html Ive successfully added the image to my 3d world but am not sure why the lighting on the other shapes has changed so much. I want the shapes to be the original color and have the image in the background. Before: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojmb8793vj514h0/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.34.44%20PM.png After: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8v6yvur8amgudia/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.35.31%20PM.png Heres the init OpenGL: - (void)initOpenGLES1 { glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); // Enable lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); // Turn the first light on glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); const GLfloat lightAmbient[] = {0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightDiffuse[] = {0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0}; const GLfloat matAmbient[] = {0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.5}; const GLfloat matDiffuse[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat matSpecular[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightPosition[] = {0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0}; const GLfloat lightShininess = 100.0; //Configure OpenGL lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_AMBIENT, matAmbient); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_DIFFUSE, matDiffuse); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SPECULAR, matSpecular); glMaterialf(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SHININESS, lightShininess); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_AMBIENT, lightAmbient); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_DIFFUSE, lightDiffuse); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, lightPosition); // Define a cutoff angle glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_SPOT_CUTOFF, 40.0); // Set the clear color glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1.0f); // Projection Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); CGSize layerSize = self.view.layer.frame.size; // Swapped height and width for landscape mode gluPerspective(45.0f, (GLfloat)layerSize.height / (GLfloat)layerSize.width, 0.1f, 750.0f); [self initSkyBox]; // Modelview Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // This next line is not really needed as it is the default for OpenGL ES glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glDisable(GL_BLEND); // Enable depth testing glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); } Heres the drawSkybox that gets called in the drawFrame method: -(void)drawSkyBox { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); static const SSVertex3D vertices[] = { {-1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, {-1.0, -1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, -1.0, -0.0} }; static const SSVertex3D normals[] = { {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0} }; static const GLfloat texCoords[] = { 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0 }; glLoadIdentity(); glTranslatef(0.0, 0.0, -3.0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, vertices); glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, normals); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, texCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 4); glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Heres the init Skybox: -(void)initSkyBox { // Turn necessary features on glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_SRC_COLOR); // Bind the number of textures we need, in this case one. glGenTextures(1, &texture[0]); // create a texture obj, give unique ID glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // load our new texture name into the current texture glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"space" ofType:@"jpg"]; NSData *texData = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path]; UIImage *image = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:texData]; GLuint width = CGImageGetWidth(image.CGImage); GLuint height = CGImageGetHeight(image.CGImage); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); void *imageData = malloc( height * width * 4 ); // times 4 because will write one byte for rgb and alpha CGContextRef cgContext = CGBitmapContextCreate( imageData, width, height, 8, 4 * width, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Big ); // Flip the Y-axis CGContextTranslateCTM (cgContext, 0, height); CGContextScaleCTM (cgContext, 1.0, -1.0); CGColorSpaceRelease( colorSpace ); CGContextClearRect( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ) ); CGContextDrawImage( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ), image.CGImage ); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, imageData); CGContextRelease(cgContext); free(imageData); [image release]; [texData release]; } Any help is greatly appreciated.

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  • First Foray&ndash;About timeout

