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  • tables wrapping to next line when width 100%

    - by jmo
    I'm encountering some weirdness with tables in css. The layout is fairly simple, a fixed-width nav bar on the left and the content on the right. When the content includes a table with a width of 100% the table ends up getting pushed down until it has room to take up the full width of the screen (instead of just the area to the right of the nav bar). If I remove the width=100% from the table's css, then it looks fine, but obviously the table doesn't grow to fill the space of the div. The problem is that i want the table to grow and shrink with the window but still stay in the bounds of its div. Thanks. Here's a simple example: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Test</title> <style type="text/css"> #content { padding-right:20px; background:white; overflow:hidden; margin:20px; } #content .column { position:relative; padding-bottom: 20010px; margin-bottom: -20000px; } #center { width:100%; padding-top:15px; } body { min-width:700px; } #left { width: 330px; padding: 0 10px; padding-top:10px; float:left; } .tableData { width:100%; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="content"> <div class="column" id="left"> <div> Some text goes in here<br/> some more text<br/> some more text<br/> some more text<br/> some more text<br/> some more text<br/> </div> </div> <div class="column" id="center"> Some text at the top; <hr/> <table class="tableData"> <thead> <tr><th>A</th><th>B</th><th>C</th></tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>A1 A1 A1 A1</td> <td>B1 B1 B1 B1</td> <td>C1 C1 C1 C1 C</td> </tr> <tr> <td>A2 A2 A2 A2 </td> <td>B2 B2 B2 B2 </td> <td>C2 C2 C2 C2</td> </tr> <tr> <td>A3 A3 A3 A3 A3 </td> <td>B3 B3 B3 B3 B3 </td> <td>C3 C3 C3 C3 C3</td> </tr> <tr> <td>A4 A4 A4 A4 A4</td> <td>B4 B4 B4 B4 B4</td> <td>C4 C4 C4 C4 C4</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </div> </div> </body> </html>

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  • Drop down box is always 100%

    - by danit
    I have the following HTML: <div style="30px;"> <table width="100%;"> <tr> <td> <SELECT name="guidelinks"> <OPTION SELECTED value="jex6.htm">Page 1 <OPTION value="jex7.htm">My Cool Page </SELECT> </td> </tr> </table> When this drop down box is displayed the width is 100%, not 30px, can anyone explain why and how to fix this? Unofrtunatly I cant edit the code on the CSS

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  • Rendering ASP.NET MVC Views to String