    - by SQLMonger
    It has been quite a while since I signed up for this blog site and high time that something was posted.  I have a list of topics that I will be working through and posting.  Some I am sure will have been posted by others, but I will be sticking to the technical problems and challenges that I’ve recently faced, and the solutions that worked for me.  My motto when learning something new has always been “My kingdom for an example!”, and I plan on delivering useful examples here so others can learn from my efforts, failures and successes.   A bit of background about me… My name is Clayton Groom. I am a founding partner of a consulting firm in St. Louis Missouri, Covenant Technology Partners, LLC and focus on SQL Server Data Warehouse design, Analysis Services and Enterprise Reporting solutions.  I have been working with SQL Server since the early nineties, when it still only ran on OS/2. I love solving puzzles and technical challenges.   Enough about me… On to a real problem… SSIS Connection Time outs versus Command Time outs Last week, I was working on automating the processing for a large Analysis Services cube.  I had reworked an SSIS package and script task originally posted by Vidas Matelis that automates the process of adding new and dropping old partitions to/from an Analysis Services cube.  I had the package working great, tested, and ready for deployment.  It basically performs a query against the source system to determine if there is new data in the warehouse that will require a new partition to be added to the cube, and it checks the cube to see if there are any partitions that are present that are no longer needed in a rolling 60 month window. My client uses Tivoli for running all their production jobs, and not SQL Agent, so I had to build a command line file for Tivoli to use to run the package. Everything was going great. I had tested the command file from my development workstation using an XML configuration file to pass in server-specific parameters into the package when executed using the DTExec utility. With all the pieces ready, I updated the dtsconfig file to point to the UAT environment and started working with the Tivoli developer to test the job.  On the first run, the job failed, and from what I could see in the SSIS log, it had failed because of a timeout. Other errors in the log made me think that perhaps the connection string had not been passed into the package correctly. We bumped the Connection Manager  timeout values from 20 seconds to 120 seconds and tried again. The job still failed. After changing the command line to use the /SET option instead of the /CONFIGFILE option, we tested again, and again failure. After a number more failed attempts, and getting the Teradata DBA involved to monitor and see if we were connecting and failing or just failing to connect, we determined that the job was indeed connecting to the server and then disconnecting itself after 30 seconds.  This seemed odd, as we had the timeout values for the connection manager set to 180 seconds by then.  At this point one of the DBA’s found a post on the Teradata forum that had the clues to the puzzle: There is a separate “CommandTimeout” custom property on the Data source object that may needed to be adjusted for longer running queries.  I opened up the SSIS package, opened the data flow task that generated the partition list table and right-clicked on the data source. from the context menu, I selected “Show Advanced Editor” and found the property. Sure enough, it was set to 30 seconds. The CommandTimeout property can also be edited in the SSIS Properties sheet. In order to determine how long the timeout needed to be, I ran the query from the task in the development environment and received a response in a matter of seconds.  I then tried the same query against the production database and waited several minutes for a response. This did not seem to be a reasonable response time for the query involved, and indeed it wasn’t. The Teradata DBA’s adjusted the query governor settings for the service account I was testing with, and we were able to get the response back down under a minute.  Still, I set the CommandTimeout property to a much higher value in case the job was ever started during a time of high-demand on the production server. With this change in place, the job finally completed successfully.  The lesson learned for me was two-fold: Always compare query execution times between development and production environments, and don’t assume that production will always be faster.  With higher user demands, query governors, and a whole lot more data, the execution time of even what might seem to be simple queries can vary greatly. SSIS Connection time out settings do not affect command time outs.  Connection timeouts control how long the package will wait for a response from the server before assuming the server is not available or is not responding. Command time outs control how long a task will wait for results to start being returned before deciding that the server is not responding. Both lessons seem pretty straight forward, and I felt pretty sheepish once I finally figured out what the issue was.  To be fair though, In the 5+ years that I have been working with SSIS, I could only recall one other time where I had to set the CommandTimeout property, and that memory only resurfaced while I was penning this post.

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  • Database Owner Conundrum