    - by Rick Strahl
    It's not uncommon in my applications that I require longish text output that does not have to be rendered into the HTTP output stream. The most common scenario I have for 'template driven' non-Web text is for emails of all sorts. Logon confirmations and verifications, email confirmations for things like orders, status updates or scheduler notifications - all of which require merged text output both within and sometimes outside of Web applications. On other occasions I also need to capture the output from certain views for logging purposes. Rather than creating text output in code, it's much nicer to use the rendering mechanism that ASP.NET MVC already provides by way of it's ViewEngines - using Razor or WebForms views - to render output to a string. This is nice because it uses the same familiar rendering mechanism that I already use for my HTTP output and it also solves the problem of where to store the templates for rendering this content in nothing more than perhaps a separate view folder. The good news is that ASP.NET MVC's rendering engine is much more modular than the full ASP.NET runtime engine which was a real pain in the butt to coerce into rendering output to string. With MVC the rendering engine has been separated out from core ASP.NET runtime, so it's actually a lot easier to get View output into a string. Getting View Output from within an MVC Application If you need to generate string output from an MVC and pass some model data to it, the process to capture this output is fairly straight forward and involves only a handful of lines of code. The catch is that this particular approach requires that you have an active ControllerContext that can be passed to the view. This means that the following approach is limited to access from within Controller methods. Here's a class that wraps the process and provides both instance and static methods to handle the rendering:/// <summary> /// Class that renders MVC views to a string using the /// standard MVC View Engine to render the view. /// /// Note: This class can only be used within MVC /// applications that have an active ControllerContext. /// </summary> public class ViewRenderer { /// <summary> /// Required Controller Context /// </summary> protected ControllerContext Context { get; set; } public ViewRenderer(ControllerContext controllerContext) { Context = controllerContext; } /// <summary> /// Renders a full MVC view to a string. Will render with the full MVC /// View engine including running _ViewStart and merging into _Layout /// </summary> /// <param name="viewPath"> /// The path to the view to render. Either in same controller, shared by /// name or as fully qualified ~/ path including extension /// </param> /// <param name="model">The model to render the view with</param> /// <returns>String of the rendered view or null on error</returns> public string RenderView(string viewPath, object model) { return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, false); } /// <summary> /// Renders a partial MVC view to string. Use this method to render /// a partial view that doesn't merge with _Layout and doesn't fire /// _ViewStart. /// </summary> /// <param name="viewPath"> /// The path to the view to render. Either in same controller, shared by /// name or as fully qualified ~/ path including extension /// </param> /// <param name="model">The model to pass to the viewRenderer</param> /// <returns>String of the rendered view or null on error</returns> public string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model) { return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, true); } public static string RenderView(string viewPath, object model, ControllerContext controllerContext) { ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext); return renderer.RenderView(viewPath, model); } public static string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model, ControllerContext controllerContext) { ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext); return renderer.RenderPartialView(viewPath, model); } protected string RenderViewToStringInternal(string viewPath, object model, bool partial = false) { // first find the ViewEngine for this view ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult = null; if (partial) viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(Context, viewPath); else viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(Context, viewPath, null); if (viewEngineResult == null) throw new FileNotFoundException(Properties.Resources.ViewCouldNotBeFound); // get the view and attach the model to view data var view = viewEngineResult.View; Context.Controller.ViewData.Model = model; string result = null; using (var sw = new StringWriter()) { var ctx = new ViewContext(Context, view, Context.Controller.ViewData, Context.Controller.TempData, sw); view.Render(ctx, sw); result = sw.ToString(); } return result; } } The key is the RenderViewToStringInternal method. The method first tries to find the view to render based on its path which can either be in the current controller's view path or the shared view path using its simple name (PasswordRecovery) or alternately by its full virtual path (~/Views/Templates/PasswordRecovery.cshtml). This code should work both for Razor and WebForms views although I've only tried it with Razor Views. Note that WebForms Views might actually be better for plain text as Razor adds all sorts of white space into its output when there are code blocks in the template. The Web Forms engine provides more accurate rendering for raw text scenarios. Once a view engine is found the view to render can be retrieved. Views in MVC render based on data that comes off the controller like the ViewData which contains the model along with the actual ViewData and ViewBag. From the View and some of the Context data a ViewContext is created which is then used to render the view with. The View picks up the Model and other data from the ViewContext internally and processes the View the same it would be processed if it were to send its output into the HTTP output stream. The difference is that we can override the ViewContext's output stream which we provide and capture into a StringWriter(). After rendering completes the result holds the output string. If an error occurs the error behavior is similar what you see with regular MVC errors - you get a full yellow screen of death including the view error information with the line of error highlighted. It's your responsibility to handle the error - or let it bubble up to your regular Controller Error filter if you have one. To use the simple class you only need a single line of code if you call the static methods. Here's an example of some Controller code that is used to send a user notification to a customer via email in one of my applications:[HttpPost] public ActionResult ContactSeller(ContactSellerViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); var entryBus = new busEntry(); var entry = entryBus.LoadByDisplayId(model.EntryId); if ( string.IsNullOrEmpty(model.Email) ) entryBus.ValidationErrors.Add("Email address can't be empty.","Email"); if ( string.IsNullOrEmpty(model.Message)) entryBus.ValidationErrors.Add("Message can't be empty.","Message"); model.EntryId = entry.DisplayId; model.EntryTitle = entry.Title; if (entryBus.ValidationErrors.Count > 0) { ErrorDisplay.AddMessages(entryBus.ValidationErrors); ErrorDisplay.ShowError("Please correct the following:"); } else { string message = ViewRenderer.RenderView("~/views/template/ContactSellerEmail.cshtml",model, ControllerContext); string title = entry.Title + " (" + entry.DisplayId + ") - " + App.Configuration.ApplicationName; AppUtils.SendEmail(title, message, model.Email, entry.User.Email, false, false)) } return View(model); } Simple! The view in this case is just a plain MVC view and in this case it's a very simple plain text email message (edited for brevity here) that is created and sent off:@model ContactSellerViewModel @{ Layout = null; }re: @Model.EntryTitle @Model.ListingUrl @Model.Message ** SECURITY ADVISORY - AVOID SCAMS ** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home ** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping ** More Info: @(App.Configuration.ApplicationBaseUrl)scams.html Obviously this is a very simple view (I edited out more from this page to keep it brief) -  but other template views are much more complex HTML documents or long messages that are occasionally updated and they are a perfect fit for Razor rendering. It even works with nested partial views and _layout pages. Partial Rendering Notice that I'm rendering a full View here. In the view I explicitly set the Layout=null to avoid pulling in _layout.cshtml for this view. This can also be controlled externally by calling the RenderPartial method instead: string message = ViewRenderer.RenderPartialView("~/views/template/ContactSellerEmail.cshtml",model, ControllerContext); with this line of code no layout page (or _viewstart) will be loaded, so the output generated is just what's in the view. I find myself using Partials most of the time when rendering templates, since the target of templates usually tend to be emails or other HTML fragment like output, so the RenderPartialView() method is definitely useful to me. Rendering without a ControllerContext The preceding class is great when you're need template rendering from within MVC controller actions or anywhere where you have access to the request Controller. But if you don't have a controller context handy - maybe inside a utility function that is static, a non-Web application, or an operation that runs asynchronously in ASP.NET - which makes using the above code impossible. I haven't found a way to manually create a Controller context to provide the ViewContext() what it needs from outside of the MVC infrastructure. However, there are ways to accomplish this,  but they are a bit more complex. It's possible to host the RazorEngine on your own, which side steps all of the MVC framework and HTTP and just deals with the raw rendering engine. I wrote about this process in Hosting the Razor Engine in Non-Web Applications a long while back. It's quite a process to create a custom Razor engine and runtime, but it allows for all sorts of flexibility. There's also a RazorEngine CodePlex project that does something similar. I've been meaning to check out the latter but haven't gotten around to it since I have my own code to do this. The trick to hosting the RazorEngine to have it behave properly inside of an ASP.NET application and properly cache content so templates aren't constantly rebuild and reparsed. Anyway, in the same app as above I have one scenario where no ControllerContext is available: I have a background scheduler running inside of the app that fires on timed intervals. This process could be external but because it's lightweight we decided to fire it right inside of the ASP.NET app on a separate thread. In my app the code that renders these templates does something like this:var model = new SearchNotificationViewModel() { Entries = entries, Notification = notification, User = user }; // TODO: Need logging for errors sending string razorError = null; var result = AppUtils.RenderRazorTemplate("~/views/template/SearchNotificationTemplate.cshtml", model, razorError); which references a couple of helper functions that set up my RazorFolderHostContainer class:public static string RenderRazorTemplate(string virtualPath, object model,string errorMessage = null) { var razor = AppUtils.CreateRazorHost(); var path = virtualPath.Replace("~/", "").Replace("~", "").Replace("/", "\\"); var merged = razor.RenderTemplateToString(path, model); if (merged == null) errorMessage = razor.ErrorMessage; return merged; } /// <summary> /// Creates a RazorStringHostContainer and starts it /// Call .Stop() when you're done with it. /// /// This is a static instance /// </summary> /// <param name="virtualPath"></param> /// <param name="binBasePath"></param> /// <param name="forceLoad"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static RazorFolderHostContainer CreateRazorHost(string binBasePath = null, bool forceLoad = false) { if (binBasePath == null) { if (HttpContext.Current != null) binBasePath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/"); else binBasePath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; } if (_RazorHost == null || forceLoad) { if (!binBasePath.EndsWith("\\")) binBasePath += "\\"; //var razor = new RazorStringHostContainer(); var razor = new RazorFolderHostContainer(); razor.TemplatePath = binBasePath; binBasePath += "bin\\"; razor.BaseBinaryFolder = binBasePath; razor.UseAppDomain = false; razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "ClassifiedsBusiness.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "ClassifiedsWeb.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Utilities.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Web.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Web.Mvc.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Web.dll"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("System.Web"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("ClassifiedsBusiness"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("ClassifiedsWeb"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("Westwind.Web"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("Westwind.Utilities"); _RazorHost = razor; _RazorHost.Start(); //_RazorHost.Engine.Configuration.CompileToMemory = false; } return _RazorHost; } The RazorFolderHostContainer essentially is a full runtime that mimics a folder structure like a typical Web app does including caching semantics and compiling code only if code changes on disk. It maps a folder hierarchy to views using the ~/ path syntax. The host is then configured to add assemblies and namespaces. Unfortunately the engine is not exactly like MVC's Razor - the expression expansion and code execution are the same, but some of the support methods like sections, helpers etc. are not all there so templates have to be a bit simpler. There are other folder hosts provided as well to directly execute templates from strings (using RazorStringHostContainer). The following is an example of an HTML email template @inherits RazorHosting.RazorTemplateFolderHost <ClassifiedsWeb.SearchNotificationViewModel> <html> <head> <title>Search Notifications</title> <style> body { margin: 5px;font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 10pt;} h3 { color: SteelBlue; } .entry-item { border-bottom: 1px solid grey; padding: 8px; margin-bottom: 5px; } </style> </head> <body> Hello @Model.User.Name,<br /> <p>Below are your Search Results for the search phrase:</p> <h3>@Model.Notification.SearchPhrase</h3> <small>since @TimeUtils.ShortDateString(Model.Notification.LastSearch)</small> <hr /> You can see that the syntax is a little different. Instead of the familiar @model header the raw Razor  @inherits tag is used to specify the template base class (which you can extend). I took a quick look through the feature set of RazorEngine on CodePlex (now Github I guess) and the template implementation they use is closer to MVC's razor but there are other differences. In the end don't expect exact behavior like MVC templates if you use an external Razor rendering engine. This is not what I would consider an ideal solution, but it works well enough for this project. My biggest concern is the overhead of hosting a second razor engine in a Web app and the fact that here the differences in template rendering between 'real' MVC Razor views and another RazorEngine really are noticeable. You win some, you lose some It's extremely nice to see that if you have a ControllerContext handy (which probably addresses 99% of Web app scenarios) rendering a view to string using the native MVC Razor engine is pretty simple. Kudos on making that happen - as it solves a problem I see in just about every Web application I work on. But it is a bummer that a ControllerContext is required to make this simple code work. It'd be really sweet if there was a way to render views without being so closely coupled to the ASP.NET or MVC infrastructure that requires a ControllerContext. Alternately it'd be nice to have a way for an MVC based application to create a minimal ControllerContext from scratch - maybe somebody's been down that path. I tried for a few hours to come up with a way to make that work but gave up in the soup of nested contexts (MVC/Controller/View/Http). I suspect going down this path would be similar to hosting the ASP.NET runtime requiring a WorkerRequest. Brrr…. The sad part is that it seems to me that a View should really not require much 'context' of any kind to render output to string. Yes there are a few things that clearly are required like paths to the virtual and possibly the disk paths to the root of the app, but beyond that view rendering should not require much. But, no such luck. For now custom RazorHosting seems to be the only way to make Razor rendering go outside of the MVC context… Resources Full ViewRenderer.cs source code from Westwind.Web.Mvc library Hosting the Razor Engine for Non-Web Applications RazorEngine on GitHub© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET   ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Microsoft, please help me diagnose TFS Administration permission issues!

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    I recently had a fun time trying to debug a permission issue I ran into using TFS 2010’s TfsConfig. Update 5th March 2010 – In its style of true excellence my company has added rant to its “Suggestions for Better TFS”. <rant> I was trying to run the TfsConfig tool and I kept getting the message: “TF55038: You don't have sufficient privileges to run this tool. Contact your Team Foundation system administrator." This message made me think that it was something to do with the Install permissions as it is always recommended to use a single account to do every install of TFS. I did not install the original TFS on our network and my account was not used to do the TFS2010 install. But I did do the upgrade from 2010 beta 2 to 2010 RC with my current account. So I proceeded to do some checking: Am I in the administrators group on the server? Figure: Yes, I am in the administrators group on the server Am I in the Administration Console users list? Figure: Yes, I am in the Administration Console users list Have I reapplied the permissions in the Administration Console users list ticking all the options? Figure: Make sure you check all of the boxed if you want to have all the admin options Figure: Yes, I have made sure that all my options are correct. Am I in the Team Foundation administrators group? Figure: Yes, I am in the Team Foundation Administrators group Is my account explicitly SysAdmin on the Database server? Figure: Yes, I do have explicit SysAdmin on the database Can you guess what the problem was? The command line window was not running as the administrator! As with most other applications there should be an explicit error message that states: "You are not currently running in administrator mode; please restart the command line with elevated privileges!" This would have saved me 30 minutes, although I agree that I should change my name to Muppet and just be done with it. </rant>   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,Administration,Team Foundation Server Admin Console,TFS Admin Console

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  • Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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  • Entity Framework Code-First, OData & Windows Phone Client