    - by Johnm
    Have you ever restored a database from a production environment on Server A into a development environment on Server B and had some items, such as Service Broker, mysteriously cease functioning? You might want to consider reviewing the database owner property of the database. The Scenario Recently, I was developing some messaging functionality that utilized the Service Broker feature of SQL Server in a development environment. Within the instance of the development environment resided two databases: One was a restored version of a production database that we will call "RestoreDB". The second database was a brand new database that has yet to exist in the production environment that we will call "DevDB". The goal is to setup a communication path between RestoreDB and DevDB that will later be implemented into the production database. After implementing all of the Service Broker objects that are required to communicate within a database as well as between two databases on the same instance I found myself a bit confounded. My testing was showing that the communication was successful when it was occurring internally within DevDB; but the communication between RestoreDB and DevDB did not appear to be working. Profiler to the rescue After carefully reviewing my code for any misspellings, missing commas or any other minor items that might be a syntactical cause of failure, I decided to launch Profiler to aid in the troubleshooting. After simulating the cross database messaging, I noticed the following error appearing in Profiler: An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 33009, State: 2. The database owner SID recorded in the master database differs from the database owner SID recorded in database '[Database Name Here]'. You should correct this situation by resetting the owner of database '[Database Name Here]' using the ALTER AUTHORIZATION statement. Now, this error message is a helpful one. Not only does it identify the issue in plain language, it also provides a potential solution. An execution of the following query that utilizes the catalog view sys.transmission_queue revealed the same error message for each communication attempt: SELECT     * FROM        sys.transmission_queue; Seeing the situation as a learning opportunity I dove a bit deeper. Reviewing the database properties  The owner of a specific database can be easily viewed by right-clicking the database in SQL Server Management Studio and selecting the "properties" option. The owner is listed on the "General" page of the properties screen. In my scenario, the database in the production server was created by Frank the DBA; therefore his server login appeared as the owner: "ServerName\Frank". While this is interesting information, it certainly doesn't tell me much in regard to the SID (security identifier) and its existence, or lack thereof, in the master database as the error suggested. I pulled together the following query to gather more interesting information: SELECT     a.name     , a.owner_sid     , b.sid     , b.name     , b.type_desc FROM        master.sys.databases a     LEFT OUTER JOIN master.sys.server_principals b         ON a.owner_sid = b.sid WHERE     a.name not in ('master','tempdb','model','msdb'); This query also helped identify how many other user databases in the instance were experiencing the same issue. In this scenario, I saw that there were no matching SIDs in server_principals to the owner SID for my database. What login should be used as the database owner instead of Frank's? The system stored procedure sp_helplogins will provide a list of the valid logins that can be used. Here is an example of its use, revealing all available logins: EXEC sp_helplogins;  Fixing a hole The error message stated that the recommended solution was to execute the ALTER AUTHORIZATION statement. The full statement for this scenario would appear as follows: ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON DATABASE:: [Database Name Here] TO [Login Name]; Another option is to execute the following statement using the sp_changedbowner system stored procedure; but please keep in mind that this stored procedure has been deprecated and will likely disappear in future versions of SQL Server: EXEC dbo.sp_changedbowner @loginname = [Login Name]; .And They Lived Happily Ever After Upon changing the database owner to an existing login and simulating the inner and cross database messaging the errors have ceased. More importantly, all messages sent through this feature now successfully complete their journey. I have added the ownership change to my restoration script for the development environment.

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  • A Visual Studio Release Grows in Brooklyn

    - by andrewbrust
    Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan.  Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn.  How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here’s the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that.  NBC’s Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you’d need some inside knowledge to recognize that.  Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent.  Appreciating VS 2010’s value takes a bit more savvy.  Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product.  How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers?  Well, it can be tough.  Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited. Turns out there’s a lot of reasons.  Support fro SharePoint development is a big one.  In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best.  Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help.  There’s also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft’s cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform.  ASP.NET MVC, a “close-to-the-metal” Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS.  So too does jQuery, the Open Source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze.  The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to that Open Source project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor. Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in, and block selection.  If you’re not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute.  I’ll just say that for people who are developers these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs. The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010’s new debugging features.  This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it’s truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug.  Cool?  Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren’t the tester and weren’t present while the testing was being done.  Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred.  VS 2010 allows all that.  This could be the demise of the IWOMM (“it works on my machine”) syndrome. After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft’s competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010’s.  His answer was an earnest “we don’t think so.”  If that’s true, that’s a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams who adopt it.  It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient.  Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan! VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren’t the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now.  There’s also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7.  With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it’s fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age.  How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially when with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely?  Hard to say.  But if focusing on core value, including value that’s hard to play into a sexy demo, is part oft the answer, then Microsoft’s doing OK.  And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely. Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics?  I honestly don’t know, because it’s the market’s prerogative to pass that judgement.  I can say this though: based on today’s show, I think Microsoft’s been doing its homework.

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  • ASP.NET: Using pickup directory for outgoing e-mails

    - by DigiMortal
    Sending e-mails out from web applications is very common task. When we are working on or test our systems with real e-mail addresses we don’t want recipients to receive e-mails (specially if we are using some subset of real data9. In this posting I will show you how to make ASP.NET SMTP client to write e-mails to disc instead of sending them out. SMTP settings for web application I have seen many times the code where all SMTP information is kept in app settings just to read them in code and give to SMTP client. It is not necessary because we can define all these settings under system.web => mailsettings node. If you are using web.config to keep SMTP settings then all you have to do in your code is just to create SmtpClient with empty constructor. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); Empty constructor means that all settings are read from web.config file. What is pickup directory? If you want drastically raise e-mail throughput of your SMTP server then it is not very wise plan to communicate with it using SMTP protocol. it adds only additional overhead to your network and SMTP server. Okay, clients make connections, send messages out and it is also overhead we can avoid. If clients write their e-mails to some folder that SMTP server can access then SMTP server has e-mail forwarding as only resource-eager task to do. File operations are way faster than communication over SMTP protocol. The directory where clients write their e-mails as files is called pickup directory. By example, Exchange server has support for pickup directories. And as there are applications with a lot of users who want e-mail notifications then .NET SMTP client supports writing e-mails to pickup directory instead of sending them out. How to configure ASP.NET SMTP to use pickup directory? Let’s say, it is more than easy. It is very easy. This is all you need. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">       <specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\temp\maildrop\"/>     </smtp>   </mailSettings> </system.net> Now make sure you don’t miss come points: Pickup directory must physically exist because it is not created automatically. IIS (or Cassini) must have write permissions to pickup directory. Go through your code and look for hardcoded SMTP settings. Also take a look at all places in your code where you send out e-mails that there are not some custom settings used for SMTP! Also don’t forget that your mails will be written now to pickup directory and they are not sent out to recipients anymore. Advanced scenario: configuring SMTP client in code In some advanced scenarios you may need to support multiple SMTP servers. If configuration is dynamic or it is not kept in web.config you need to initialize your SmtpClient in code. This is all you need to do. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); smtpClient.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory; smtpClient.PickupDirectoryLocation = pickupFolder; Easy, isn’t it? i like when advanced scenarios end up with simple and elegant solutions but not with rocket science. Note for IIS SMTP service SMTP service of IIS is also able to use pickup directory. If you have set up IIS with SMTP service you can configure your ASP.NET application to use IIS pickup folder. In this case you have to use the following setting for delivery method. SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis You can set this setting also in web.config file. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="PickupDirectoryFromIis" />   </mailSettings> </system.net> Conclusion Who was still using different methods to avoid sending e-mails out in development or testing environment can now remove all the bad code from application and live on mail settings of ASP.NET. It is easy to configure and you have less code to support e-mails when you use built-in e-mail features wisely.

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  • Best way to store a large amount of game objects and update the ones onscreen

    - by user3002473
    Good afternoon guys! I'm a young beginner game developer working on my first large scale game project and I've run into a situation where I'm not quite sure what the best solution may be (if there is a lone solution). The question may be vague (if anyone can think of a better title after having read the question, please edit it) or broad but I'm not quite sure what to do and I thought it would help just to discuss the problem with people more educated in the field. Before we get started, here are some of the questions I've looked at for help in the past: Best way to keep track of game objects Elegant way to simulate large amounts of entities within a game world What is the most efficient container to store dynamic game objects in? I've also read articles about different data structures commonly used in games to store game objects such as this one about slot maps, but none of them are really what I'm looking for. Also, if it helps at all I'm using Python 3 to design the game. It has to be Python 3, if I could I would use C++ or Unityscript or something else, but I'm restricted to having to use Python 3. My game will be a form of side scroller shooter game. In said game the player will traverse large rooms with large amounts of enemies and other game objects to update (think some of the larger areas in Cave Story or Iji). The player obviously can't see the entire room all at once, so there is a viewport that follows the player around and renders only a selection of the room and the game objects that it contains. This is not a foreign concept. The part that's getting me confused has to do with how certain game objects are updated. Some of them are to be updated constantly, regardless of whether or not they can be seen. Other objects however are only to be updated when they are onscreen (for example, an enemy would only be updated to react to the player when it is onscreen or when it is in a certain range of the screen). Another problem is that game objects have to be easily referable by other game objects; something that happens in the player's update() method may affect another object in the world. Collision detection in games is always a serious problem. I need a way of containing the game objects such that it minimizes the number of cases when testing for collisions against one another. The final problem is that of creating and destroying game objects. I think this problem is pretty self explanatory. To store the game objects then I've considered a number of different methods. The original method I had was to simply store all the objects in a hash table by an id. This method was simple, and decently fast as it allows all the objects to be looked up in O(1) complexity, and also allows them to be deleted fairly easily. Hash collisions would not be a major problem; I wasn't originally planning on using computer generated ids to store the game objects I was going to rely on them all using ids given to them by the game designer (such names would be strings like 'Player' or 'EnemyWeapon4'), and even if I did use computer generated ids, if I used a decent hashing algorithm then the chances of collisions would be around 1 in 4 billion. The problem with using a hash table however is that it is inefficient in checking to see what objects are in range of the viewport. Considering the fact that certain game objects move (as well as the viewport itself), the only solution I could think of in order to only update objects that are in the viewport would be to iterate through every object in the hash table and check if it is in the viewport or not, updating only the ones that are in the valid area. This would be incredibly slow in scenarios where the amount of game objects exceeds 500, or even 200. The second solution was to store everything in a 2-d list. The world is partitioned up into cells (a tilemap essentially), where each cell or tile is the same size and is square. Each cell would contain a list of the game objects that are currently occupying it (each game object would be inserted into a cell depending on the center of the object's collision mask). A 2-d list would allow me to take the top-left and bottom-right corners of the viewport and easily grab a rectangular area of the grid containing only the cells containing entities that are in valid range to be updated. This method also solves the problem of collision detection; when I take an entity I can find the cell that it is currently in, then check only against entities in it's cell and the 8 cells around it. One problem with this system however is that it prohibits easy lookup of game objects. One solution I had would be to simultaneously keep a hash table that would contain all the positions of the objects in the 2-d list indexed by the id of said object. The major problem with a 2-d list is that it would need to be rebuilt every single game frame (along with the hash table of object positions), which may be a serious detriment to game speed. Both systems have ups and downs and seem to solve some of each other's problems, however using them both together doesn't seem like the best solution either. If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, comments, opinions or solutions on new data structures or better implementations of the existing data structures I have in mind, please post, any and all criticism and help is welcome. Thanks in advance! EDIT: Please don't close the question because it has a bad title, I'm just bad with names!