    - by Jon Galloway
    Entity Framework Code-First is the coolest thing since sliced bread, Windows  Phone is the hottest thing since Tickle-Me-Elmo and OData is just too great to ignore. As part of the Full Stack project, we wanted to put them together, which turns out to be pretty easy… once you know how.   EF Code-First CTP5 is available now and there should be very few breaking changes in the release edition, which is due early in 2011.  Note: EF Code-First evolved rapidly and many of the existing documents and blog posts which were written with earlier versions, may now be obsolete or at least misleading.   Code-First? With traditional Entity Framework you start with a database and from that you generate “entities” – classes that bridge between the relational database and your object oriented program. With Code-First (Magic-Unicorn) (see Hanselman’s write up and this later write up by Scott Guthrie) the Entity Framework looks at classes you created and says “if I had created these classes, the database would have to have looked like this…” and creates the database for you! By deriving your entity collections from DbSet and exposing them via a class that derives from DbContext, you "turn on" database backing for your POCO with a minimum of code and no hidden designer or configuration files. POCO == Plain Old CLR Objects Your entity objects can be used throughout your applications - in web applications, console applications, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications, etc. In our case, we'll want to read and update data from a Windows Phone client application, so we'll expose the entities through a DataService and hook the Windows Phone client application to that data via proxies.  Piece of Pie.  Easy as cake. The Demo Architecture To see this at work, we’ll create an ASP.NET/MVC application which will act as the host for our Data Service.  We’ll create an incredibly simple data layer using EF Code-First on top of SQLCE4 and we’ll expose the data in a WCF Data Service using the oData protocol.  Our Windows Phone 7 client will instantiate  the data context via a URI and load the data asynchronously. Setting up the Server project with MVC 3, EF Code First, and SQL CE 4 Create a new application of type ASP.NET MVC 3 and name it DeadSimpleServer.  We need to add the latest SQLCE4 and Entity Framework Code First CTP's to our project. Fortunately, NuGet makes that really easy. Open the Package Manager Console (View / Other Windows / Package Manager Console) and type in "Install-Package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact" at the PM> command prompt. Since NuGet handles dependencies for you, you'll see that it installs everything you need to use Entity Framework Code First in your project. PM> install-package EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 'SQLCE (= 4.0.8435.1)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'EFCodeFirst (= 0.8)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done 'WebActivator (= 1.0.0.0)' not installed. Attempting to retrieve dependency from source... Done You are downloading SQLCE from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' You are downloading EFCodeFirst from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206497. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' Successfully installed 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' You are downloading EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact from Microsoft, the license agreement to which is available at http://173.203.67.148/licenses/SQLCE/EULA_ENU.rtf. Check the package for additional dependencies, which may come with their own license agreement(s). Your use of the package and dependencies constitutes your acceptance of their license agreements. If you do not accept the license agreement(s), then delete the relevant components from your device. Successfully installed 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' Successfully added 'SQLCE 4.0.8435.1' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'WebActivator 1.0.0.0' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Successfully added 'EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact 0.8' to EfCodeFirst-CTP5 Note: We're using SQLCE 4 with Entity Framework here because they work really well together from a development scenario, but you can of course use Entity Framework Code First with other databases supported by Entity framework. Creating The Model using EF Code First Now we can create our model class. Right-click the Models folder and select Add/Class. Name the Class Person.cs and add the following code: using System.Data.Entity; namespace DeadSimpleServer.Models { public class Person { public int ID { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } public class PersonContext : DbContext { public DbSet<Person> People { get; set; } } } Notice that the entity class Person has no special interfaces or base class. There's nothing special needed to make it work - it's just a POCO. The context we'll use to access the entities in the application is called PersonContext, but you could name it anything you wanted. The important thing is that it inherits DbContext and contains one or more DbSet which holds our entity collections. Adding Seed Data We need some testing data to expose from our service. The simplest way to get that into our database is to modify the CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class in AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework.cs by adding some seed data to the Seed method: protected virtual void Seed( TContext context ) { var personContext = context as PersonContext; personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 1, Name = "George Washington" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 2, Name = "John Adams" } ); personContext.People.Add( new Person { ID = 3, Name = "Thomas Jefferson" } ); personContext.SaveChanges(); } The CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists class name is pretty self-explanatory - when our DbContext is accessed and the database isn't found, a new one will be created and populated with the data in the Seed method. There's one more step to make that work - we need to uncomment a line in the Start method at the top of of the AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework class and set the context name, as shown here, public static class AppStart_SQLCEEntityFramework { public static void Start() { DbDatabase.DefaultConnectionFactory = new SqlCeConnectionFactory("System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"); // Sets the default database initialization code for working with Sql Server Compact databases // Uncomment this line and replace CONTEXT_NAME with the name of your DbContext if you are // using your DbContext to create and manage your database DbDatabase.SetInitializer(new CreateCeDatabaseIfNotExists<PersonContext>()); } } Now our database and entity framework are set up, so we can expose data via WCF Data Services. Note: This is a bare-bones implementation with no administration screens. If you'd like to see how those are added, check out The Full Stack screencast series. Creating the oData Service using WCF Data Services Add a new WCF Data Service to the project (right-click the project / Add New Item / Web / WCF Data Service). We’ll be exposing all the data as read/write.  Remember to reconfigure to control and minimize access as appropriate for your own application. Open the code behind for your service. In our case, the service was called PersonTestDataService.svc so the code behind class file is PersonTestDataService.svc.cs. using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.ServiceModel; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; namespace DeadSimpleServer { [ServiceBehavior( IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true )] public class PersonTestDataService : DataService<PersonContext> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService( DataServiceConfiguration config ) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule( "*", EntitySetRights.All ); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; config.UseVerboseErrors = true; } } } We're enabling a few additional settings to make it easier to debug if you run into trouble. The ServiceBehavior attribute is set to include exception details in faults, and we're using verbose errors. You can remove both of these when your service is working, as your public production service shouldn't be revealing exception information. You can view the output of the service by running the application and browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/: <service xml:base="http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:app="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app"> <workspace> <atom:title>Default</atom:title> <collection href="People"> <atom:title>People</atom:title> </collection> </workspace> </service> This indicates that the service exposes one collection, which is accessible by browsing to http://localhost:[portnumber]/PersonTestDataService.svc/People <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="yes"?> <feed xml:base=http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/ xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <title type="text">People</title> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People</id> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <link rel="self" title="People" href="People" /> <entry> <id>http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People(1)</id> <title type="text"></title> <updated>2010-12-29T01:01:50Z</updated> <author> <name /> </author> <link rel="edit" title="Person" href="People(1)" /> <category term="DeadSimpleServer.Models.Person" scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" /> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:ID m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:ID> <d:Name>George Washington</d:Name> </m:properties> </content> </entry> <entry> ... </entry> </feed> Let's recap what we've done so far. But enough with services and XML - let's get this into our Windows Phone client application. Creating the DataServiceContext for the Client Use the latest DataSvcUtil.exe from http://odata.codeplex.com. As of today, that's in this download: http://odata.codeplex.com/releases/view/54698 You need to run it with a few options: /uri - This will point to the service URI. In this case, it's http://localhost:59342/PersonTestDataService.svc  Pick up the port number from your running server (e.g., the server formerly known as Cassini). /out - This is the DataServiceContext class that will be generated. You can name it whatever you'd like. /Version - should be set to 2.0 /DataServiceCollection - Include this flag to generate collections derived from the DataServiceCollection base, which brings in all the ObservableCollection goodness that handles your INotifyPropertyChanged events for you. Here's the console session from when we ran it: <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> Next, to keep things simple, change the Binding on the two TextBlocks within the DataTemplate to Name and ID, <ListBox x:Name="MainListBox" Margin="0,0,-12,0" ItemsSource="{Binding}" SelectionChanged="MainListBox_SelectionChanged"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,17" Width="432"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextExtraLargeStyle}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding ID}" TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="12,-6,12,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Getting The Context In the code-behind you’ll first declare a member variable to hold the context from the Entity Framework. This is named using convention over configuration. The db type is Person and the context is of type PersonContext, You initialize it by providing the URI, in this case using the URL obtained from the Cassini web server, PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); Create a second member variable of type DataServiceCollection<Person> but do not initialize it, DataServiceCollection<Person> people; In the constructor you’ll initialize the DataServiceCollection using the PersonContext, public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); Finally, you’ll load the people collection using the LoadAsync method, passing in the fully specified URI for the People collection in the web service, people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); Note that this method runs asynchronously and when it is finished the people  collection is already populated. Thus, since we didn’t need or want to override any of the behavior we don’t implement the LoadCompleted. You can use the LoadCompleted event if you need to do any other UI updates, but you don't need to. The final code is as shown below: using System; using System.Data.Services.Client; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using DeadSimpleServer.Models; using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; namespace WindowsPhoneODataTest { public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage { PersonContext context = new PersonContext( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/" ) ); DataServiceCollection<Person> people; // Constructor public MainPage() { InitializeComponent(); // Set the data context of the listbox control to the sample data // DataContext = App.ViewModel; people = new DataServiceCollection<Person>( context ); people.LoadAsync( new Uri( "http://localhost:49786/PersonTestDataService.svc/People" ) ); DataContext = people; this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler( MainPage_Loaded ); } // Handle selection changed on ListBox private void MainListBox_SelectionChanged( object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e ) { // If selected index is -1 (no selection) do nothing if ( MainListBox.SelectedIndex == -1 ) return; // Navigate to the new page NavigationService.Navigate( new Uri( "/DetailsPage.xaml?selectedItem=" + MainListBox.SelectedIndex, UriKind.Relative ) ); // Reset selected index to -1 (no selection) MainListBox.SelectedIndex = -1; } // Load data for the ViewModel Items private void MainPage_Loaded( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) { if ( !App.ViewModel.IsDataLoaded ) { App.ViewModel.LoadData(); } } } } With people populated we can set it as the DataContext and run the application; you’ll find that the Name and ID are displayed in the list on the Mainpage. Here's how the pieces in the client fit together: Complete source code available here

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  • Friday Fun: Play 3D Rally Racing in Google Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you a racing fan in need of a short (or long) break from work? Then get ready to enjoy a mid-day speed boost with the 3D Rally Racing extension for Google Chrome. 3D Rally Racing in Action This is the opening screen for 3D Rally Racing. You can start game play, view current best times, and read through the instructions from here. The first thing that you should do is have a quick look at the instructions to help you get set up and started. Click on “Play” to start the process. Before you can go further you will need to choose a “User Name”. Once you have done that click “Select Track”… Note: The extension will retain your name for later use even if you close your browser. When you first start out you will only have access to two tracks…the others require reaching a certain score/level to unlock them. Once you select a track you will be taken to the next screen. After you have selected a track you will need to choose your car and car color. All that is left to do afterwards is click on “Go Race”. Note: You will be competing against three other vehicles in the race. Here is a look at the “Desert Race Track”… And a look at the “Snow Race Track”. This game moves quickly and it is easy to fall behind if you are not careful! You can have a lot of fun playing this game while you are waiting for the day to end. Conclusion If you love racing games and want a fun way to waste the rest of afternoon at work, then you should definitely give 3D Rally Racing a try. Links Download the 3d Rally Racing extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Uphill RushFriday Fun: Racing Fun with SuperTuxKart RacerHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserEnable Vista Black Style Theme for Google Chrome in XPIncrease Google Chrome’s Omnibox Popup Suggestion Count With an Undocumented Switch TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Friday Fun: Play 3D Rally Racing in Google Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you a racing fan in need of a short (or long) break from work? Then get ready to enjoy a mid-day speed boost with the 3D Rally Racing extension for Google Chrome. 3D Rally Racing in Action This is the opening screen for 3D Rally Racing. You can start game play, view current best times, and read through the instructions from here. The first thing that you should do is have a quick look at the instructions to help you get set up and started. Click on “Play” to start the process. Before you can go further you will need to choose a “User Name”. Once you have done that click “Select Track”… Note: The extension will retain your name for later use even if you close your browser. When you first start out you will only have access to two tracks…the others require reaching a certain score/level to unlock them. Once you select a track you will be taken to the next screen. After you have selected a track you will need to choose your car and car color. All that is left to do afterwards is click on “Go Race”. Note: You will be competing against three other vehicles in the race. Here is a look at the “Desert Race Track”… And a look at the “Snow Race Track”. This game moves quickly and it is easy to fall behind if you are not careful! You can have a lot of fun playing this game while you are waiting for the day to end. Conclusion If you love racing games and want a fun way to waste the rest of afternoon at work, then you should definitely give 3D Rally Racing a try. Links Download the 3d Rally Racing extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Friday Fun: Uphill RushFriday Fun: Racing Fun with SuperTuxKart RacerHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserEnable Vista Black Style Theme for Google Chrome in XPIncrease Google Chrome’s Omnibox Popup Suggestion Count With an Undocumented Switch TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Disable Opera Thumbnail Previews on Windows 7 Taskbar

    - by Asian Angel
    If you are one of the people who does not care for the Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in Windows 7 then we have a quick and easy way for you to turn them off in Opera Browser. Before Here is our Opera Browser with four tabs full of HTG Network goodness… Hovering the mouse over the Taskbar Icon gives a nice preview of each tabs content. Looking closer you can see the fanned edge on the Taskbar Icon indicating that there are multiple tabs open. This is all good but what if you just want something simpler? Disabling the Previews If you want to disable the Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in Opera you will need to type opera:config in the Address Bar and press Enter. Once you have done that, you will see a condensed listing for all of Opera’s preferences. There is one Preference Category that we need to look for…User Prefs. Note: While a Quick Find Search could be conducted for the entry that needs to be modified, we have chosen to show the full method here. After scrolling down and finding the User Prefs category you will need to expand the section. Notice the size of the scrollbar in comparison with the screenshot above…there is quite a lot that you can look at and finesse in Opera if desired. Scroll down until you find the Use Windows 7 Taskbar Thumbnails entry. Uncheck the box but do not close the opera:config Tab yet…or your changes will not take effect. Scroll down once more until you reach the end of the User Prefs category and click Save. With this particular modification you will need to restart Opera after clicking OK. After restarting Opera the Taskbar Icon and Taskbar Thumbnail Preview will revert to the minimal Windows 7 default as shown here. You can see Opera’s Tab Bar in the thumbnail and the Taskbar Icon no longer has a “fanned edge”. Conclusion If you want to disable Opera’s Taskbar Thumbnail Previews on your Windows 7 system, then this quick modification will help get it sorted out in just a few moments. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Disable IE 8 Thumbnail Previews on Windows 7 TaskbarIncrease the size of Taskbar Preview Thumbnails in Windows 7Vista Style Popup Previews for Firefox TabsEnable Thumbnail Previews for Firefox in Windows 7 TaskbarWorkaround for Vista Taskbar Thumbnail Previews Not Showing Correctly TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides

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  • Podcast Show Notes: The Red Room Interview &ndash; Part 1

    - by Bob Rhubart
      The latest OTN Arch2Arch podcast is Part 1 of a three-part series featuring a discussion of a broad range of SOA  issues with three members of the small army of contributors to The Red Room Blog, now part of the OJam.biz site, the Australia-New Zealand outpost of the global Oracle community. The panelists for this program are: Sean Boiling - Sales Consulting Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog Richard Ward - SOA Channel Development Manager at Oracle LinkedIn | Blog Mervin Chiang - Consulting Principal at Leonardo Consulting LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog (You can also follow the Red Room itself on Twitter: @OracleRedRoom.) The genesis of this interview goes back to 2009, and the original Red Room blog, on which Sean, Richard, Mervin, and other Red Roomers published a 10-part series of posts that, taken together, form a kind of SOA best-practices guide, presented in an irreverent style that is rare in a lot of technical writing. It was on the basis of their expertise and irreverence that I wanted to get a few of the Red Room bloggers on an Arch2Arch podcast.  Easier said than done. Trying to schedule a group interview with very busy people on the other side of world (they’re actually 15 hours in the future, relative to my location) is not a simple process. The conversations about getting some of the Red Room people on the program began in the summer of 2009. The interview finally happened at 5:30 PM EDT on Tuesday March 30, 2010, which for the panelists, located in Australia, was 8:30 AM on Wednesday March 31, 2010. I was waiting for dinner, and Sean, Richard, and Mervin were waiting for breakfast. But the call went off without a hitch, and the panelists carried on a great discussion of SOA issues. Listen to Part 1 Many thanks to Gareth Llewellyn for his help in putting this together. SOA Best Practices Here’s a complete list of the posts in the original 10-part Red Room series: SOA is Dead. Long Live SOA by Sean Boiling Are you doing SOP’s instead of SOA? by Saul Cunningham All The President's SOA by Sean Boiling SOA – Pay Now or Pay Dearly by Richard Ward SOA where are the skills? by Richard Ward Project Management Pitfalls within SOA by Anton Gouws Viewing SOA as a project instead of an architecture by Saul Cunningham Kiss and Tell by Sean Boiling Failure to implement and adhere to SOA Governance by Mervin Chiang Ten Out Of Ten by Sean Boiling Parts 2 of the Red Room Interview will be available next week, followed by Part 3, so stay tuned: RSS Change in the Wind Beginning with next week’s program, the OTN Arch2Arch Podcast will be rechristened as the OTN ArchBeat Podcast, to better align with this blog. The transformation will be painless – you won’t feel a thing.   del.icio.us Tags: otn,oracle,Archbeat,Arch2Arch,soa,service oriented architecture,podcast Technorati Tags: otn,oracle,Archbeat,Arch2Arch,soa,service oriented architecture,podcast

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  • Blender mesh mirroring screws up normals when importing in Unity