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  • Coping with infrastructure upgrades

    - by Fatherjack
    A common topic for questions on SQL Server forums is how to plan and implement upgrades to SQL Server. Moving from old to new hardware or moving from one version of SQL Server to another. There are other circumstances where upgrades of other systems affect SQL Server DBAs. For example, where I work at the moment there is an Microsoft Exchange (email) server upgrade in progress. It it being handled by a different team so I’m not wholly sure on the details but we are in a situation where there are currently 2 Exchange email servers – the old one and the new one. Users mail boxes are being transferred in a planned process but as we approach the old server being turned off we have to also make sure that our SQL Servers get updated to use the new SMTP server for all of the SQL Agent notifications, SSIS packages etc. My servers have a number of profiles so that various jobs can send emails on behalf of various departments and different systems. This means there are lots of places that the old server name needs to be replaced by the new one. Anyone who has set up DBMail and enjoyed the click-tastic odyssey of screens to create Profiles and Accounts and so on and so forth ought to seek some professional help in my opinion. It’s a nightmare of back and forth settings changes and it stinks. I wasn’t looking forward to heading into this mess of a UI and changing the old Exchange server name for the new one on all my SQL Instances for all of the accounts I have set up. So I did what any Englishmen with a shed would do, I decided to take it apart and see if I can fix it another way. I took a guess that we are going to be working in MSDB and Books OnLine was remarkably helpful and amongst a lot of information told me about a couple of procedures that can be used to interrogate DBMail settings. USE [msdb] -- It's where all the good stuff is kept GO EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_profile_sp; EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_account_sp; Both of these procedures take optional parameters with the same name – ID and Name. If you provide an ID or a name then the results you get back are for that specific Profile or Account. Otherwise you get details of all Profiles and Accounts on the server you are connected to. As you can see (click for a bigger image), the Account has the SMTP server information in the servername column. We want to change that value to NewSMTP.Contoso.com. Now it appears that the procedure we are looking at gets it’s data from the sysmail_account and sysmail_server tables, you can get the results the stored procedure provides if you run the code below. SELECT [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] FROM dbo.sysmail_account AS sa; SELECT [account_id] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [credential_id] , [use_default_credentials] , [enable_ssl] , [flags] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] , [timeout] FROM dbo.sysmail_server AS sms Now, we have no real idea how these tables are linked and whether making an update direct to one or other of them is going to do what we want or whether it will entirely cripple our ability to send email from SQL Server so we wont touch those tables with any UPDATE TSQL. So, back to Books OnLine then and we find sysmail_update_account_sp. It’s exactly what we need. The examples in BOL take the form (as below) of having every parameter explicitly defined. Not wanting to totally obliterate the existing values by not passing values in all of the parameters I set to writing some code to gather the existing data from the tables and re-write the SMTP server name and then execute the resulting TSQL. IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#sysmailprofiles') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #sysmailprofiles GO CREATE TABLE #sysmailprofiles ( account_id INT , [name] VARCHAR(50) , [description] VARCHAR(500) , email_address VARCHAR(500) , display_name VARCHAR(500) , replyto_address VARCHAR(500) , servertype VARCHAR(10) , servername VARCHAR(100) , port INT , username VARCHAR(100) , use_default_credentials VARCHAR(1) , ENABLE_ssl VARCHAR(1) ) INSERT [#sysmailprofiles] ( [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [use_default_credentials] , [ENABLE_ssl] ) EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_help_account_sp] DECLARE @TSQL NVARCHAR(1000) SELECT TOP 1 @TSQL = 'EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_update_account_sp] @account_id = ' + CAST([s].[account_id] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @account_name = ''' + [s].[name] + '''' + ', @email_address = N''' + [s].[email_address] + '''' + ', @display_name = N''' + [s].[display_name] + '''' + ', @replyto_address = N''' + s.replyto_address + '''' + ', @description = N''' + [s].[description] + '''' + ', @mailserver_name = ''NEWSMTP.contoso.com''' + +', @mailserver_type = ' + [s].[servertype] + ', @port = ' + CAST([s].[port] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @username = ' + COALESCE([s].[username], '''''') + ', @use_default_credentials =' + CAST(s.[use_default_credentials] AS VARCHAR(1)) + ', @enable_ssl =' + [s].[ENABLE_ssl] FROM [#sysmailprofiles] AS s WHERE [s].[servername] = 'SMTP.Contoso.com' SELECT @tsql EXEC [sys].[sp_executesql] @tsql This worked well for me and testing the email function EXEC dbo.sp_send_dbmail afterwards showed that the settings were indeed using our new Exchange server. It was only later in writing this blog that I tried running the sysmail_update_account_sp procedure with only the SMTP server name parameter value specified. Despite what Books OnLine might intimate, you can do this and only the values for parameters specified get changed. If a parameter is not specified in the execution of the procedure then the values remain unchanged. This renders most of the above script unnecessary as I could have simply specified the account_id that I want to amend and the new value for the parameter I want to update. EXEC sysmail_update_account_sp @account_id = 1, @mailserver_name = 'NEWSMTP.Contoso.com' This wasn’t going to be the main reason for this post, it was meant to describe how to capture values from a stored procedure and use them in dynamic TSQL but instead we are here and (re)learning the fact that Books Online is a little flawed in places. It is a fantastic resource for anyone working with SQL Server but the reader must adopt an enquiring frame of mind and use a little curiosity to try simple variations on examples to fully understand the code you are working with. I think the author(s) of this part of Books OnLine missed an opportunity to include a third example that had fewer than all parameters specified to give a lead to this method existing.

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  • Gamification at OOW

    - by erikanollwebb
    Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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  • Texture and Lighting Issue in 3D world