    - by Shivan Dragon
    My issue is as follows: I've modeled a robot in Blender 2.6. It's a mech-like biped or if you prefer, it kindda looks like a chicken. Since it's symmetrical on the XZ plane, I've decided to mirror some of its parts instead of re-modeling them. Problem is, those mirrored meshes look fine in Blender (faces all show up properly and light falls on them as it should) but in Unity faces and lighting on those very same mirrored meshes is wrong. What also stumps me is the fact that even if I flip normals in Blender, I still get bad results in Unity for those meshes (though now I get different bad results than before). Here's the details: Here's a Blender screen shot of the robot. I've took 2 pictures and slightly rotated the camera around so the geometry in question can be clearly seen: Now, the selected cog-wheel-like piece is the mirrored mesh obtained from mirroring the other cog-wheel on the other (far) side of the robot torso. The back-face culling is turned of here, so it's actually showing the faces as dictated by their normals. As you can see it looks ok, faces are orientated correctly and light falls on it ok (as it does on the original cog-wheel from which it was mirrored). Now if I export this as fbx using the following settings: and then import it into Unity, it looks all screwy: It looks like the normals are in the wrong direction. This is already very strange, because, while in Blender, the original cog-wheel and its mirrored counter part both had normals facing one way, when importing this in Unity, the original cog-wheel still looks ok (like in Blender) but the mirrored one now has normals inverted. First thing I've tried is to go "ok, so I'll flip normals in Blender for the mirrored cog-wheel and then it'll display ok in Unity and that's that". So I went back to Blender, flipped the normals on that mesh, so now it looks bad in Blender: and then re-exported as fbx with the same settings as before, and re-imported into Unity. Sure enough the cog-wheel now looks ok in Unity, in the sense where the faces show up properly, but if you look closely you'll notice that light and shadows are now wrong: Now in Unity, even though the light comes from the back of the robot, the cog-wheel in question acts as if light was coming from some-where else, its faces which should be in shadow are lit up, and those that should be lit up are dark. Here's some things I've tried and which didn't do anything: in Blender I tried mirroring the mesh in 2 ways: first by using the scale to -1 trick, then by using the mirroring tool (select mesh, hit crtl-m, select mirror axis), both ways yield the exact same result in Unity I've tried playing around with the prefab import settings like "normals: import/calculate", "tangents: import/calculate" I've also tired not exporting as fbx manually from Blender, but just dropping the .blend file in the assets folder inside the Unity project So, my question is: is there a way to actually mirror a mesh in Blender and then have it imported in Unity so that it displays properly (as it does in Blender)? If yes, how? Thank you, and please excuse the TL;DR style.

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  • How To Personalize the Windows Command Prompt

    - by Matthew Guay
    Command line interfaces can be downright boring, and always seem to miss out on the fresh coats of paint liberally applied to the rest of Windows.  Here’s how to add a splash of color to Command Prompt and make it unique. By default, Windows Command Prompt is white text on a black background. It get’s the job done, but maybe you want to add some color to it.   To get an overview of what we can do with the color command, let’s enter: color /? So, to get the color you want, enter color then the option for the background color followed by the font color.  For example, let’s make an old-fashioned green on black look by entering: color 02   There are a bunch of different combinations you can do, like this black background with red text. color 04 You can’t mess it up too much.  The color command won’t let you set both the font and the background to the same color, which would make it unreadable.  Also, if you want to get back to the default settings, just enter: color Now we’re back to plain-old black and white. Personalize Command Prompt Without Commands If you’d prefer to change the color without entering commands, just click on the Command Prompt icon in the top left corner of the window and select Properties. Select the Colors tab, and then choose the color you want for the screen text and background.  You can also enter your own RGB color combination if you want.   Here we entered the RGB values to get a purple background color like Ubuntu 10.04. Back in the Properties dialog, you can also change your Command Prompt font from the font tab.  Choose any font you want, as long as the one you want is one of the three listed here. Customizations you make via the Properties dialog are saved and will be used any time you open Command Prompt, but any customizations you make with the Color command are only for that session. Conclusion Whether you want to make your command prompt bright enough to cause a sunburn or old-style enough to scare a mainframe operator, with these settings, you can make Command Prompt a bit more unique.   Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use "Command Prompt Here" in Windows VistaVerify the Integrity of Windows Vista System FilesKeyboard Ninja: Scrolling the Windows Command Prompt With Only the KeyboardRun a Command as Administrator from the Windows 7 / Vista Run boxStart an Application Assigned to a Specific CPU in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app

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  • Super-Charge GIMP’s Image Editing Capabilities with G’MIC [Cross-Platform]

    - by Asian Angel
    Recently we showed you how to enhance GIMP’s image editing power and today we help you super-charge GIMP even more. G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic Image Converter) will add an impressive array of filters and effects to your GIMP installation for image editing goodness. Note: We applied the Contrast Swiss Mask filter to the image shown in the screenshot above to create a nice, warm sunset effect. To add the new PPA open the Ubuntu Software Center, go to the Edit Menu, and select Software Sources. Access the Other Software Tab in the Software Sources Window and add the first of the PPAs shown below (outlined in red). The second PPA will be automatically added to your system. Once you have the new PPAs set up, go back to the Ubuntu Software Center and do a search for “G’MIC”. You will find two listings available and can select either one to add G’MIC to your system (both work equally well). Click on More Info for the listing that you choose and scroll down to where Add-ons are listed. Make sure to select the Add-on listed, click Apply Changes when it appears, and then click Install. We have both shown here for your convenience… When you get ready to use G’MIC to enhance an image, go to the Filters Menu and select G’MIC. A new window will appear where you can select from an impressive array of filters available for your use. Have fun! Command Line Installation For those of you who prefer using the command line for installation use the following commands: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/gimp sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gmic gimp-gmic Links Note: G’MIC is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. G’MIC PPA at Launchpad [via Web Upd8] G’MIC Homepage at Sourceforge *Downloads for all three platforms available here. Bonus The anime wallpaper shown in the screenshots above can be found here: anime sport [DesktopNexus] Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Learn To Adjust Contrast Like a Pro in Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.NET Have You Ever Wondered How Your Operating System Got Its Name? Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space? What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions Access and Manage Your Ubuntu One Account in Chrome and Iron Mouse Over YouTube Previews YouTube Videos in Chrome Watch a Machine Get Upgraded from MS-DOS to Windows 7 [Video] Bring the Whole Ubuntu Gang Home to Your Desktop with this Mascots Wallpaper Hack Apart a Highlighter to Create UV-Reactive Flowers [Science] Add a “Textmate Style” Lightweight Text Editor with Dropbox Syncing to Chrome and Iron

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  • How To Remove Hyperlinks from Microsoft Word Documents

    - by Mysticgeek
    Sometimes when you copy text from a webpage and paste it into Word, it can be annoying when the hyperlinks transfer with it. Today we take a look at how to easily remove the hyperlinks if you don’t want them in the document. Here we will cover a few different ways you can remove hyperlinks from emails or webpage data that you enter into a Word document using Paste Special and Keyboard Shortcuts. Remove Hyperlinks in Word Using Paste Special In Word 2010 we copied part of an article from How-To Geek, as you can see the hyperlinks were copied into the document as well. To remove the hyperlinks right-click on the document and you’ll see three icons under Paste Options. We want to select the third one to the right which is Keep Text Only…the text in in the document changes so you can get a preview of how it will look. After selecting Keep Text Only, you can see the hyperlinks have been removed. However, you’ll need to change the fonts and other layouts if you’re not happy with the default of Calibri. In Office 2007 under the Home tab click the dropdown menu under Paste and select Paste Special. In the Paste Special screen select Unformatted Text then click OK. In Office 2003 copy the text into the document, hover your mouse over the clipboard, click the dropdown menu, then select Keep Text Only. Keyboard Ninja Style If you’re a Keyboard Ninja, an easy way to remove all hyperlinks is to use “Ctrl+A” to select everything, then use the key combination “Ctrl+Shift+F9”…We tested this key combination and it works in Word 2003-2010. This will remove all of the hyperlinks and keep the original format of the text. Conclusion There are several different ways to get rid of hyperlinks in text pasted into Word documents. The method you use will depend on your preference and the version of Word you’re using…but the “Ctrl+Shift+F9” keyboard shortcut works in all versions of Word and might be the easiest way. If you always want just text in Word 2007, you can disable automatically disable them. If you have a different method you use to remove hyperlinks from Word documents, leave a comment and let us know! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Preview Documents Without Opening Them In Word 2007Embed True Type Fonts in Word and PowerPoint 2007 DocumentsAdd Background Color To Word 2007 DocumentsUse Image Placeholders to Display Documents Faster in WordHow To Make Sure Word Prints Document Backgrounds TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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  • Reducing Oracle LOB Memory Use in PHP, or Paul's Lesson Applied to Oracle

    - by christopher.jones
    Paul Reinheimer's PHP memory pro tip shows how re-assigning a value to a variable doesn't release the original value until the new data is ready. With large data lengths, this unnecessarily increases the peak memory usage of the application. In Oracle you might come across this situation when dealing with LOBS. Here's an example that selects an entire LOB into PHP's memory. I see this being done all the time, not that that is an excuse to code in this style. The alternative is to remove OCI_RETURN_LOBS to return a LOB locator which can be accessed chunkwise with LOB->read(). In this memory usage example, I threw some CLOB rows into a table. Each CLOB was about 1.5M. The fetching code looked like: $s = oci_parse ($c, 'SELECT CLOBDATA FROM CTAB'); oci_execute($s); echo "Start Current :" . memory_get_usage() . "\n"; echo "Start Peak : " .memory_get_peak_usage() . "\n"; while(($r = oci_fetch_array($s, OCI_RETURN_LOBS)) !== false) { echo "Current :" . memory_get_usage() . "\n"; echo "Peak : " . memory_get_peak_usage() . "\n"; // var_dump(substr($r['CLOBDATA'],0,10)); // do something with the LOB // unset($r); } echo "End Current :" . memory_get_usage() . "\n"; echo "End Peak : " . memory_get_peak_usage() . "\n"; Without "unset" in loop, $r retains the current data value while new data is fetched: Start Current : 345300 Start Peak : 353676 Current : 1908092 Peak : 2958720 Current : 1908092 Peak : 4520972 End Current : 345668 End Peak : 4520972 When I uncommented the "unset" line in the loop, PHP's peak memory usage is much lower: Start Current : 345376 Start Peak : 353676 Current : 1908168 Peak : 2958796 Current : 1908168 Peak : 2959108 End Current : 345744 End Peak : 2959108 Even if you are using LOB->read(), unsetting variables in this manner will reduce the PHP program's peak memory usage. With LOBS in Oracle DB there is also DB memory use to consider. Using LOB->free() is worthwhile for locators. Importantly, the OCI8 1.4.1 extension (from PECL or included in PHP 5.3.2) has a LOB fix to free up Oracle's locators earlier. For long running scripts using lots of LOBS, upgrading to OCI8 1.4.1 is recommended.

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  • Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2010 - 2 -- #811

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: AfricanGeek, Phil Middlemiss, Damon Payne, David Anson, Jesse Liberty, Jeremy Likness, Jobi Joy(-2-), Fredrik Normén, Bobby Diaz, and Mike Taulty(-2-). Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuth blogged that they posted My "What's New in Silverlight 3" Video from 0reDev Last Fall Shawn Wildermuth also has a post up for his loyal followers: Where to See Me At MIX10 Jonas Follesø has presentation materials up as well: MVVM presentation from NDC2009 on Vimeo Adam Kinney updated his Favorite Tool and Library Downloads for Silverlight From SilverlightCream.com: Styling Silverlight ListBox with Blend 3 In his latest Video Tutorial, AfricanGeek is animating the ListBox control by way of Expression Blend 3. Animating the Silverlight Opacity Mask Phil Middlemiss has written a Behavior that lets you turn a FrameworkElement into an opacity mask for it's parent container... check out his tutorial and grab the code. AddRange for ObservableCollection in Silverlight 3 Damon Payne has a post up discussing the problem with large amounts of data in an ObservableCollection, and how using AddRange is a performance booster. Easily rotate the axis labels of a Silverlight/WPF Toolkit chart David Anson blogged a solution to rotating the axis labels of a Silverlight and WPF chart. Persisting the Configuration (Updated) Jesse Liberty has a good discussion on the continuation of his HyperVideo Platform talking about what all he is needing from the database in the form of configuration information... including the relationships. Animations and View Models: IAnimationDelegate Check out Jeremy Likness' IAnimationDelegate that lets your ViewModel fire and respond to animations without having to know all about them. Button Style - Silverlight Jobi Joy converted a WPF control template into Silverlight... and you'll want to download the XAML he's got for this :) A Simple Accordion banner using ListBox Jobi Joy also has an Image Accordian created in Expression Blend... and it's a 'drop this XAML in your User Control' kinda thing... again, go grab the XAML :) WCF RIA Services Silverlight Business Application – Using ASP.NET SiteMap for Navigation Fredrik Normén has a code-laden post up on RIA Services and the ASP.NET SiteMap. He is using the Silverlight Business app template that comes with WCF RIA Services. A Simple, Selectable Silverlight TextBlock (sort of)... Bobby Diaz shares with us his solution for a Text control that can be copied from in the same manner 'normal' web controls can be. He also includes a link to another post on the same topic. Silverlight 4 Beta Networking. Part 11 - WCF and TCP Mike Taulty has another pair of video tutorials up in his Networking series. This one is on WCF over TCP Silverlight 4 Beta Networking. Part 12 - WCF and Polling HTTP Mike Taulty's 12th networking video tutorial is on WCF with HTTP polling duplex. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    MIX10

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  • Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux

    - by Asian Angel
    Do you have a terrific collection of comics in electronic form but need a great app to view them with? If you have a Linux system then we have the perfect app for you…Comix, the open source comic reading powerhouse. For our example we installed Comix on our Ubuntu 10.10 system. Just go to the Ubuntu Software Center and conduct a quick search. When you go to install Comix in the Ubuntu Software Center, make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom and select Unarchiver for .rar files. The listing appears as a “non-free version” for some reason, but displays as free once selected. Odd, but nothing to worry about in the end… Once Comix is installed you can find it in the Graphics Section of the Ubuntu Menu. Comix also comes with a nice set of options to let you customize the app to best suit those important comic reading needs. Here is a comprehensive list of the features this little comic reading powerhouse packs into one easy to use package: Fullscreen mode, double page mode, fit-to-screen mode, zooming and scrolling, rotation and mirroring, magnification lens, changeable image scaling quality, image enhancement, can read right-to-left to fit manga, etc., caching for faster page flipping, bookmarks support, customizable GUI, archive comments support, archive converter, thumbnail browser, standards compliant, available in multiple languages (English, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, & German), reads “JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, ICO, XPM, & XBM” image formats, reads “ZIP & tar archives natively, RAR archives through the unrar program” runs on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and virtually any other UNIX-like OS, and more! Have fun reading those comics on your favorite Linux system! Interested in learning more about Comix? Then be certain to drop by the homepage! Comix Homepage Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Ask How-To Geek: How Can I Monitor My Bandwidth Usage? Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware Comix is an Awesome Comics Archive Viewer for Linux Get the MakeUseOf eBook Guide to Speeding Up Windows for Free Need Tech Support? Call the Star Wars Help Desk! [Video Classic] Reclaim Vertical UI Space by Adding a Toolbar to the Left or Right Side of Firefox Androidify Turns You into an Android-style Avatar Reader for Android Updates; Now with Feed Widgets and More

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  • Disable IE 8 Thumbnail Previews on Windows 7 Taskbar