    - by noah
    Im using OpenGL ES 1.1 for iPhone. I'm attempting to implement a skybox in my 3d world and started out by following one of Jeff Lamarches tutorials on creating textures. Heres the tutorial: iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-part-6_25.html Ive successfully added the image to my 3d world but am not sure why the lighting on the other shapes has changed so much. I want the shapes to be the original color and have the image in the background. Before: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ojmb8793vj514h0/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.34.44%20PM.png After: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8v6yvur8amgudia/Screen%20Shot%202012-10-01%20at%205.35.31%20PM.png Heres the init OpenGL: - (void)initOpenGLES1 { glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); // Enable lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); // Turn the first light on glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); const GLfloat lightAmbient[] = {0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightDiffuse[] = {0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0}; const GLfloat matAmbient[] = {0.3, 0.3, 0.3, 0.5}; const GLfloat matDiffuse[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat matSpecular[] = {1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; const GLfloat lightPosition[] = {0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0}; const GLfloat lightShininess = 100.0; //Configure OpenGL lighting glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_LIGHT0); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_AMBIENT, matAmbient); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_DIFFUSE, matDiffuse); glMaterialfv(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SPECULAR, matSpecular); glMaterialf(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_SHININESS, lightShininess); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_AMBIENT, lightAmbient); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_DIFFUSE, lightDiffuse); glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, lightPosition); // Define a cutoff angle glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_SPOT_CUTOFF, 40.0); // Set the clear color glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1.0f); // Projection Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); CGSize layerSize = self.view.layer.frame.size; // Swapped height and width for landscape mode gluPerspective(45.0f, (GLfloat)layerSize.height / (GLfloat)layerSize.width, 0.1f, 750.0f); [self initSkyBox]; // Modelview Matrix config glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadIdentity(); // This next line is not really needed as it is the default for OpenGL ES glTexEnvi(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL_MODULATE); glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); glDisable(GL_BLEND); // Enable depth testing glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); glDepthMask(GL_TRUE); } Heres the drawSkybox that gets called in the drawFrame method: -(void)drawSkyBox { glDisable(GL_LIGHTING); glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); static const SSVertex3D vertices[] = { {-1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, 1.0, -0.0}, {-1.0, -1.0, -0.0}, { 1.0, -1.0, -0.0} }; static const SSVertex3D normals[] = { {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0}, {0.0, 0.0, 1.0} }; static const GLfloat texCoords[] = { 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0 }; glLoadIdentity(); glTranslatef(0.0, 0.0, -3.0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 0, vertices); glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, 0, normals); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, texCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, 4); glDisableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glEnable(GL_LIGHTING); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Heres the init Skybox: -(void)initSkyBox { // Turn necessary features on glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glEnable(GL_BLEND); glBlendFunc(GL_ONE, GL_SRC_COLOR); // Bind the number of textures we need, in this case one. glGenTextures(1, &texture[0]); // create a texture obj, give unique ID glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); // load our new texture name into the current texture glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"space" ofType:@"jpg"]; NSData *texData = [[NSData alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:path]; UIImage *image = [[UIImage alloc] initWithData:texData]; GLuint width = CGImageGetWidth(image.CGImage); GLuint height = CGImageGetHeight(image.CGImage); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); void *imageData = malloc( height * width * 4 ); // times 4 because will write one byte for rgb and alpha CGContextRef cgContext = CGBitmapContextCreate( imageData, width, height, 8, 4 * width, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Big ); // Flip the Y-axis CGContextTranslateCTM (cgContext, 0, height); CGContextScaleCTM (cgContext, 1.0, -1.0); CGColorSpaceRelease( colorSpace ); CGContextClearRect( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ) ); CGContextDrawImage( cgContext, CGRectMake( 0, 0, width, height ), image.CGImage ); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, imageData); CGContextRelease(cgContext); free(imageData); [image release]; [texData release]; } Any help is greatly appreciated.