    - by Asian Angel
    The Aero thumbnail previews are a great new feature, but if you are not a fan of the flashy eye-candy, you can get rid of them with a simple tweak. Here is how to do it. Before Here we are…Internet Explorer 8 with a lot of How-To Geek Network goodness ready to go. The Taskbar Thumbnail Previews look very nice, but perhaps they take up too much room for those of you who like to keep things simple. The Taskbar Icon has the classic “fanned edge” look just like any other software with Taskbar Thumbnail Previews active. Disabling the Thumbnail Previews If you want to deactivate the Taskbar Thumbnail Previews for Internet Explorer, it is quite easy and will only take you a few moments to complete. Open IE and go to Tools \ Internet Options. When the Internet Options Window opens you will already be on the General Tab. Under the Tabs Section, click on the Settings button. The Tabbed Browsing Settings window opens. Uncheck Show previews for individual tabs in the taskbar and click OK. When you are returned to the Internet Options Window, click OK once again to totally exit out. Note: A browser restart will be required for the changes to take effect. After you have restarted Internet Explorer, you will see the simple default Taskbar Thumbnail Preview and standard icon look. Conclusion If you have been looking to disable the Taskbar Thumbnail Previews for Internet Explorer, then you are only a few clicks away from satisfaction. If you want to change it back, it is as simple as re-enabling the Show previews for individual tabs in the taskbar setting. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Increase the size of Taskbar Preview Thumbnails in Windows 7Vista Style Popup Previews for Firefox TabsWorkaround for Vista Taskbar Thumbnail Previews Not Showing CorrectlyDisable Thumbnail Previews in Windows 7 or Vista ExplorerGet Vista Taskbar Thumbnail Previews in Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010New ProjectsBase Class Libraries: The Base Class Libraries site hosts samples, previews, and prototypes from the BCL team. BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler is highly useful as it helps the user to set the time when the computer will automatically enable the Broadband (Internet) conn...BFBC2 PRoCon: BFBC2 PRoCon makes it easier for Bad Company 2 GSP's and private server owners to administer their BFBC2 servers. It's developed in C# and targete...Business Process Management Virtual Environment (BPMVE): This BPMVE project has been separated into 3 different projects. BPMVE_DataStructure project contains all data structures (classes and attribute...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test StepsCint: CintContent Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: The Content Edit Extender is an Ajax.Net control extender that allows in-place editing of a div tag (panel). Double-click to edit, hit enter or tab...COV Game: Cov game is a worms like game made on Silverlight with Python server.Cybera: A continuing development project of the existing but now generally inactive former Cybera project.DotNetCRM Community Edition: DotNetCRM Community Edition is an open source, enterprise class CRM built on the .NET platform. It is designed to be extensible, configurable, data...EAV: A sample EAV pattern for SQL Server with: Tables and indexes Partial referential integrity Partial data typing Updatable views (like normal SQL table)EditRegion.MVC: EditRegion.MVC may be all you want, when you do not want a full CMS. It allows html areas to be edited by nominated users or roles. The API follo...Firestarter Modeller: Firestarter ModellerHabanero.Testability: Habanero.TestabilityProSoft CMS: CMS System - scalable over an undeclared amount of servers - publishing services - version control of sitesPS-Blog.net: This is my first project here on codeplex. I would like to write my own blog software. Any comments or critcs are welcome.ReleaseMe: ReleaseMe is a simple little tool I use to copy websites, and custom Window Services, from my development machine to a specified production machin...SAAS-RD: SAAS-RD: uma ferrameta utilizada para prover integração de SaaS com aplicações externasSample Web Application using Telerik's OpenAccess ORM: Sample Web Site Application Project that uses Telerik's OpenAccess ORM for data access.Sistema Facturacion: En el proyecto de Sistema de Facturacion se desarrollara una aplicacion para el total control de un establecimiento comercial Smooth Habanero: Smooth HabaneroSouthEast Conference 2011: For the Florida Institute of Technology IEEE Chapter regarding the Southeast Hardware Conference held in Nashville, TN 2011.SQL Server Bible Standards: A SQL Server Design and Development standards document. SSAS Profiler Trace Scheduler: AS Profiler Scheduler is a tool that will enable Scheduling of SQL AS Tracing using predefined Profiler Templates. For tracking different issues th...Symbolic Algebra: Another attempt to make an algebric system but to be natively in C# under the .net framework. Theocratic Ministry School System: This is an Open Source Theocratic Ministry School System designed for Jehovah's Witnesses. It will include much of the same features as the TMS ver...Weather Report WebControls: The First Release Version:1.0.10330.2334WPF 3D Labyrinth: A project for "Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms" subject at Kaunas University of Technology. Building a 3D labyrinth with a figure which ...WPF Zen Garden: This is intended to be a gallery for WPF Style sheets in the form of Css Zen Garden. New ReleasesAPSales CRM - Software as a Service: APSales 0.1.3: This version add some interesting features to the project: Implement "Filter By Additional Fields" in view edit Implement quick create function Im...Base Class Libraries: BigRational: BigRational builds on the BigInteger introduced in .NET Framework 4 to create an arbitrary-precision rational number type. A rational number is a ...Base Class Libraries: Long Path: The long path wrapper provides functionality to make it easier to work with paths that are longer than the current 259 character limit of the Syste...Base Class Libraries: PerfMonitor: PerfMonitor is a command-line tool for profiling the system using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). PerfMonitor is built on top of the TraceEvent li...Base Class Libraries: TraceEvent: TraceEvent is an experimental library that greatly simplifies reading Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events. It is used by the PerfMonitor tool. ...BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler v2.0: - Broadband service has some of the cheap and best monthly plans for the users all over the nation. And some of the plans include unlimited night d...BuildTools - Toolset for automated builds: BuildTools 2.0 Mar 2010 Milestone: The Mar 2010 Milestone release is a contains a bug fixes for projects not explicitly setting the StartingDate property, and no longer breaks when t...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: BRE BizUnit Test Steps Ver. 1.0: Version 1.0Claymore MVP: Claymore 1.1.0.0: Changelog Added Compact Framework support Added fluent interface to configure the library.Content Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: ContentEditExtender 1.0 for Ajax.Net: Complete with source control and test/example Website and Web Service. Built with Visual Studio 2008 with the 3.5 BCL. Control requires the AjaxCon...dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.6: This stable version of the compiler for both .NET 3.5 and 4.0 adds the loading of numbers in a bult-in fashion. See code below: #refasm mscorlib...EAV: March 2010: The initial release as demoed at the SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Fax .NET: Fax .NET 1.0.1: FIX : bugs for x64 and WOW64 architecture. The zip file include : Binary file Demo executable file Help fileFluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 for NET 4.0 RC: Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) compiled with .NET 4.0 RC Test application compiled with .NET 4.0 RC SourcesIceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 12.1 Full Install: Build Alpha 12.1 - March 30 2010 Fix Nick Name Change for Tabs/Server List for Queries Fix for running Channel List Multiple Times, clears list n...Import Excel data to SharePoint List: Import Data from Spreadsheet to SP List V1.5 x64: Import from Spreadsheet to a SharePoint List is the missing facet to the WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 List features. SharePoint lets a user create a custom...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.9: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...mojoPortal: 2.3.4.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2341-released.aspxocculo: test: Release build for testers.PowerShell ToodleDo Module: 0.1: Initial Development Release - Very rough build.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.2: Fixed issue where app crash when performance counter disappear or becomes unavailable while the application is running. For now the exception is si...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.3: Add 'view last error'Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18 (Visual Studio 2010 + .NET 4 RC Version): This is the second public beta for the first version of Rule 18. It has had a extensive private beta and been used in big presentations since the ...Selection Maker: Selection Maker 1.5: New Features:If the source folder does not exist,a dialog box will appear and ask the user if he/she wants to create that folder or if select anoth...sPATCH: sPatch v0.9a: + Fixed: wrong path to elementclient.exeSQL Server Bible Standards: March 2010: Initial release as presented at SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Survey - web survey & form engine: Source Code Documentation: Documentation.chm file as published with Nsurvey v. 1.9.1 - april 2005 Basic technical documentation and description of source code for developers...Theocratic Ministry School System: Theocratic Ministry School System - TMSS: This is the first release of TMSS. It is far from complete but demonstrates the possiablities of what can be done with Access 2007 using developer ...Weather Report WebControls: WeatherReport Controls: 本下载包含一个已经经过编译的二进制运行库和一个测试的WebApplication项目,是2010年3月30日发布的Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)LiveUpload to FacebookASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBase Class LibrariesBlogEngine.NETManaged Extensibility FrameworkFarseer Physics EngineGraffiti CMSMicrosoft Biology FoundationLINQ to Twitterpatterns & practices – Enterprise Library

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  • Emoti-phrases

    - by Tony Davis
    Surely the next radical step in the development of User-interface design is for applications to react appropriately to the rising tide of bewilderment, frustration or antipathy of the users. When an application understands that rapport is lost, it should respond accordingly. When we, for example, become confused by an unforgiving interface, shouldn't there be a way of signalling our bewilderment and having the application respond appropriately? There is surprisingly little in the current interface standards that would help. If we're getting frustrated with an unresponsive application, perhaps we could let it know of our increasing irritation by means of an "I'm getting angry and exasperated" slider. Although, by 'responding appropriately', I don't include playing a "we are experiencing unusually heavy traffic: your application usage is important to us" message, accompanied by calming muzak. When confronted with a tide of wizards, 'are you sure?' messages, or page-after-page of tiresome and barely-relevant options, how one yearns for a handy 'JFDI' (Just Flaming Do It) button. One click and the application miraculously desists with its annoying questions and just gets on with the job, using the defaults, or whatever we selected last time. Much more satisfying, and more direct to most developers and DBAs, however, would be the facility to communicate to the application via a twitter-style input field, or via parameters to command-line applications ("I don't want a wide-ranging debate with you; just open the bl**dy PDF!" or, or "Don't forget which of us has the close button"). Although to avoid too much cultural-dependence, perhaps we should take the lead from emoticons, and use a set of standardized emoti-phrases such as 'sez you', 'huh?', 'Pshaw!', or 'meh', which could be used to vent a range of feelings in any given application, whether it be SQL Server stubbornly refusing to give us the result we are expecting, or when an online-survey is getting too personal. Or a 'Lingua Glaswegia' perhaps: 'Atsabelter' ("very good") 'Atspish' ("must try harder") 'AnThenYerArsFellAff ' ("I don't quite trust these results") 'BileYerHeid' or 'ShutYerGub' ("please stop these inane questions") There would, of course, have to be an ANSI standards body to define the phrases that were acceptable. Presumably, there would be a tussle amongst the different international standards organizations. Meanwhile Oracle, Microsoft and Apple would each release non-standard extensions. Time then, surely, to plant emoti-phrases on the lot of them and develop a user-driven consensus. Send us your suggestions! The best one will win an iPod nano! Cheers! Tony.