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  • SQL SERVER – ?Finding Out What Changed in a Deleted Database – Notes from the Field #041

    - by Pinal Dave
    [Note from Pinal]: This is a 41th episode of Notes from the Field series. The real world is full of challenges. When we are reading theory or book, we sometimes do not realize how real world reacts works and that is why we have the series notes from the field, which is extremely popular with developers and DBA. Let us talk about interesting problem of how to figure out what has changed in the DELETED database. Well, you think I am just throwing the words but in reality this kind of problems are making our DBA’s life interesting and in this blog post we have amazing story from Brian Kelley about the same subject. In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Brian Kelley explains a how to find out what has changed in deleted database. Read the experience of Brian in his own words. Sometimes, one of the hardest questions to answer is, “What changed?” A similar question is, “Did anything change other than what we expected to change?” The First Place to Check – Schema Changes History Report: Pinal has recently written on the Schema Changes History report and its requirement for the Default Trace to be enabled. This is always the first place I look when I am trying to answer these questions. There are a couple of obvious limitations with the Schema Changes History report. First, while it reports what changed, when it changed, and who changed it, other than the base DDL operation (CREATE, ALTER, DELETE), it does not present what the changes actually were. This is not something covered by the default trace. Second, the default trace has a fixed size. When it hits that size, the changes begin to overwrite. As a result, if you wait too long, especially on a busy database server, you may find your changes rolled off. But the Database Has Been Deleted! Pinal cited another issue, and that’s the inability to run the Schema Changes History report if the database has been dropped. Thankfully, all is not lost. One thing to remember is that the Schema Changes History report is ultimately driven by the Default Trace. As you may have guess, it’s a trace, like any other database trace. And the Default Trace does write to disk. The trace files are written to the defined LOG directory for that SQL Server instance and have a prefix of log_: Therefore, you can read the trace files like any other. Tip: Copy the files to a working directory. Otherwise, you may occasionally receive a file in use error. With the Default Trace files, if you ask the question early enough, you can see the information for a deleted database just the same as any other database. Testing with a Deleted Database: Here’s a short script that will create a database, create a schema, create an object, and then drop the database. Without the database, you can’t do a standard Schema Changes History report. CREATE DATABASE DeleteMe; GO USE DeleteMe; GO CREATE SCHEMA Test AUTHORIZATION dbo; GO CREATE TABLE Test.Foo (FooID INT); GO USE MASTER; GO DROP DATABASE DeleteMe; GO This sets up the perfect situation where we can’t retrieve the information using the Schema Changes History report but where it’s still available. Finding the Information: I’ve sorted the columns so I can see the Event Subclass, the Start Time, the Database Name, the Object Name, and the Object Type at the front, but otherwise, I’m just looking at the trace files using SQL Profiler. As you can see, the information is definitely there: Therefore, even in the case of a dropped/deleted database, you can still determine who did what and when. You can even determine who dropped the database (loginame is captured). The key is to get the default trace files in a timely manner in order to extract the information. If you want to get started with performance tuning and database security 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 Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • VirtualBox appliance for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products

    - by chlander
    It's been quite awhile since we last blogged. This blog is written by Leif Lourie, a Curriculum Developer for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) products. For the last 8 years, Leif has worked as a Curriculum Developer for many of the telecom-oriented products that Oracle offers. He has been working in the telecom industry for about 25 years and has also worked as a software developer, project manager, and solutions architect. He is currently working on courseware for an upcoming release for one of the Service Delivery Platform products. Thanks to Leif not only for this blog, but for making the VM described in the blog available. Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director To be able to download, install and test a product within a day is many times very important for people that are doing the primary evaluation of a software product. If it takes longer, it will require a bigger effort, like a proof-of-concept project with many people involved. Of course, if the product is chosen for a more thorough test, it will probably happen anyway, but then maybe with focus on integration instead of product features. We have a long tradition of creating complex software that is easy to install and test and we have often been praised for the ease of getting our products up and running. One key for this has been that there has always been an installer for Windows, as well as for the production environments that usually are Unix and Linux. And, the windows installer has, in most cases, been released for developing and testing purposes. Lately, this has changed. Our products are very seldom released for the Windows platform, at all. And even the Linux versions are almost always released for 64-bit systems. This is creating problems for many of the people that want to try out our products, since few have access to a 64-bit Linux system of the right platform. Most of us are using a laptop with Windows or Mac OS. Some of us are using Linux or Solaris, but probably a non certified distribution for the product you want to test. My job, among other things, is to develop hands-on practices for our products. For me, it is crucial to have access to environments for installing and using our products. For this reason I have been using virtual machines for many years.I have a ready-made base system, with the necessary tools installed for all the products I create hands-on practices for. Whenever I start working on hands-on practices for a new product or a new version, I just copy the base system and start working with a clean slate. This saves me a lot of time! Now, I would like to start saving time for my favorite student: You! If you are using our products and regularly test new versions you might benefit from the virtual machine that is now available on Oracle Technology Network: The Virtual Machine for the Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform (SDP) Products. This virtual machine contains an installation of the 64-bit version of Oracle Enterprise Linux, version 6. It also has Oracle Database Express Edition (XE), Oracle Java and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse installed. By using Oracle VM VirtualBox you may use Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris on your laptop. VirtualBox can be installed on top of any of these platforms and give you the ability to run virtual machines in your laptop. After downloading and starting the virtual machine you will also need to download the installation files for the product you want to test; for example Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper or Oracle Communications Online Mediation Controller. In some cases there are lessons and practices available for the products. The freely available courses are listed in Oracle Learning Library as a Collection of Oracle Communications Service Delivery Platform Courses. As time goes by, we will make this list collection bigger. Also, the goal is to update the virtual machine about one to two times per year. So you will always be able to get a well maintained virtual machine for the Service Delivery Platform products from us. We Value Your Feedback If you would like to suggest improvements or report issues on any of the product documentation, curriculum, or training produced by the Oracle Communications Information Development team, you can use these channels: Email [email protected]. Post a comment on this blog. Thanks for reading!

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  • Modularity through HTTP

    - by Michael Williamson
    As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

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