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  • Getting Started With nServiceBus on VAN Mar 31

    - by van
    Topic: nServiceBus is mature and powerful open source framework that enables to design robust, scalable, message-based, service-oriented architectures. Latest improvements in the configuration API enables developers to quickly get started and build a working simple system that uses messaging infrastructure. The goal of this session is to give a jump start with the framework, introduce basic concepts such as message handlers, Sagas, Pub/Sub, Generic Host and also create a working demo application that uses publish/subscribe messaging. The content of the session is addressed to developers that are interested in learning how to get started using nServiceBus in order to design and build distributed systems. Bio: Bernard Kowalski is currently a Software Developer at Microdesk, one of Autodesk's leading partners in providing variety of Geospatial and Computer-Aided Design solutions. Bernard has experience developing .NET framework-based applications utilizing Windows Forms, Windows Services, ASP.NET MVC, and Web services. In a recent project, Bernard architected and implemented a distributed system based on SOA principles using an open source implementation of an Enterprise Service Bus. Bernard develops software with Agile patterns and practices using Domain Driven Design combined with TDD (Test Driven Development). He is familiar with all of the following APIs: Autodesk Vault/Product Stream API, AutoCAD ActiveX/VBA/.NET API, AutoCAD Mechanical API, Autodesk Inventor API, Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. Prior to joining Microdesk, Bernard worked as a researcher and teacher at the University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland where he was awarded with a PhD in Computer Methods in Materials Science. He also participated in research projects where he developed applications for analysis of hot compression test results using advanced optimization techniques. He also developed Finite Element Method-based programs for thermal and stress analysis using C++ and FORTRAN. Bernard is a member of the Domain Driven Design and ALT.NET user groups in NYC. Virtual ALT.NET (VAN) is the online gathering place of the ALT.NET community. Through conversations, presentations, pair programming and dojos, we strive to improve, explore, and challenge the way we create software. Using net conferencing technology such as Skype and LiveMeeting, we hold regular meetings, open to anyone, usually taking the form of a presentation or an Open Space Technology-style conversation. Please see the Calendar(http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar) to find a VAN group that meets at a time convenient to you, and feel welcome to join a meeting. Past sessions can be found on the Recording page. To stay informed about VAN activities, you can subscribe to the Virtual ALT.NET Google Group and follow the Virtual ALT.NET blog. Times below are Central Standard Time Start Time: Wed, Mar 31, 2010 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours End Time: Wed, Mar 31, 2010 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours Attendee URL: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/van Zach Young http://www.virtualaltnet.com

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  • New regular expression features in PCRE 8.34 and 8.35

    - by Jan Goyvaerts
    PCRE 8.34 adds some new regex features and changes the behavior of a few to make it better compatible with the latest versions of Perl. There are no changes to the regex syntax in PCRE 8.35. \o{377} is now an octal escape just like \377. This syntax was first introduced in Perl 5.12. It avoids any confusion between octal escapes and backreferences. It also allows octal numbers beyond 377 to be used. E.g. \o{400} is the same as \x{100}. If you have any reason to use octal escapes instead of hexadecimal escapes then you should definitely use the new syntax. Because of this change, \o is now an error when it doesn’t form a valid octal escape. Previously \o was a literal o and \o{377} was a sequence of 337 o‘s. In free-spacing mode, whitespace between a quantifier and the ? that makes it lazy or the + that makes it possessive is now ignored. In Perl this has always been the case. In PCRE 8.33 and prior, whitespace ended a quantifier and any following ? or + was seen as a second quantifier and thus an error. The shorthand \s now matches the vertical tab character in addition to the other whitespace characters it previously matched. Perl 5.18 made the same change. Many other regex flavors have always included the vertical tab in \s, just like POSIX has always included it in [[:space:]]. Names of capturing groups are no longer allowed to start with a digit. This has always been the case in Perl since named groups were added to Perl 5.10. PCRE 8.33 and prior even allowed group names to consist entirely of digits. [[:<:]] and [[::]] are now treated as POSIX-style word boundaries. They match at the start and the end of a word. Though they use similar syntax, these have nothing to do with POSIX character classes and cannot be used inside character classes. Perl does not support POSIX word boundaries. The same changes affect PHP 5.5.10 (and later) and R 3.0.3 (and later) as they have been updated to use PCRE 8.34. RegexBuddy and RegexMagic have been updated to support the latest versions of PCRE, PHP, and R. Older versions that were previously supported are still supported, so you can compare or convert your regular expressions between the latest versions of PCRE, PHP, and R and whichever version you were using previously.

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  • Regular Expressions Reference Tables Updated

    - by Jan Goyvaerts
    The regular expressions reference on the Regular-Expressions.info website was completely overhauled with the big update of that site last month. In the past, the reference section consisted of two parts. One part was a summary of the regex features commonly found in Perl-style regex flavors with short descriptions and examples. This part of the reference ignored differences between regex flavors and omitted most features that don’t have wide support. The other part was a regular expression flavor comparison that listed many more regex features along with YES/no indicators for many regex flavors, but without any explanations of the features. When reworking the site, I wanted to make the reference section more detailed, with descriptions and examples of all the syntax supported by the flavors discussed on the site. Doing that resulted in a reference that lists many features that are only supported by a few regex flavors. For such a reference to be usable, it needs to indicate which flavors support each feature. My original design for the new reference table used two rows for each feature. The first row had 4 columns with a label, syntax, description, and example, similar to the old reference tables. The second row had 20 columns indicating which versions of which flavors support these features. While the double-row design allowed all the information to fit within the table without requiring horizontal scrolling, it made it more difficult to quickly scan the tables for the feature you’re looking for. To make the new reference tables easier to read, they now have only a single row for each feature. The first 4 columns are the same as before. The remaining two columns show which versions of two regular expression flavors support the feature. You can use the drop-down lists above the table to choose the flavors the table should indicate. The site uses cookies to allow the flavor choices to persist while you navigate the reference. The result of this latest update is that the new regex tables are now just as easy to read as the ten-year-old tables on the old site were, while still covering all the features big and small of all the flavors discussed on the site.

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  • Ad-hoc taxonomy: owning the chess set doesn't mean you decide how the little horsey moves

    - by Roger Hart
    There was one of those little laugh-or-cry moments recently when I heard an anecdote about content strategy failings at a major online retailer. The story goes a bit like this: successful company in a highly commoditized marketplace succeeds on price and largely ignores its content team. Being relatively entrepreneurial, the founders are still knocking around, and occasionally like to "take an interest". One day, they decree that clothing sold on the site can no longer be described as "unisex", because this sounds old fashioned. Sad now. Let me just reiterate for the folks at the back: large retailer, commoditized market place, differentiating on price. That's inherently unstable. Sooner or later, they're going to need one or both of competitive differentiation and significant optimization. I can't speak for the latter, since I'm hypothesizing off a raft of rumour, but one of the simpler paths to the former is to become - or rather acknowledge that they are - a content business. Regardless, they need highly-searchable terminology. Even in the face of tooth and claw resistance to noticing the fundamental position content occupies in driving sales (and SEO) on the web, there's a clear information problem here. Dilettante taxonomy is a disaster. Ok, so this is a small example, but that kind of makes it a good one. Unisex probably is the best way of describing clothing designed to suit either men or women interchangeably. It certainly takes less time to type (and read). It's established terminology, and as a single word, it's significantly better for web readability than a phrasal workaround. Something like "fits men or women" is short, by could fall foul of clause-level discard in web scanning. It's not an adjective, so for intuitive reading it's never going to be near the start of a title or description. It would also clutter up search results, and impose cognitive load in list scanning. Sorry kids, it's just worse. Even if "unisex" were an archaism (which it isn't), the only thing that would weigh against its being more usable and concise terminology would be evidence that this archaism were hurting conversions. Good luck with that. We once - briefly - called one of our products a "Can of worms". It was a bundle in a bug-tracking suite, and we thought it sounded terribly cool. Guess how well that sold. We have information and content professionals for a reason: to make sure that whatever we put in front of users is optimised to meet user and business goals. If that thinking doesn't inform style guides, taxonomy, messaging, title structure, and so forth, you might as well be finger painting.

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  • Book Review: Inside Windows Communicat?ion Foundation by Justin Smith

    - by Sam Abraham
    In gearing up for a new major project, I have taken it upon myself to research and review various aspects of our Microsoft stack of choice seeking new creative ways for us to leverage in our upcoming state-of-the-art solution projected to position us ahead of the competition. While I am a big supporter of search engines and online articles as a quick and usually reliable source of information, I have opted in my investigative quest to actually “hit the books”.  I have also made it a habit to provide quick reviews for material I go over hoping this can be of help to someone who may be looking for items others may have had success using for reference. I have started a few months ago by investigating better ways to implementing, profiling and troubleshooting SQL Server 2008. My reference of choice was Itzik Ben-Gan et al’s “Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008” series. While it has been a month since my last book review, this by no means meant that I have been sitting idle. It has been pretty challenging to balance research with the continuous flow of projects and deadlines all while balancing that with my family duties which, of course, always comes first. In this post, I will be providing a quick review of my latest reading: Inside Windows Communication Foundation by Justin Smith. This book has been on my reading list for a very long time and I am proud to have finally tackled it. Justin’s book presents a great coverage of WCF internals. His simple, concise and well-worded style has simplified the relatively complex internals of WCF and made it comprehensible. Justin opted to organize the book into three parts: an introduction to WCF, coverage of the Channel Layer and a look at WCF internals at the ServiceModel layer. Part I introduced the concepts and made the case behind WCF while covering a simplified version of WCF’s message patterns, endpoints and contracts. In Part II, Justin provided a thorough coverage of the internals of Messages, Channels and Channel Managers. Part III concluded this nice reading with coverage of Bindings, Contracts, Dispatchers and Clients. While one would not likely need to extend WCF at that low level of the API, an understanding of the inner-workings of WCF is a must to avoid pitfalls mainly caused by misinformation or erroneous assumptions. Problems can quickly arise in high-traffic hosted solutions, but most can be easily avoided with some minimal time investment and education. My next goal is to pay a closer look at WCF from the programmer’s API perspective now that I have acquired a better understanding of its inner working.   Many thanks to the O’Reilly User Group Program and its support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group.   Stay tuned for more… All the best, --Sam

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